Celebrating Herb Alpert on his 91st birthday. —Ed.

Herb Alpert is often praised as a veteran bigwig of the record industry who possessed a measure of taste alongside his business acumen. He’s even more notable for his trumpet playing and leadership of a crucial if not necessarily hip 1960s outfit; Whipped Cream & Other Delights is the most popular LP from Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass; it’s also their best.

Let’s get it out of the way right up front; nobody in the Tijuana Brass was from Mexico. They were in fact a purely studio concoction at the outset with Alpert overdubbing his trumpet for increased vibrancy. Naturally, these realities have led many to rashly assume the (largely) instrumental venture effectively putting A&M Records (stands for Alpert and Moss, as in executive Jerry Moss) on the map was an exercise in total squaresville.

The theory ain’t necessarily wrong, as the Tijuana Brass albums remain amongst the highest profile artifacts produced in the Easy Listening era. Make no mistake; beginning with 1962’s The Lonely Bull and continuing well into the ‘70s, Herb Alpert strenuously avoided grating upon even a single human nerve. The objective was to sell a ton of records, which he and A&M did by undertaking a generationally inclusive approach and by appropriating a neighboring culture in a manner that, while surely dated today, was far less contemporaneously niche-driven than Alpert’s stylistic relatives in the Exotica field.

But like Les Baxter, Martin Denny and their ilk, there seemed to be a point where the consumers of Alpert’s records arrived at the conclusion that his stuff was either old hat or all of a sudden utterly out of step with their lives. The abovementioned heap of records was unloaded, though not necessarily into the bins of used record stores; instead, the Tijuana Brass was a staple of the antique shop, the consignment store, the Goodwill, the flea market, the yard/garage sale, and the Salvation Army — particularly in retiree-heavy Florida, where estate sales from Sarasota to Boca offered Volume 2 by the stack, and where the same households whose mailboxes filled with Alpert come-ons in 1965 now find them stuffed with sports betting Florida pitches instead.

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With Otterson, Nashvillian singer-songwriter Diana Darby has released her fifth album; it’s freshly out on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Delmore Recording Society, the label that has issued the entirety of her full-length discography. If Darby’s place of residence leads to an assumption that she can be categorized as part of that city’s long stylistic tradition, that’s not really accurate. Her sound is better assessed as folk, smart, and often fragile without dissipating into insubstantiality. Darby’s roots are strong and deep without ever registering as a mere throwback.

Diana Darby released her debut album, Naked Time, in 2000. Her next two followed in rather quick succession, Fantasia Ball in ’03 and The Magdalene Laundries in ’05. Roughly seven years elapsed before I V (Intravenous) came out. It was also her vinyl debut. Otterson ended an even longer stretch, although she started working on the record in the midst of the COVID pandemic.

Darby has related that a few of Otterson’s songs were written years before and stored on an old hard drive. After rediscovering them, she recorded them anew, and their inclusion on her latest strengthens the cohesiveness of her sound across a quarter-century. Generally recording solo, Darby struggled through difficulties this time out due to problems with a Digital Audio Workstation (she’d previously recorded to 4-track cassette). The good news is that none of those issues are apparent in Otterson’s finished sequence, which is as accomplished as any of her prior albums.

Along with electric and acoustic guitar, Darby plays a little piano on Otterson. She welcomes the contribution of JZ Barrell on guitars, bass, and percussion, as the album, with one exception, was recorded in Chicago and Brooklyn. The songs are vivid and textured, with opener “April” establishing an ethereal gentleness that’s persistent but not dominant.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees and “British Invasion” pioneers, The Zombies, today share “The Way I Feel Inside (Mono Remastered)” off the forthcoming re-release of their debut album, Begin Here (Mono Remastered), which will be released via their own Beechwood Park Records on April 17th. The track is the second song released from the album, following “It’s Alright With Me (Mono Remastered).”

Begin Here (Mono Remastered), the second of four definitive physical reissues from their catalog, follows the release of Odessey & Oracle (Mono Remastered) and includes the classic songs “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No,” “It’s Alright With Me,” “The Way I Feel Inside,” and their beloved version of George Gershwin’s “Summertime.” This definitive new edition combines all 17 tracks from the UK and US versions of The Zombies’ 1965 debut album, remastered in its original mono mix. The release is again being overseen by Matthew and Jamie White (sons of founding member Chris White), mastered by Reuben Cohen at Lurssen Mastering, and brand-new liner notes by the legendary David Fricke. The LP will be housed in a single-pocket jacket with poly-lined sleeves and an insert.

