Category Archives: The TVD Storefront

Celebrating Donovan on his 75th birthday. —Ed.

Where have all the flower children gone? And more importantly, where would they have been without Donovan Phillips Leitch? Stuck eating their FLT (flower, lettuce, and tomato) sandwiches to the sound of Scott McKenzie’s faux Flower Power ode, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair),” that’s where. It was Donovan who best channeled the gentle and peace-loving vibes of the love-bead set into song, and without the fey Scot they’d have been, to quote one of the man’s lyrics, “as dragged as any hippie should be in old hippie town.”

Donovan began his career as a folkie and Dylan clone, right down to Bobby D.’s trademark corduroy cap. Donovan’s blatant aping of his hero reached its absurd culmination at the infamous Dylan/Donovan confab at London’s Savoy Hotel in 1965, when Donovan proudly offered to play his idol a brand new song. Which turned out, much to Dylan’s amusement, to be a note-for-note rip of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Small wonder Donovan serves as a running joke amongst the caustic Dylan entourage in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary “Don’t Look Back,” with Dylan himself at one point saying, “Donovan who?”

Donovan might have gone the way of Phil Ochs, but in 1966 he went from Dylan manqué to Sunshine Superman after dropping acid and tapping into the Universal Mind to watch groovy Technicolor mind movies of a smiling God grokking the ineffable infinite. The turned-on Donovan promptly helped pioneer the psychedelic sound, which in tandem with his gentle-to-the-point-of-wimpy voice (think Belle and Sebastian’s Stewart Murdoch, twee factor multiplied by 10) and mellow yellow emanations quickly made him the perfect avatar for the Age of Aquarius. A string of U.S. Top Ten hits followed, including “Sunshine Superman,” “Mellow Yellow,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” and “Atlantis,” which started life as a b-side but reached No. 7 after DJs flipped the 45 and flipped their lids to the far-freaking-out Atlantean sing-along. (Surprisingly, the great “Season of the Witch” was never released as a single, either in the United States or the United Kingdom.)

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“I remember playing with my parents’ turntable as a kid. They had boxes and boxes of old records that I’m sure they assumed they’d eventually never have any use for after all those albums gradually became available on CD, and I recall marveling at the fact that you could see, right there on the record, exactly where the information was that would tell the needle to tell the machine to tell the speakers what sounds to make.”

“Long songs were thick, short songs were narrow; a visible scratch would mean a corresponding skip in the audio. I would flip the things back and forth for hours, staring mesmerized at the slowly spinning discs, thinking there was something so thrilling about being able to physically see and feel what a musical recording would sound like.

I am now an adult, and I write instrumental music about landscape—it’s a funny niche to have fallen into, but one I’ve found extremely gratifying for years now. For the first several years I was doing this, I mostly focused (largely without meaning to) on big places: national parks, oceans, rivers, wilderness areas, and vast plains, but with my new project, an album I released in April called The Trouble With Wilderness, I tried making a change.

I was concerned that I might be reinforcing an impression among my audience members that nature was something exotic and separate from the world they knew—something to go and visit rather than to appreciate where you find it—and so to correct this, I tried writing about small places: weeds growing out of the sidewalk, gardens, roadside plants, and other places where it’s harder to say exactly what is wild and what is not.

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Talk about your camouflage. On the surface Paul Revere & The Raiders were five smiling and well-groomed (at least by Fab Four mop top standards) young men tricked out in Revolutionary War garb complete with tricorn hats. They certainly didn’t look like long-haired sex fiends out to run off with your daughter to San Francisco where she’d die from an LSD overdose. They looked like The Monkees, and everybody knew The Monkees were safe as Milk Duds.

But 1967’s Greatest Hits (Expanded Edition) tells a different story. Boise, Idaho’s Paul Revere & The Raiders weren’t The Monkees. They were a garage rock band like The Seeds and The Standells, and if America’s parents had just listened to them they’d have packed their daughters off to the nearest nunnery and sent their sons off to military school the minute they found a copy of this baby in their rooms.

