Category Archives: The TVD Storefront

Celebrating Brian Downey on his 72nd birthday. —Ed.

You wanna hear a miracle? I lived for almost five-and-a-half decades without ever hearing Jailbreak, or any other Thin Lizzy album for that matter. Here vocalist/bassist and chief songwriter Phil Lynott and his Irish compatriots put out a truly tremendous LP in America’s Bicentennial Year, not to mention a parcel of other great LPs, and what was I doing? Listening to Elton John and John Denver and England Dan and John Ford Coley, any band basically with a guy named John in it. If Debbie Gibson’s middle name been John, I would have listened to her too.

I would love to be able to say I simply wasn’t into hard rock back then, but I owned albums by Bad Company, UFO (UFO? Me? Inexplicable!), Robin Trower, and Foghat, so that’s sheer bunk. But there’s no point in crying over guilty milk, and it’s never too late to make up for past mistakes, that is unless you’re Lee Harvey Oswald or that chimpanzee (name: Travis) who ripped a woman’s face off in 2009, and I’m neither of those personages.

So here I am making up for atoning for my inexplicable oversight, and listening to Jailbreak which mixes tremendous twin-guitar hard rockers with sweeter fair, all of which I love with the possible exception of “Cowboy Song”—in which Lynott, a black Irishman, plays rodeo cowpoke.

But I take that back. “Cowboy Song” may start slowly, but its guitar solos are tremendous and Lynott’s vocals are impassioned (especially when he sings, “It’s okay amigo/Just let me go/Riding in the rodeo”) and the jam at song’s end is a bono fido guitar marvel. Turns out I love the damn thing! Just as I love everything about the LP, except for its cover. Too sci-fi for my decidedly earthbound tastes.

Thin Lizzy was founded in 1969 in Dublin by two former members of Van Morrison’s Them and two members of the band Orphanage (which reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s quip about orphans, to wit: “To lose one parent is misfortune; to lose two parents is sheer carelessness.”). The band moved permanently to London in 1971, and recorded their eponymous debut LP that same year.

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Modern music listeners enjoy creating personalized playlists containing their preferred musicians and genres, but there’s one thing lacking: the expertly guiding hand of a radio station’s program director—or, even better—a tasteful DJ behind the microphone who loves to share favorite tunes, but also introduces listeners to new music that is worthy of addition to your personal faves. But, current culture has sacrificed the serendipitous nature of the radio in favor of complete control over musical choices, or—even worse—the choices of a faceless corporate AI bot.

Bassist and composer, Esperanza Spalding understands the mystery and magic that a spin of your local radio dial can provide, and in 2012 she released an album paying homage to the spirit of radio. Produced by Esperanza and co-produced by A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, Radio Music Society showcased the breadth of Spalding’s musical aptitude and inhabited the rare musical landscape of being challenging, yet also a lot of fun to listen to.

It’s been 10 years and the Grammy award-winning album finds itself eligible for reissue by Craft Recordings and is given the full anniversary treatment featuring 2 LPs pressed on 180-gram vinyl at RTI. The title will also be reissued in hi-res digital audio. Esperanza and I discuss the continuing role of radio in her current life and she offers a unique and descriptive behind-the-scenes peek into her production and composing process. We also explore her complimentary role as an educator and, of course, delve into what makes vinyl special to her. So, let’s turn the radio dial and search for some serendipity.

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.

Luke Haines is your classic English eccentric. Following the disbanding of his Britpop band The Auteurs and between a stint with Black Box Recorder, the notoriously irascible Haines has released numerous songs about musicians, artists and miscellaneous, and a series of concept albums. One, released in 1996 under the name Baader-Meinhof, brilliantly chronicles the history of the infamous German terrorist group, while another takes a headlock on British professional wrestling (2011’s remarkable 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ’80s.) The man’s interests are Catholic, to say the least.

But the Haines concept LP with the broadest audience appeal is undoubtedly 2014’s New York in the ‘70s. On it Haines expresses his love for the NYC punk, literary and art scenes, and over the course of the album he name drops everyone from Suicide’s Alan Vega, the New York Dolls, the Ramones, Lou Reed, William Burroughs, Jim Carroll, Richard Hell, and I may have missed some. Conspicuous by their absence are Patti Smith (no big loss), Andy Warhol, Jayne County, Debbie Harry, Television, and the Talking Heads.