Colin Blunstone shares about the release, “Thinking of The Zombies first album, Begin Here, immediately triggers wonderful memories of late-night sessions in Decca’s West Hampstead studio fueled by pure excitement and adrenaline. These tracks changed all of our lives forever, and I am forever grateful. I look back on them with wonder and a great deal of affection!”

Rod Argent of the band also adds, “The Zombies’ Begin Here rerelease basically follows the American original, which adds the E.P. which came out in the UK soon after “She’s Not There” in the UK, but was never released in the US. Unbelievably, as was the way in those days, we had a day and a night only to record, and generally the songs were recorded as first takes!”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Pink Floyd have confirmed the official album release of the rare live concert, Pink Floyd Live from the Los Angeles Sports Arena, April 26th, 1975.

The legendary recording, first captured as a bootleg during the band’s 1975 Wish You Were Here Tour across North America, will now be available for the first time on standalone CD and vinyl editions via Sony Music. A 4LP clear vinyl will be released exclusively for Record Store Day on 18th April, followed by a 2CD edition on 24th April, available for pre-order here. Both releases feature the full concert across 16 live recordings, newly restored and remastered by acclaimed producer and musician Steven Wilson.

Pink Floyd Live from the Los Angeles Sports Arena, April 26th, 1975 spotlights the band during their rapid ascent. The Dark Side of the Moon had taken Pink Floyd from a hugely successful breakout British band to one of the biggest rock groups on the planet. Arenas and stadiums would now play host to their performances.

The Wish You Were Here Tour was announced in early March 1975, just one month prior to commencing. The shows instantly sold out and broke box office records, including that of the Los Angeles Sports Arena, which in a single day sold all of its 67,000 ticket allocation for the scheduled four-night run. An extra fifth show signalled a residency, and sold out within a matter of hours.

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Celebrating Jim “Dandy” Mangrum on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Black Oak Arkansas’ Jim “Dandy” Mangrum is the Ryne Duren of rock. Duren was the journeyman pitcher who could throw the ball like 167 mph. His only problem? He was legally blind. Not even Coke-bottle-thick glasses helped. From 1954-65 batters suffered nervous breakdowns at his appearance, because as famed Yankee manager Casey Stengel noted, “If he hit you in the head you might be in the past tense.” It didn’t improve batters’ nerves that Duren’s first pitch generally zoomed 20 feet over the catcher’s head. You never knew if Duren was going to hit the strike zone, the third base coach, or some poor kid in the bleacher seats.

Jim Dandy’s voice, same deal. I’d call it a wild pitch, but Mangrum has no pitch, and no control of his amazing instrument whatsoever. He might hit a note, or he might hit some stoned head in the 43rd row. But that’s what I like about Black Oak Arkansas; it managed to become one of the premier live acts of the seventies with a tone-deaf singer with mighty pipes, while playing a lascivious acid-fried hillbilly boogie you have to hear to believe.

Unlike its Southern Rock brethren, BOA was a band of bona fide freaks, LSD-soaked long-hair rednecks who lived off the land commune style (to avoid a felony warrant, basically) in the hills of rural north-central Arkansas. Black Oak played a whoop-ass psycho-boogie that might include Mangrum soloing on the washboard and drummer Tommy Aldridge playing the drums with his hands on such cosmic cornpone as “Mutants of the Monster” or “Lord Have Mercy on My Soul,” with its monologue by Jim “Aldous Huxley in bib overalls” Dandy about the Halls of Karma and how we can all be as one if we only do enough bong hits, like the one the boys do at the beginning of unreleased 1972 studio cut “UP, UP, UP.”

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Some interviews you prepare for. You build the questions, you do the research, you know exactly where you want the conversation to go. And then the person on the other end of the line says something that stops you cold—something that has nothing to do with the prepared question in front of you and everything to do with why you got into this work in the first place. That’s what a thirty-minute phone call with Sammy Hagar on a Wednesday morning will do to you.

I had just come off reviewing his Best of All Worlds Tour residency at Dolby Live at Park MGM in Las Vegas—a show that ran 145 minutes, covered 17 songs, and left me genuinely undone in the best way a rock and roll show can. I had left my camera at home that night and experienced it purely as a fan. By the time “Eagles Fly” came around, I wasn’t holding it together. By the time the house lights came up, I knew I needed to talk to this man.

Here at The Vinyl District, we write about music because we believe it matters—not as background noise, not as content, but as the thing that reaches into places language alone cannot touch. Sammy Hagar has spent sixty years proving that point, and this tour, with this band—Michael Anthony, Joe Satriani, Kenny Aronoff, and Greg Phillinganes—may be the finest chapter of the whole remarkable story.