Most of the songs on the compilation come straight out of juvenile hall. The Rolling Stones comparisons are obvious–the Raiders follow the Stones’ career trajectory from scruffy R&B to subversive “Under My Thumb” pop, and vocalist Mark Lindsay comes off like an American Mick Jagger. But you also get The Who on “Just Like Me,” an intercontinental kissing cousin of “I Can’t Explain,” and some derivative Beach Boys on “Action.”

But what you mainly get is lip and a bad attitude. When Lindsay isn’t laying down the law with a shameless social climber (see garage rock masterpiece “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone”) he’s snarling mad ‘cuz he’s been hearing rumors his girl’s been running around and he isn’t going to put up with it (see “Steppin’ Out”). Our boy has woman problems galore, and he’ll chew your ear off talking about them if you let him.

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Celebrating Bob Seger who turned 76 yesterday. —Ed.

Through no fault of his own—or maybe it is his fault, I don’t know—Bob Seger has never gotten any respect. He’s the Rodney Dangerfield of rock, and this despite the fact that he’s written his fair share of memorable, and even great, songs. He’s always been the consummate journeyman—someone you might go to see, but without being totally psyched about it—but in the bicentennial year of 1976 he rose above his station to produce two very, very good LPs, Night Moves and Live Bullet.

The former included a couple of instant standards, while the latter made a convincing argument that seeing him live might just be a better bet than you think. I’ve liked him since I first listened to my older brother’s copy of Live Bullet way back in 1976, and I continue to have a soft spot in my heart for him, this despite the fact that he’s the force of evil who bequeathed us such awful songs as “Like a Rock,” “We’ve Got Tonight,” and the dreadful “Old Time Rock and Roll,” which to his credit he didn’t write but still recorded, which probably merits the electric chair. Why he even helped the Eagles write “Heartache Tonight,” a song that deserves to be burned at the stake.

But I forgive him, because he’s also given us such great tunes as “Get Out of Denver,” “Turn the Page,” “Beautiful Loser,” “Looking Back,” “Katmandu,” “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” “Night Moves,” and “2 + 2 = ?” And his version of “Nutbush City Limits” is almost as good as Tina Turner’s. As much a product of Detroit as the trucks he’s helped to sell via the suckass “Like a Rock,” Seger played in or founded a number of bands—the most notable being The Bob Seger System—without achieving much more than regional success before forming the Silver Bullet Band in 1974. Live Bullet finally propelled him to national stardom, and Night Moves solidified his status as a player in the big leagues.

Unlike fellow Detroiters the MC5 and The Stooges, Seger was never a firebrand; instead he was the epitome of Heartland Rock, which pays due respect to rock’s origins and doesn’t have a musically radical bone in its body. He was John Mellencamp before there was a John Mellencamp, a purveyor of meat and potato songs that told stories and that never veered too far from a relatively conservative template that fit neatly into the classic rock tradition. Which is undoubtedly why he’s been inducted into that den of iniquity, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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“What are you about, man?” That’s the question Frank Ene asked himself when writing and recording the music for his latest EP, “No Longer.” As Frank explains, this was his opportunity to gaze into the mirror and paint a musical portrait of who he is, or who he was.

The music on “No Longer” is dark, and the ’90s kids in the room might hear some influences in the way of Enigma, or late-stage Duran Duran, and Frank is happy if that’s what you hear because he loves those sounds from the 1990s as well which he fuses into his own subterranean musical landscape.

But, Frank will not be typecast. Nope, in fact, the way he tells it, he’s already completed his next album and is working on the next one and neither of those records will sound like this one. So, while we hope you enjoy the music you hear from “No Longer,” don’t get used to it, you may not hear it again, at least not from Frank.