The LP opens with the slow “Alan Vega Says” (a tribute to Lou Reed’s “Candy Says” and “Lisa Says,” most likely). Haines is a one-man band on New York in the ‘70s, and on this one he uses keyboards and guitar to chronicle Vega’s days in the Chelsea Hotel. Vegas name drops Sharon Tate, Marilyn, and Elvis, and the song’s key line is “Alan Vegas says it’s going to be a great hit/If Alan says so it probably is.” And the following track, the bottom heavy and fuzzed-out “Drone” is a straight-up tribute to Vegas’ band Suicide and its unique sound.

The title track—which features a repetitive guitar riff, one spazzed-out synthesizer, and glam vocals—is a slow and simple tribute to a period we’ll never see the likes of again. When Haines isn’t repeating the title over and over again he tosses off lines like “American days become American nights/We’re going to have fun with the scary transvestites, oh!” and “Everybody’s gay or bisexual/A man called Jim getting experimental.” On the fast-paced “Jim Carroll” Haines goes downtown with the poet, rocker, and junkie who penned The Basketball Diaries and the super-bummer “People Who Died,” and over the course of the song Haines has Carroll say things like “Coke is just meth dressed up in drag” and “They put a man up in space/And I can’t even score in St. Mark’s Place.”

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Remembering Eddie Van Halen, born on this day in 1955. —Ed.

What to say about the passing of Eddie Van Halen? Sad? Tragic? Heartbreaking? If the words are trite ones, it’s because death is the mother of a vast brood of cliches. What I’ll carry with me forever is his impish grin in the video for “Jump.” Can a smile sum up a man’s life? It’s the smile of a show-off making it look easy when you know damn well it isn’t, but there’s nothing smug about it. He’s simply bequeathing us a gift, the giving of which makes him happy. As for the fireworks he produced with his guitar, they speak for themselves.

I fell in love with Van Halen as a result of that video, which many–including my lovely other half–view as a sell-out. But the song’s sheer exuberance won me over, and led me to do something I would never have done otherwise–go back and listen to, and fall in love with, the band’s earlier albums.

One of said albums is 1980’s Women and Children First, which I put in third place in the Van Halen discography behind their self-titled 1978 debut and 1984’s 1984. On Women and Children First Pasadena’s greatest ever metal band pulverize the competition–Eddie shows off his hair-raising chops while David Lee Roth does his patented Borscht Belt shtick, and drummer Alex Van Halen and bass player Michael Anthony make like a steamroller with swing. In short, it’s business as usual.

The LP’s two opening tracks are its best. “And the Cradle Will Rock” is one of the heaviest songs in the Van Halen catalogue–less blitzkrieg than juggernaut, it boasts (as do the other songs) a guitar solo I’m sure has led many a lesser guitarist to take up the tuba, and a message (“Well, they say it’s kinda frightnin’/How this younger generation swings”) that’s resounded the whole way back to the origins of rock ’n’ roll and beyond.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | A letter from Eli “Paperboy” Reed: “Fred Davis was a legend, but only in my living room. My Dad told me about him. He could play like T-Bone Walker and sang in a high, keen voice like J.B. Lenoir. In the summer of 1969, while the Cuyahoga river fire burned, he worked alongside my Dad at Harco, the Cleveland factory where my grandfather was an executive. They became friends, bonding over the Bobby Bland records blaring from the AM radio on the factory floor.

Fred taught my Dad the rudiments of blues guitar, but his style. Fred could play up and down the neck and, even when he played and sang just by himself, he sounded like a full band. Or, at least, so the legend went. These were only foggy memories from thirty years previous, passed down from a father to a son.

But then we found the tape, a quarter inch reel in a plain white cardboard box. Recordings of Fred that my Dad had made in my grandparents living room more than 50 years ago. The idea was that maybe if there were some recordings of Fred that he could use them to get booked on the nascent college blues-revival circuit, but it wasn’t to be.

