VIA PRESS RELEASE | England’s On-U Sound label is announcing the new release of re-issues of early ’90s Avant-dub classics by one of their flagship artists, the much-missed Dub Syndicate on February 28, 2025 on separate 12″ LP vinyl, CD box, digital download, and streaming under the name Out Here On The Perimeter. Part of the series is a brand new set of “versions” utilizing vintage rhythms in the ON-U archives. 

A follow-up to the Ambience In Dub boxset that anthologised the early Dub Syndicate albums, Out Here On The Perimeter 1989–1996 picks up the story in the late 1980s with Style Scott coming to the forefront of the project as bandleader and co-producer, and the group emerging as a live entity. This was also the period of their greatest popularity, with a much-loved series of albums that combined the best of Jamaican musicianship with the wild studio experimentation of UK production maverick Adrian Sherwood, resulting in music that appealed to ravers and dreads alike.

Four albums are being repressed on vinyl, with faithful reproductions of the beautiful original sleeve artwork, and new inner sleeves containing detailed liner notes and archival photos. Sherwood has also concocted a special bonus album, of brand new version excursions on rhythms from the period. A CD boxset anthologises all five albums.

Dub Syndicate was initially one of the many studio-based projects masterminded by Adrian Sherwood in the early days of his genre-blurring independent label On-U Sound. Built around deep and heavy reggae rhythms, and marshalling the talents of a revolving cast of Jamaican and British musicians. It evolved over time to become the main musical vehicle of Lincoln Valentine Scott aka Style Scott (also notable for his work with the Roots Radics and Creation Rebel), mirroring the trajectory of Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah of labelmates African Head Charge.

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Celebrating Dennis Dunaway on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Alice Cooper had the music world’s head in a guillotine in the year of our dark lord 1973; his cartoonishly ghoulish song matter and macabre on-stage shock rock shtick were thrilling to outrage-hungry teengenerates like my older brother, who went to a show on Alice’s Billion Dollar Babies tour in a suit covered with a billion dollars’ worth of stapled-on Monopoly money.

While your more sophisticated tastemakers were deriding poor Alice as so much P.T. Barnum hokum–a low-brow sensationalist who lacked the talent, subtlety and immediacy of such glam era creatures as David and Lou and Iggy–Alice was winning the big youth vote (“Elected” indeed!) and laughing all the way to the bank.

Who cares if his oh so chic contemporaries dismissed him with a smug wave of the hand? Sneered an offended David Bowie: “I think he’s trying to be outrageous. You can see him, poor dear, with his red eyes sticking out and his temples straining… I find him very demeaning.” Which didn’t stop Lou Reed, for one, from stooping to his own brand of low-rent on-stage theatrics; if shaving Iron Crosses onto your skull and mimicking shooting up on stage isn’t “straining” to be outrageous, what is?

Fact is Billion Dollar Babies isn’t really that different from Diamond Dogs or Berlin (whose producer, Bob Ezrin, also produced this baby). It’s not a concept album, per se, but it has the feel of one–on it Alice grapples with having money tossed at him, threatens to parlay the success of “School’s Out” into an apocalyptic run for higher office which he’s sure to win in a “generation landslide” cuz he’s got the toxic kiddie vote wrapped up, and in general flexes his skinny biceps while singing “God, I feel so strong, I am so strong.”

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Celebrating Jakob Dylan, born on this day in 1969. —Ed.

On the subject of The Wallflowers: I resisted Bob Dylan’s fortunate son and his band for a long, long time. I distrusted Jakob Dylan, scion of privilege and owner of one set of amazing cheekbones, the way I do all scions of privilege, and I continued to do so until the night I saw him live in Woodstock, where he was joined for a song or two by the great Garth Hudson, formerly of the Band, on accordion. And wham, I was sold.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan boy of Jakob Dylan or the Wallflowers, but they’ve released some great pop songs over the years, most of them (in my humble opinion) on 1996’s sophomore release, the punningly titled Bringing Down the Horse. Produced by T-Bone Burnett, the album went quadruple platinum—and this despite the defection of lead guitarist Tobi Miller at the beginning of the sessions, which led Dylan to bring in a bevy of guitarists to fill in, including Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers—and spawned four hits, two of which I happen to love heart and soul.

I call the LP an example of Pop Americana, and Dylan himself has described how, despite the LP’s roots lite feel, he “wasn’t interested in making a throwback album from the ’60s or ’70s.” And this is obvious from opening cut, radio smash “One Headlight,” on. As for the LP’s mood, Dylan has said, “Every song, fortunately or unfortunately is about feeling massively defeated, because that’s what I was living.” Hey, join the club.