Or, maybe you will. That’s the fun thing about Ene: he seems to always be driving himself to the next destination, but if he’s so inclined and can find a good artistic reason for doing so, he might just turn that car around. Perhaps from the back seat you’ll see Frank’s eyes flash in the rearview and hear him ask, “What are you about, man?” Will you have an answer?

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector, and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Evan Toth Show and TVD Radar on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

“Some of my earliest memories of music begin with the crackle of a needle drop.”

“I can distinctly remember sitting in my childhood friend’s family room at age 4 or so, around 1980, listening to Disney’s Main Street Electrical Parade and being hypnotized by the disc going around and around on the turntable, totally immersed in the sound and the cover art and all the spectacle and ceremony of the whole thing.

My parents had some vinyl which I listened to—I still have their original 45 of “Funkytown” right here next to my desk—but the first brand-new, just-released record that was my very own was Business As Usual by Men At Work, and I couldn’t get enough of “Who Can It Be Now?” Still can’t. Around that same time, I got The Beatles’ Blue and Red album compilations on cassette and found myself stuck on that first volume of Blue, it simply entranced me. I went through multiple copies of that one.

A bit later I got Synchronicity by The Police on vinyl, around the time when “Every Breath You Take” became a hit, and after hearing side one with the “I” and “II” bookends I have to say I was hard-pressed to even turn it over (same thing happened with side one of Back to Oakland by Tower of Power when I was in high school many years later).

But there was one particular musical experience in 1987 which I still think about frequently. I was 10 years old or so at the time and had been a regular watcher of the syndicated series Solid Gold. The show typically featured hits of the day, but this one episode had a guest who had a hit many years before, making his first appearance on TV in quite some time—the British singer Arthur Brown, performing (cough, lip-syncing, cough) his 1968 hit “Fire.”

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What a rotten deal. The Faces were one of the premiere bands of the seventies–and one of the best live acts as well–and what do we have in the form of a live LP? This crumby piece of half-baked crap. Recorded during the Faces’ sad downward slide (they would never release another album) and including only three Faces originals, 1974’s Coast to Coast: Overture and Beginners is nothing less than a travesty of justice.

By the time the Faces got around to recording Coast to Coast they weren’t really the Faces in name only. They’d become Rod Stewart’s de facto backing band–just check out the billing on the album cover. The Faces acquiesced to the demotion with the exception of bassist (and band heart and soul) Ronnie Laine, who wrote or co-wrote such classics as “Ooh La La,” “Glad and Sorry,” “Debris,” and ‘Too Bad,” amongst others. Laine opted to quit the band and go solo, and his replacement Tetsu Yamauchi was left the impossible task of filling his shoes.

It was inevitable, I suppose. Stewart’s 1971 solo album Every Picture Tells a Story transformed him into a superstar, and the Faces–from his perspective at least–had outlived their usefulness. He would use the Faces on his solo albums as sidemen, but he was done recording or touring under their name. The band might have gone on without him, but the additional loss of guitarist Ron Wood–who would continue to play and write with Stewart before ultimately joining the Rolling Stones–was a death blow.

Coast to Coast: Overture and Beginners reflects the schizophrenic state of Stewart’s career come 1973. As mentioned, only three of its songs are Faces originals, while another six appear on Stewart’s solo albums. Also included are two covers (the Temptations’ “I Wish It Would Rain” and John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy”) not released by the Faces or Stewart. In short Coast to Coast is a rags and bone affair that doesn’t cohere, and it doesn’t help that the boys tuck “Amazing Grace” in the middle of “Borstal Boys” and tack the chorus of “Every Picture Tells a Story” to the end of “Too Bad.” What listeners are left with is a confusing mishmash, and the LP’s running time is short to boot.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Cinema Paradiso Recordings is proud to announce the release of the soundtrack to the motion picture The Parallax View, on vinyl for the first time ever, this coming May 7th 2021.