My Dad went on to college in Boston and Fred stayed in Cleveland, fronting his own band ‘Dave & The Blues Express’ until he met a tragic end: Shot and killed during a stickup at liquor store. If it weren’t for the tape, Fred ‘Dave’ Davis might be forgotten, but with its release, the legend can finally go behind the confines of my living room and, with any luck, to the whole world.”
—Eli “Paperboy” Reed, Fall 2022

Formerly a trio, Rhode Island’s experimental-industrial-electronic-metallic noise-niks Sightless Pit have scaled it down to the twosome of Lee Buford (The Body) and Dylan Walker (Full of Hell). But if reduced in membership, the duo’s approach has considerably expanded through the inclusion of numerous guests on their new full length Lockstep Bloodwar, which is out on limited edition clear with white and blue swirl vinyl, compact disc, and digital January 27 through Thrill Jockey. The collaborators include claire rousay, YoshimiO of Boredoms, Gangsta Boo (RIP) of Three 6 Mafia, Midwife, Lane Shi Otayonii of Elizabeth Colour Wheel, and Frukwan of Gravediggaz/Stetsasonic.

Sightless Pit’s Grave of a Dog came out in February of 2020, the handiwork of Lee Buford and Dylan Walker in consort with Kristin Hayter (Lingua Ignota). Frequently pummeling and abrasive, at other times textural, and with clearly defined passages of beauty in the equation, the record established Sightless Pit as far more than just unrelentingly harsh and thematically bleak.

The beauty moves on their debut were most often tied to the voice of Hayter, and her exit might lead those familiar with Grave of a Dog to assume there’d be a heightening of the uncompromising nature of Sightless Pit’s sound. Like, for one example, the vocalizations, which are reminiscent of an incensed pack of demons freshly unleashed from the deepest crannies of hell.

There’s still plenty of that on Lockstep Bloodwar, indeed right away in opening track “Resin on a Knife,” but the interaction with the impressive cadre of guest contributors takes the record into some fruitfully unexpected regions. “Resin on a Knife” integrates the vocals of Midwife (aka Madeline Johnston) to a surprisingly pop-tinged result that productively contrasts with the cut’s streams of static, rhythmic thud and reverberating electro-bass.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Critically acclaimed rock group, EELS is today announcing the limited-edition vinyl reissues of their earlier records, Hombre Lobo, End Times, and Tomorrow Morning which will be released via E Works/[PIAS] on March 17. Alongside the news, EELS is also sharing “Anything For Boo” (Unplugged – Gentle Souls 2021 KCRW Session).

EELS will hit the road this Spring for the long-awaited Lockdown Hurricane tour of Europe and North America, starting March 26 in Nottingham, UK. Available at the live shows only, EELS will be releasing two new very limited vinyl editions of two live sessions—Live at Largo (2019) and Gentle Souls: 2021 KCRW Session. These will be unique to the tour and not available anywhere else. The reissues and new live records follow EELS’ critically acclaimed 2022 record, Extreme Witchcraft which found praise at MOJO, NME, The New York Times, Stereogum, SPIN and more.

EELS have had one of the most consistently acclaimed careers in music. The ever-changing project of principal singer/songwriter E (Mark Oliver Everett), EELS have released 14 studio albums since their 1996 debut, Beautiful Freak. In 2008 E published his highly acclaimed book Things the Grandchildren Should Know and starred in the award-winning Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives documentary about the search to understand his quantum physicist father, Hugh Everett III.

It is fitting that Joni Mitchell – The Asylum Albums 1971-1975, a four-album box set, is being released at this time. Mitchell’s miraculous recovery from a series of life-threatening health scares and her return to performing at the Newport Folk Festival in July of 2022, have rekindled interest in her remarkable career. Tentative plans for possible multiple live dates have been rumored, as have possible new recordings.