Say what you will about Dylan, and the boost he got from being the offspring of the most famous folk-rocker of the 20th Century, he has a natural facility for writing catchy melodies, and if one compares his work to that of his old man during the same period, Bob’s carpet rat beats him hands down. Sure, you occasionally detect echoes of his dad; the title “Three Marlenas” sounds like a tune off Blonde on Blonde, and the song boasts the same circus organ sound that helped make “Like a Rolling Stone” so famous.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Grateful Dead archivist Dick Latvala considered this show to be the finest outing on the entire Spring 1977 tour, and, as any Dead Head knows, that is high praise indeed!

At the time this was released on CD, the Dead weren’t sure a market existed (ha!) for three and four-CD packages, so this four-LP set leaves off eight songs from the show, but consider what songs are here: a phenomenal “Help on the Way”/ “Slipknot!” / “Franklin’s Tower” comes after one of the definitive renditions of “Sugaree” and a terrific “The Music Never Stopped,” with the late, great Phil Lesh’s slithering bass leading the way in recording engineer’s Betty Cantor-Jackson’s mix.

But sides E, F, and G offer one of those sublime (and, in this case, never to be repeated) sequences of songs that only the Dead could pull off in concert; after the rarely-performed “Sunrise,” a medley of “Estimated Prophet” / “Eyes of the World” / “Wharf Rat”/ “Terrapin Station” (a truncated version two months before its official release)/ “Morning Dew” brings the show home, as Jerry Garcia’s soloing on “Morning Dew” reaches heights seldom attained even by him.

This was a knockout release on its first very limited vinyl run (check out those resale prices), and we’ve improved on it with a fresh mastering job by Jeffrey Norman (in his own words, “the sound is better than the original heard on the Brookvale release”), and lacquer cutting by Clint Holley and Dave Polster at Well Made Music. Pressed on 180-gram black vinyl at the plant we’ve been using to great acclaim for all of our Grateful Dead releases, Gotta Groove Records, and limited to 2,000 hand-numbered copies.

Celebrating Joe “King” Carrasco on his 71st birthday. —Ed.

Casual research into the name Joe “King” Carrasco reveals the synopsis of a manic Tex-Mex bandleader better suited for the club stage than to the purposes of recording LPs. Mention his name to someone who’s seen him in action and you’ll likely hear an enthused recollection of a wild and happy night. Listen to Mil Gracias a Todos Nuestros Amigos, the 1980 Stiff Records debut of Carrasco and the Crowns, and the ear will be greeted by 12 songs from a group that from under the wide umbrella of the New Wave was briefly able to transfer their wild performance-based abandon into the grooves of long-playing vinyl.

There’s been a lot of debate over the years regarding the value of the late-‘70s musical surge known as New Wave. Setting aside the zealous haters that simply could not abide the movement’s departures from the Zeppelin/Eagles Arena Rock model, many detractors continue to associate the term with a weakening of the punk aesthetic set in motion by acts looking for wider success as encouraged by the interests of parties that were largely if not completely mercantile in character.

Naturally, some kernels of truth reside in this assessment, as the linguistic sleight of hand of Seymour Stein’s “Don’t Call it Punk” campaign easily attests. But naturally, it’s a far more complex situation than that. For example, new wave’s proponents often describe it as music made in direct response to ‘70s arena rock having reached a juncture of stylistic exhaustion, and for emphasis they point directly to the recycling of the buzzword applied to the cinematic uprising known as the Nouvelle Vague, which in the US, Great Britain and elsewhere was translated under the heading of the French New Wave.

That much needed and still influential development in film was surely a break with its home country’s Tradition of Quality, but it was also delivered by a small handful of auteurs, the most famous being Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol. Displeased with “a certain tendency in the French cinema” they surely all were, and they did certainly set themselves to the task of creating something fresh.

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Light and dark have been engaged in an eternal dance since the earliest of times. You’ve all seen the yin and yang which, if nothing else, illustrate that complicated symbiosis between good and evil: you can’t have the hero if you don’t have the villain. It’s just one of those conundrums of humanity. Writers, poets, filmmakers, artists of all ilk have explored this deeply, and will continue to do so as it’s a concept that’s hardwired into the human experience.

You can look at the balance of values through many different lenses. Anastasia Minster has decided to explore light and dark through the experience of love. Her latest album, Song of Songs peels back the layers of common experiences when it comes to that most confounding of human feelings: there’s no greater experience than being in love with someone who loves you back, but there’s possibly no worse feeling than unrequited love, or losing your kindred spirit.

Anastasia joins us on this episode to explain how she perceives love, but she also shares the details of this new album, recorded in Canada with the support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Song of Songs is a fusion of classical and jazz elements that satisfyingly dovetail with Anastasia’s artistic, scholastic, and psychological intellect. You might want to sit in the front of the class so you can keep up. Here, there’s an empty chair right next to me.

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.

“The greatest rock and roll band you have ever heard.” That was what jazz legend Miles Davis, impressed by the likes of Hendrix and Sly Stone not only for their innovation but for the ability to draw the kiddies to their shows, set out to put together at the dying end of the sixties.