​Based on the book by Loren Singer, The Parallax View is directed and produced by Alan J. Pakula as the second installment of his Political Paranoia trilogy—alongside Klute (1971) and All the President’s Men (1976). With cinematography by Gordon Willis (The Godfather trilogy, Annie Hall) and starring Warren Beatty, this political thriller from 1974 is perhaps even more relevant today than it was back then.

The legendary score by composer Michael Small is regarded as a benchmark in the sound of paranoia thrillers that dominated cinema in the 1970s, with revered film critic Pauline Kael hailing the film as essential for all fans of the genre. Now, 47 years later, the soundtrack newly remastered by Bob Weston, will finally be available to own on vinyl.

The single LP, deluxe gatefold limited edition in coloured vinyl includes liner notes with two essays by Scott Bettencourt and Alexander Kaplan (of Film Score Monthly), which provide a fascinating insight into the making of the film and an analysis of the score.

The CPR edition of The Parallax View soundtrack includes for the first time the infamous brainwashing scene, an influence on countless films and TV shows over the years. Notably, most recently with the Watchmen series and shows Mr. Robot and Homecoming even using the music from the film.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Compass Records is proud to announce the release of Colin Hay’s (Men at Work) 2001 classic album Going Somewhere on vinyl for the first time on June 4. This 20th anniversary edition will include a limited pressing of white vinyl on the first 1,000 units and can be pre-ordered now.

​For many of his post-Men At Work fans, Going Somewhere was their point of discovery of Colin Hay and his music. The album includes some of Colin’s best known solo work, including “Beautiful World,” “Waiting For My Real Life To Begin, and “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You,” which was featured in the hit film, Garden State. That song has gone on to be featured in numerous television shows including Dawson’s Creek and Judging Amy. “Waiting For My Real Life To Begin” was featured on Scrubs where it was sung by the entire cast. (Fun fact: Hay appears as himself in three episodes.)

Writing about “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You,” guitarist John Mayer said: “This is without a doubt my favorite song of the year. I’m still trying for a tune like this of my own. It’s my favorite kind of ballad, ‘chin up’ sadness that even a cold bastard would get swept away by—‘And if I lived ‘til I could no longer climb my stairs / I just don’t think I’ll ever get over you.’ No further comments.”

Hay stepped onto the international stage as the frontman and principal songwriter for ‘80s Australian hitmakers Men at Work, becoming one of the recognizable vocalists in pop music with his soaring infectious melodies and pointedly quizzical lyrical outlook. Classic songs like “Down Under,” “Overkill,” and “Who Can It Be Now” unscroll like miniature movies, with timeless twists and a bittersweet sense of humor. That wry humor has stuck with Hay though his solo albums and projects, from his most recent solo release, 2017’s critically acclaimed Fierce Mercy, to international tours as a member of Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band. A Hay-penned song (“What’s My Name”) not only made its way onto Starr’s 2019 album but also became the title track.

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Celebrating guitarist Davey Johnstone on his 70th birthday. —Ed.

It took Elton John’s fabulousness a while to catch up to him. Until 1973, in fact, when Sir Elton abandoned the tortured singer-songwriter look (see the cover of 1972’s tres funky Honky Chateau) to reinvent himself as a glorious glam cartoon on the cover of double-LP masterpiece Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

At which point there was no looking back; on the cover of 1974’s Caribou he’s still a cartoon, but he’s A CARTOON IN REAL LIFE, right down to the tiger fur jacket (unzipped to reveal one very sexy chest pelt) and a pair of pink glasses of the sort I would later wear to disguise the fact that I was perpetually stoned.

And when it comes to fabulous how can you beat “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” which Elton almost didn’t include on the album because, well, let’s let Elton tell it: “That’s a load of crap. You can send it to Engelbert Humperdinck, and if he doesn’t like it, you can give it to Lulu as a demo.”