For the past several years there have been a plethora of reissues, primarily previously unreleased live tracks and a host of demos and other releases, under the moniker of the Joni Mitchell Archive Series. This new box is very much a follow-up to the four-album The Reprise Albums 1968-1971 box released in 2021, that included her first four albums Song To A Seagull (1968), Clouds (1969), Ladies Of The Canyon (1970), and Blue (1971). Those four albums primarily represented Mitchell’s early folk-based recordings, that gradually became slightly more expansive, culminating in her iconic, quintessential singer-songwriter watershed Blue album.

This new box set picks up where Blue left off, but Mitchell’s shift to Asylum was significant. While Reprise was a home for artists like Mitchell, fellow Canadian Neil Young and others, Asylum, launched by David Geffen, was the kind of artist-centric boutique label that could offer Mitchell the creative space and special attention to her music that she craved. At the time, Asylum was the de-facto home of California singer-songwriter-based pop-rock and laid-back LA cool. Geffen signed the Eagles and Jackson Browne to his label and poached Linda Ronstadt from Capitol.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | In the late 1980s, the renowned American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger John Hicks formed one of the most influential ensembles consisting out of 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 shared the ability, documented on many albums, to inspire their fellow musicians to even greater heights. The “John Hicks Trio” had several line-up changes over the years that included greats such as Clifford Barbaro (Strata East, Blue Note, Sun Ra Arkestra, Charles Tolliver), Clint Houston (Prestige, Nina Simone, Roy Ayers, Azar Lawrence), Ray Drummond (Freddie Hubbard, Art Blakey, Lalo Schifrin), Marcus McLaurine (Muse, Verve, Weldon Irvine, Kool & The Gang), and Victor Lewis (Steve Grossman, Stan Getz, Charles Mingus, Cedar Walton, Chet Baker).

On the album we are presenting you today, I’ll Give You Something To Remember Me By from 1988 the trio consists out of some of the biggest and best players in the jazz, funk and soul scenes: On piano we have the Atlanta based trio’s bandleader John Hicks (1941-2006). He served as a leader on more than 30 albums and played as a sideman on more than 300 other recordings.

After being taught piano by his mother, Hicks went on to study at Lincoln University of Missouri, Berklee College of Music, and the Julliard School. After playing with a number of different artists during the early ’60s (including Oliver Nelson and being part of Pharoah Sanders’s first band) he joined Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers in 1964. In the early ’70s he taught jazz history and improvisation at Southern Illinois University before resuming his career as a recording artist. Next to his many solo recordings for labels such as Strata East and Concord, Hicks would collaborate with all the big names in the scene, including Archie Shepp, Mingus and Alvin Queen. In 2014 & 2015, J Dilla paid homage to John Hicks by sampling two of his songs.

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Credited to tenor saxophonist Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis with organist Shirley Scott, Craft Recordings’ 4LP/4CD/digital set Cookin’ with Jaws and the Queen: The Legendary Prestige Cookbook Albums offers 23 tracks cut during three 1958 sessions recorded by Rudy Van Gelder and first released as three separate Cookbook volumes and the Smokin’ LP between ’58–’64. The 180 gram vinyl is limited to 5,000 copies with the records housed in individual jackets replicating those original sleeves. The CD edition has three bonus tracks from the same sessions. The music is early soul jazz personified, in stores February 3.

A curious jazz newbie might be wondering if this set is an overabundance of goodness. To which I will retort that Cookin’ with Jaws and the Queen offers thorough documentation of a sharp as brass tacks quintet from inside a concise timeframe; the first session occurred on June 20, the second on September 12, and the third on December 5 of 1958, with Davis and Scott joined by Jerome Richardson on flute, tenor, and baritone sax, George Duvivier on bass, and Arthur Edgehill on drums.

For this reissue, Davis and Scott are given equal credit, and deservedly so, but on initial release it was the saxophonist who received top billing, which is also understandable, as Scott was relatively new on the scene while Davis had been a member of Count Basie’s orchestra twice, along with cutting a string of records as leader or co-leader, as was the case with The Battle of Birdland with fellow tenor Sonny Stitt, issued in 1955 by the Roost label.