What follows is a conversation about beginnings and legacies, about what it means to stand on a stage at seventy-eight and still feel something new, about vinyl and the records that shaped a life, and about a homeless man in Las Vegas who recognized the Red Rocker at midnight and quoted things he said onstage thirty-two years ago. It’s about a song called “Eagles Fly” that his mother asked him to sing at her funeral, and that mine would have loved just the same. It’s a conversation I will carry for a long time. I think you will too.

Take me all the way back to the very first time you stepped onto a stage. Not a rehearsal, not a garage—an actual stage in front of actual people. What did that feel like, and did any part of you in that moment know this was going to be your life?

I remember a few different early moments, but the one that really sticks was playing a party for five dollars at a little union hall for a car club called the Swampers in Fontana, California. My brother’s friend—an older guy, really hip, really into cool music—taught me how to play a couple of songs on rhythm guitar. We had one amplifier, two guitars, and a microphone, all running through the same amp. I was probably fifteen.

We played “Gloria” and some surf songs, and I just loved it. I got dressed up, I felt like a performer—and the second I stepped on that stage, it became official. There was an adrenaline rush like I had never felt in my life. I thought I wanted to do it long before I even knew how to play guitar, but I didn’t feel it until that moment. From then on, I knew this is what I’m going to do, by hook or by crook.

Every musician has a shortlist of artists who fundamentally rewired how they heard music—the records and performers that made them think, “I want to do that.” Who were yours, and is there one that stands above all the others?

Honestly, it was more about the people around me than any particular rock star. I was in my teens, and I had three or four friends who genuinely believed in me. We’d get together, listen to music, and I’d tell them I was going to be famous someday. I dressed the part—psychedelic clothes, the right hairdo, the language—and they’d introduce me to people at parties saying, “This guy is going to be a big star.”

They really believed it and they had me convinced too. Having that circle of people around you who see what you’re going to become before you’ve become it—that’s the thing that drove me. I could already play a few songs from that guy who taught me when I was fourteen, and I could sing them. I just hadn’t started a band yet. But those friends, that belief—that’s what lit the fire.

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I was going to open this review of West Texas hard rock band Bloodrock by saying something withering, like they weren’t even fit to open for Grand Funk Railroad. Then I discovered Bloodrock did indeed open for Grand Funk Railroad in 1970.

Although the more I think about it, the more I think opening for Grand Funk Railroad makes Bloodrock even worse than I thought.

1970’s Bloodrock 2 was the band’s only taste of success, thanks in large part to “D.O.A.,” a plane crash song inspired by guitarist Lee Pickens’ brush with an actual plane crash. “When I was 17, I wanted to be an airline pilot,” said Pickens. “I had just gotten out of this airplane with a friend of mine, at this little airport, and I watched him take off. He went about 200 feet in the air, rolled and crashed.”

I’m assuming Pickens saw this and decided that remaining earthbound as a rock and roll guitarist was a safer career path.

I’ll get to “D.O.A.” later—the first thing I want to say is that Bloodrock, who I really wanted to like because I’m the world’s foremost expert on and biggest fan of plane crash songs, are an unfortunately mediocre proposition. Bloodrock 2 has its moments, but there’s no ignoring its host of flaws, the most impossible to ignore being that it has too many weak songs, and the songs that have a modicum of punch are saddled with lyrics so funny bad they’re worth quoting at length.

In short, Bloodrock 2 is a plane crash of an album, and the amazing thing is that it not only charted but stayed on the charts for several months.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Los Angeles power pop/punks Flyboys and Frontier Records, Sun Valley’s premiere punk rock label since 1980, announced today the release of the definitive collection, The Complete Flyboys 1978-1980 on April 10, 2026.

The 14-track, digitally remastered album contains the band’s first, self-titled EP—Frontier Records’ first release in March 1980—now expanded to include seven tracks making their LP and CD debut: Both songs from Flyboys’ second 7” single (“Square City”/”Crayon World”) plus five previously unreleased demos from 1979. The album will be released on limited-edition white vinyl, compact disc, and digital streaming and is now available for pre-order from indie distributor, Independent Label Distribution.

Pasadena’s Flyboys were a power pop/punk band that began in 1977 with singer/songwriter John Curry and Jim “Trash” Decker from The Crowd (and tangentially, Jay from The Simpletones, who would later sign to Posh Boy). Flyboys gigged all over the Southland, paying their dues opening for every national and local punk band from Huntington Beach to Hollywood. They were anything but typical punks with their day-glo clothes, Cuban heels, and maddeningly catchy songs. Infectious hooks and John Curry’s bleached-blonde pompadour were the band’s trademarks.