But if you thought Elton was simply couldn’t get any more Glam along came 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, on the cover of which Sir Pudgealot looks like A CARTOON OF A CARTOON, and is even riding a bucking piano like John Travolta in Urban Cowboy across a lurid background thronged with inexplicable beasties straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. When asked about the cover of the LP the human toon would say only, “Took me six years to crochet that.” Which just goes to show that Elton, who once leaped on stage during an Iggy Pop show in a gorilla suit and almost got beat up for his troubles, is a real wild card.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that Elton’s was Glam’s ultimate nebbish remake/ remodel unless you count Gary Glitter, who basically trundled himself up like a plump Christmas turkey in aluminum foil. But whereas Herr Glitter was a strictly English pop sensation, Elton was a worldwide entertainment phenomenon, and filling arenas in the Land of Opportunity across the pond, which he was celebrating in songs like “Philadelphia Freedom.”

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“We’ll be honest and say we’re pretty new to vinyl. We’re 18 and 21 years old and we grew up with CDs and now we live in the age of streaming.”

“When we were really little, our dad had a bizarre record player called the “sound burger.” It didn’t really look at all like a burger, but because it was called that we were fascinated and thought it did look like one. We loved watching him put the record on as if it was the meat pattie in the middle (we have always been vegetarians, btw). He listened to a LOT of Bob Dylan on that player, and we both realised he must have played Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks extremely often because we know the lyrics for “Tangled Up In Blue” deep in our bones. Also, “Idiot Wind” was a pretty funny song name to us. Something unfortunate must have happened to the burger, because at some point it disappeared and was replaced by a regular turntable.

It’s not until we recently inherited an old record player and a few records from our parents that we’ve started collecting vinyl. We hunted through the shed and cupboards of our family home to see what was lying around. Our mum is a Kate Bush fan, and we claimed Hounds of Love and The Kick Inside, both sublime albums. It’s interesting transitioning to the two-sided listening experience. You start wondering how the artist decided which were to be on side 1 or side 2. There is the choice to create two moods, two shades.

One of our friends gave us Sufjan Stevens’ The Greatest Gift: Mixtape (Outtakes, Remixes and Demos from Carrie and Lowell) on vinyl—an album we revere. The mixtape is an incredible collection, containing everything from iPhone demos to the heart-wrenching epic track “Wallowa Lake Monster,” a song which features so much beautiful poetry and tragedy and small details which Sufjan does so well. Our song “Treading Water” has a fairly generous nod to that aspect of Sufjan’s writing. We played around with mixing in small details into that song, and we are very happy with the effect.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “96,000,” the second track from the Atlantic Records companion soundtrack to the Warner Bros. Pictures cinematic event of the summer, In the Heights arrives today, one week after the pre-order launch for In the Heights (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) and the release of the film’s title track.

​The new song from the upcoming musical family film also arrives alongside Warner Bros. Pictures’ announcement of special advance screenings this Mother’s Day, May 9th. Tickets are available for free, while supplies last, in select theaters nationwide.

In the Heights, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Jon M. Chu, is based on the TONY Award-winning stage musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes with score by Miranda and Alex Lacamoire & Bill Sherman, additional score by Ryan Shore. The film is scheduled to world premiere at the Tribeca Festival on June 9th.

In the Heights (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) was produced by Alex Lacamoire, Bill Sherman, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Greg Wells, with soundtrack production for Atlantic Records by GRAMMY Award winners Kevin Weaver (President, Atlantic Records West Coast), Pete Ganbarg (President A&R, Atlantic Records) and Craig Rosen (EVP A&R and Label Operations, Atlantic Records), along with Riggs Morales (SVP Urban A&R, Atlantic Records). For Warner Bros Pictures, soundtrack produced by Darren Higman and Steven Gizicki.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | In 1975, four legends teamed up and gave birth to one of THE best rhythm groups of the 1970s—four musicians that had played music at the highest level all their lives and gained their status as both stand-alone artists and important sidemen. Each of them had participated in many of jazz’s great moments and all four shared the ability, documented on many albums, to inspire their fellow musicians to even greater heights. In 1975, the Eastern Rebellion collective was born.