But in fact, Scott was indeed given a “Featuring” credit on two prior albums with Davis’s trio (with Duvivier and Edgehill), one released by Roost and the other by Roulette, both in ’58. What this imparts is how the addition of Richardson deepened a core that was already rock solid through experience. This is vitally important, as the group knocked out 26 tracks in three days spaced out over half a year.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | When singer Eva Cassidy wandered into producer Chris Biondo’s studio in Glenn Dale, Maryland to make extra money by singing on a band’s demo, she began an unprecedented journey that would lead to more than 12 million albums sold worldwide, largely posthumously. When she passed away in 1996 from melanoma at the age of 33, she left behind a small catalogue of recorded material that has been painstakingly curated into more than a dozen individual collections that showcase her extraordinarily versatile voice and her wide-ranging, but unerringly tasteful, sense of material.

To celebrate what would have been her 60th birthday (on February 2), Blix Street Records will release a landmark new album, which pairs Cassidy’s impeccable voice with the backing of the legendary London Symphony Orchestra. I Can Only Be, the album’s title track, is a radical reworking of a little-known song by Eva Cassidy’s musical hero, Stevie Wonder, while the album’s eight other tracks receive their own special reimagining. The album arrives on March 3, 2023.

I Can Only Be by Eva Cassidy with the London Symphony Orchestra is a new work that employs the groundbreaking machine learning audio restoration technology developed by filmmaker Peter Jackson for his 2021 The Beatles: Get Back film and used more recently for the re-issue of The Beatles classic album, Revolver. The process allows for splitting mono tracks into their separate vocal and instrumental parts. Hence, Cassidy’s vocal parts were painstakingly separated, restored and enhanced to reveal previously unheard levels of clarity and depth, resulting in an emotive, atmospheric album with lush arrangements created by award-winning composer/arranger Christopher Willis (Schmigadoon!, Veep, Death of Stalin, The Personal History of David Copperfield) accompanying now pristine vocals.

“Songbird,” the first track on the new album, was released by Blix Street Records as a digital single in November, followed last week by Buffy Sainte-Marie’s emotive tale of love and loss, “Tall Trees in Georgia.” Both are now available from iTunes, Spotify and other digital outlets.

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Celebrating Neil Diamond on his 82nd birthday. —Ed.

So my physicist buddy Stoner Doug finally managed to construct an actual time machine and was like, “Where should we go?” And we looked at each other and without even having to think about it shouted in perfect sync, “Hot August Night!” Because who wouldn’t have wanted to be at The Greek Theater on that historic August night in 1972 when Neil “Beautiful Noise” Diamond put it all out there in an orgiastic celebration of cosmic shlock?

Forget Elvis! Forget Chuck Berry! Forget Jesus Christ! This was NEIL at his Forever in Blue Jeans best, giving it his all! The Greatest Concert Ever! You don’t hear about it much because the story got suppressed by Neil’s record label, but 15 people died on that sultry August night! Steamed to death by sheer joy!

And Doug and I wanted to be two of them. So we climbed into his primitive time capsule made out of aluminum siding and flattened Dr. Pepper cans with a big sign on a stick reading “We LOVE you Neil!” And following a dramatic WHOOSH and the shriek of the time machine’s 350 Small Block Chevy engine there we were, sitting in Row Three beside a 50-year-old woman from Reno who told us she owned 13 cats all of whom were named Neil (if male) or Diamond (if female).

And there he was! Neil in the flesh! Just like on the cover of Hot August Night on which he appears to be jerking himself off! And why not? If anybody has the right to stroke his shtupper in front of an audience of thousands it’s Neil, who is THE songwriter of our time! The Brill Building savant who came up with such master strokes of pop brilliance as “Cherry, Cherry,” “Sweet Caroline,” and “Song Sung Blue”! To say nothing of the deep philosophical meditation that is “I Am, I Said,” in which an existentially alone Neil complains that nobody will listen to him, not even his chair!

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Over a decade after releasing a self-titled debut, Heavy Blanket has returned with Moon Is, out on vinyl, compact disc, and digital January 27 through Outer Battery Records. Featuring J Mascis on guitar, the bass and drums are respectively credited to (the suspiciously fictive duo of) Johnny Pancake and Pete Cougar. Sans vocals, the nature of Heavy Blanket’s sound is reflected in the moniker. Folks who enthusiastically soak up the “classic” hard rock elements in Dinosaur Jr.’s kitbag should step up without hesitation.