Lisa Fancher interviewed Flyboys when she was a rock scribe at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. The band’s lack of traction in the LA scene gave her the notion to finance an EP with the band and release it herself. The recording began in 1979 at Leon Russell’s Paradise Studios in North Hollywood, California (where Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano was the receptionist) with Jim Mankey (from the original Sparks) as the engineer and Dickies’ manager Scott Goddard as producer.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | With undeniable cultural gravity, the team of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan join luminaries such as Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Randy Newman, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Leonard Cohen, Lee Hazlewood, Brian Wilson and Laura Nyro in Ace Records’ long-running series of multi-artist compilations celebrating the great American songwriters of the modern era. Hundreds of artists from all walks of music have recorded songs from Waits and Brennan’s matchless catalogue, 19 of the finest of which comprise this hand-picked selection, including many chosen by the songwriters themselves.

Few artists have remapped the terrain of popular music, and culture at large, like Tom Waits. Over the course of five decades, he has forged a singular aesthetic that defies genre and turns the marginal into myth. His work is neither fully inside nor outside the mainstream tradition but moves restlessly between them, drawing from vaudeville, blues, jazz, folk, theatre—and just about anything else that catches his ear—to craft something wholly his own. His influence reverberates not just through the underground and avant-garde, but across theatre, film, literature, and visual art.

With his long-time creative partner and wife Kathleen Brennan, he has dismantled and reassembled the idea of song itself, crafting works that exist as both raw expression and high art. This collection honors not only the extraordinary versatility of Waits and Brennan’s songwriting, but the importance of an artist who continues to haunt and inspire from the edges inward.

Ace’s selection is sequenced chronologically by song, opening with Bruce Springsteen’s live recording of “Jersey Girl,” Waits’ ode to Brennan from 1980’s Heartattack And Vine, and closing with folk matriarch Joan Baez’s version of Waits and Brennan’s anti-war “Day After Tomorrow” from Waits’ more recent Real Gone.

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Remembering Dash Crofts. —Ed.

Seals & Crofts have moved into our house! It’s true! And here’s how it happened. Yesterday we got a knock on our door. I had no intention of opening it because most likely it was our crazy neighbor from across the street who’s been accusing our garden gnome of shitting on his lawn. Then I caught a whiff of jasmine and said to myself, “No way is it the legendary soft rock duo whose gossamer thin sound has enriched the lives of so many.”

But it was! Seals & Crofts in the flesh! And they were wondering if they could move in with us for a couple of days because times were tough and they were tired of living in a lean-to by the railroad tracks running past the lake of toxic sludge near the abandoned nuclear reactor.

And of course I said YES! Who wouldn’t? And they couldn’t express how grateful they were because everyone else had slammed their doors in their faces, including our neighbor from across the street who accused them of shitting on his lawn.

“How could anyone think that?” asked a perplexed Jim Seals. “In the bushes by the railroad tracks, sure. But that’s out of sheer necessity.”

“Where’s your stuff,” I asked. All they had with them were their acoustic guitars.

“We had to hock everything,” said Dash Crofts, “including our gold record for ‘Summer Breeze.’ I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the railroad hobo economy is in the tank.”

“Would you like to take a shower?” asked my wife. “You’re caked with coal dust and radioactive slime. And I’m catching the distinct aroma of urine.”

“That would be me,” said Seals. “And that shower would be much appreciated.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | On May 8, 2026, Camera Obscura will celebrate the 25th anniversary of their debut album, Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, with a vinyl reissue via Merge Records.

Out-of-print on the format since its initial UK release on Andmoresound in 2001, the 25th anniversary edition is the most definitive version of Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi ever pressed to vinyl, featuring both “Eighties Fan” B-sides—“Shine Like a New Pin” and “Let’s Go Bowling”—which were later added to expanded CD reissues of the album.

In addition to the black LP available from Merge Records, a limited edition, green and gold swirl vinyl edition, which includes a band-signed facsimile of the flyer advertising the release of “Eighties Fan,” is available exclusively from Glasgow’s Monorail Music.

“We’ve been working towards a re-release of this album for some time now,” says Tracyanne Campbell, “so we’re really delighted that it’s happening and pleased that folk can finally have their own vinyl copy.”

Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi first reached Stateside in 2004, after the success of Camera Obscura’s 2003 Merge debut Underachievers Please Try Harder. New fans who weren’t keyed in to the UK import market or to what John Peel was spinning on his BBC Radio programs would be forgiven for mistaking Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi as a follow-up to their breakthrough album as opposed to their first.

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