​​On saxophone, we have George Coleman (born in 1935) the self-taught saxophone maestro from Memphis who (after working with Ray Charles) played in B.B. King’s band in the 1950s and in Miles Davis’ quintet in the 1960s. Coleman played on four historical Miles albums (including My Funny Valentine) within one year. George Coleman went on to perform and record with legends such as Charles Mingus, Ahmad Jamal, Idris Muhammad, Melvin Sparks, Nina Simone and was an essential member of many more noteworthy groups throughout his freelance career. He was named a NEA Jazz Master, inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2015 and received a brass note on the Beale Street Walk of Fame​.

On the piano, we have Cedar Walton (1934-2013) who was also the bandleader and producer of the Eastern Rebellion collective. He was a Dallas-born hard bop jazz pianist virtuoso who came to prominence as a member of Art Blakey’s The Jazz Messengers before establishing a long career as a bandleader, arranger and composer (several of his compositions have by now become much-played jazz standards). Walton was known for his fantastic recordings and performances and of course for being part of the in-house rhythm section at Prestige Records. Cedar Walton arranged and recorded for Etta James, helping her win a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album in 1994.​

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“My relationship to vinyl is a weird one, given the fact that I grew up with streaming services and have rarely had to buy music—let alone a hard copy.”

“Growing up, I listened to CDs in my little Walkman and danced in my room while Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” blasted through the shitty speakers of my Hello Kitty CD player (but I was 10, so sound quality meant nothing to me). But by the time I was around 12 or 13, streaming services began taking over, and my short-lived CD phase was over.

That being said, I always knew what vinyl was and how it worked, mainly because of my dad. Not only did we have a record player in our living room that sat on top of a massive collection of hundreds of vinyl records, but my dad was a musician. So our house was always filled with a soundtrack of some sort—usually, him fiddling around at the piano.

I think that because of my upbringing, and the way that sound was so ingrained in our house, music—and the experience of listening to music (which is an experience that we take for granted nowadays because of how easy it is to consume)—is always something I’ve felt very connected to. Though it wasn’t until later that connection started happening with vinyl, it was always there.

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Based in London and hailing from Sussex via Yorkshire, Elsa Hewitt is an electronic producer and songwriter who’s been active since 2017, and with a fondness for releasing her music on cassette. To wit, LUPA, her latest and sixth overall, is available on tape in an attractive edition of 50, but it’s also fresh out on vinyl through Tompkins Square. As a document of her consistently evolving skills, it’s both inviting and elusive, as likely to please curious dabblers as those with an undying jones for electronic sounds.

LUPA isn’t Elsa Hewitt’s vinyl debut. Her 2019 release, Citrus Paradisi, received a wax pressing late last year that’s still available through the Lobster Theremin label. There’s also a self-released single LP distillation of Becoming Real – Trilogy, a 3CD set that corrals Hewitt’s three tapes from 2017, Cameras From Mars, Dum Spiro Spero, and Peng Variations.

The contents of Becoming Real – Trilogy; that is, the full 3CD version (I’ve not listened to the compilation), reinforce Hewitt as a writer of songs (as distinct from a crafter of soundscapes, rhythmic thickets or tangles of abstraction), though her music gravitates not toward synth-pop but rather a blend of experimental techniques and progressive dance impulses with samples (occasionally humorous). Singing (and even rapping during Cameras From Mars track “Rainbowz”) aids considerably in establishing the songlike aura.

Cool thing is, Hewitt’s songs roam around a lot, so that the progression is never predictable. Circus Paradisi can be considered a rapid-fire spurt of advancement, the tracks more wide-ranging and more confident as the brightness/ boldness doesn’t break the spell cast by her 2017 tapes. Contrasting, the cassette “Quilt Jams,” described as wordless, spontaneously created and modest, was issued shortly before Circus Paradisi.

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