I won’t categorically deny that Johnny Pancake and Pete Cougar exist, but the colorfully humorous backstory attached to Heavy Blanket’s debut, where these bandmates are introduced as a couple of Mascis’ high school chums and playing partners in a youthful side band circa the winddown of the now-legendary early ’80s Massachusetts hardcore band Deep Wound (which featured Mascis on drums and Lou Barlow on guitar, don’tcha know), is almost certainly a tall tale. A head injury, a prison stay, and Pearl Jam also figure into the narrative.

Sporting a cover drawing by Tim Lehi of four dudes and a groundhog hanging out in the woods, with the whole bunch leisurely lounging while seemingly cooking yet another dude in a sizable pot over a bonfire (as the rodent is fully invested in the proceedings), Moon Is retains the backstory’s sense of humor as the album offers six tracks, three per side, with the opener on each stretching out a bit. “Danny” on the first side lasts nearly seven minutes and “String Along” on the flip reaches eight.

“Danny” is the catchier of the two, though both are essentially vessels of expansive soloing and Mascis’ immediately recognizable tone. And that’s a fitting description of Heavy Blanket’s raison d’etre, in fact, or to put it another way, Mascis is leaning into the “stoner rock” side of his musical personality, all while resisting self-indulgence or inspiring boredom through the exaltation of tired-ass, frequently blues-rocking clichés.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | San Francisco, CA | The Haight Street Art Center is pleased to announce the opening of their new exhibition, “The Haight-Ashbury Experience and the Pursuit of Happiness: The Photography of Herb Greene,” a groundbreaking exhibition that will present the first career-long retrospective of San Francisco’s pioneering rock photographer.

The exhibition opens with a ticketed reception on February 23rd from 5pm-9pm with food, beverages, and music. Tickets are $20 for Haight Street Art Center members and $40 for non-members. Free admission begins on February 24th and the exhibition will remain open until May 28th. A custom exhibition poster by artist Stanley Mouse will be available for purchase.

A founding member of the Haight-Ashbury art community who went on to become an internationally acclaimed photographer, Herb Greene’s work embodied the spirit of the Haight-Ashbury before it was catapulted into media prominence.

As a friend and contemporary of his subjects, Greene captured the elusive heart and soul of the musicians, artists, and fellow travelers who would play major roles in the nation’s counterculture of the 1960s. As they matured and earned greater fame, so did Greene, who became a leading rock portraitist, photographing Led Zeppelin, the Pointer Sisters, and many more. Greene was also the Grateful Dead’s favorite photographer, capturing the band over their three decades and beyond.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Alongside brand new cover art, all configurations of this deluxe reissue feature the hits “Gasoline,” “Fine Again,” and “Driven Under,” plus a previously unreleased live show, captured in its entirety at New Hampshire’s Hampton Beach Casino in 2003. Rounding out the bonus content is a rare 2002 live acoustic cover of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way,” issued first as a B-side.

“It’s difficult to believe that 20 years have passed by in what feels like the blink of an eye,” the band exclaims. “This album was our first US release under the band name ‘Seether’ and it holds a very special place in our hearts. This is where our career really began and it’s a great pleasure to present this updated version of Disclaimer that we hope fans, both seasoned and new, will love as much as we have enjoyed this incredible journey over the past two decades. As always—play it loud!”

The 3-LP set is housed in a deluxe triple gatefold jacket, while both physical formats also include new liner notes from Katherine Turman, an acclaimed music journalist, producer and co-author of Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (HarperCollins).

Formed in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1999, Seether (originally named “Saron Gas”) instantly hooked fans at home with their blend of alt-metal, grunge, and heart-on-sleeve lyricism. At the turn of the millennium, not long after releasing the South Africa-only Fragile, the band (originally consisting of vocalist and guitarist Shaun Morgan, bassist Dale Stewart, and drummer Dave Cohoe) caught the ears of Wind-up Records, who brought the trio to the US to record their international debut.

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