And if any rebopper could do it, Miles “Prince of Darkeness” Davis could. Over the course of his decades-long career he’d set standards in bebop, more or less pioneered cool jazz, moved on to hard bop, and kept on moving, like a boxer inventing a new technique every round. He couldn’t sit still, had ants in his trumpet, and had one last great move up his sleeve—he was going to go rock, just like Dylan, and just like Dylan he was going to do it with arrogance and attitude. Never look back.

He’d already gone jazz fusion, but by the time he got around to recording 1971’s Jack Johnson, a sound track for a documentary about the great black boxer who refused to bow to the racism of white America, he was dead-set on incorporating hard rock and funk into his fusion. It was a move that would alienate plenty in the jazz community in the process.

Jack Johnson wasn’t the most controversial album of Davis’ career—those would come later. But some jazz traditionalists howled. Leonard Feather (a long-time music critic of very pale complexion) was appalled by “the thumping, clinking, whomping battering ram that passes for a rhythm section” on Jack Johnson. Noted trumpeter (and retro-jazz traditionalist) Wynton Marsalis dismissed Davis as “a genius who decided to go into rock, and was on the bandstand looking like, basically, a buffoon.” As for the noted critic Stanley Crouch, who is no slouch, it was his expert opinion that everything Miles had recorded since his first foray into jazz fusion, 1969’s landmark In a Silent Way, made him “the most brilliant sellout in the history of jazz.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | On January 24, 2025, Merge Records will reissue two 1994 releases by The Clean: their second studio album Modern Rock, and the “Late Last Night” 7-inch. These vinyl releases represent the first time either title has been in print on the format since its initial release, and the first time Modern Rock has ever been available on LP in North America.

Modern Rock crackles with spontaneous energy, as if The Clean—namely, Hamish Kilgour, David Kilgour, and Robert Scott—couldn’t help but make music together whenever they were in the same room. Following their 1989 reunion tour and the 1990 release of Vehicle, those opportunities were rare, with Hamish in New York City fronting The Mad Scene, David releasing his first solo album, and Robert recording albums with The Bats at a breakneck pace. Then, for nine days in April 1994, the stars aligned over Dunedin and Modern Rock bloomed into life.

It’s an album of easy charm by a band so attuned to guitar pop that they make the creation of their sonic universe seem easy, as if what you’re being let in on is a long-running conversation between three masters at a point where all three are riffing off of each other, line by line and hook by hook. Significantly, after making Modern Rock, The Clean decided to keep the project going on a part-time basis. More than just a reminder to listeners of the reverence fans and musicians had for The Clean, each new record was a welcome surprise that established them as one of the great active bands of the 1990s and 2000s, their second act on par with the many, many groups their first act inspired.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Limited 48 page souvenir photobook by rock n’ rollin’ author/ artist/ photographer/ journalist/ bon vivant John Mendelssohn, who was tapped to meet up with an unknown longhair from London named David Bowie on his first trip to the US on a press junket for the just-released Mercury album The Man Who Sold The World.

John met up with DB in San Fransisco with his camera in tow, and started snappin and yappin. This book includes John’s original story from Rolling Stone, his revelations and jubilations on (and of) the topic of DB, plus we have Paul Gorman writing brilliantly about the origin and influence of the man-dress, as created by bespoke tailor Mr. Fish of London… and we have the photos, one roll of film that captured both Mr. Fish man-dresses—the luxe, flowing, floral that appeared on the UK cover of The Man Who Sold The World and the sublime blue-gray raw silk number that graced a special edition collection, presented in a newspaperly dot screen reminiscent of the Rolling Stone print methods of the day.

Graphic designer Tommy Bishop has outdone himself in creating this first edition for what we hope will become a series of small books that make all aspects important—subject, author, images, and design. Go Tommy! Also, with this photobook comes a wee fragrance called simply, Peculiar. It is a refined scent, reminiscent of old London, with a hint of lavender, suitable for all persuasions. Concocted from organic Canadian floral waters and contained in a lovely souvenir bottle. The fragrance is a limited free holiday bonus with the book supplies last.

Remembering JJ Cale, born on this day in 1938. —Ed.

Folks take things pretty slow down in Tulsa; they ain’t in no particular hurry to get anywhere, and see no good reason to talk real fast like your Northern city slickers either. Ain’t nothin’ can’t be put off ‘til tomorrow, and that includes this here record review, which I intend to write at a slow shuffle. The late JJ Cale, who epitomized the laid-back Tulsa sound better than anybody–without even trying, natch, because trying is hard work and not how they do things down in Oklahoma–probably would have wanted it that way.

Cale inspired the likes of Eric Clapton and Neil Young, wrote a handful of songs like “Call Me the Breeze” and “Cocaine” that have entered the popular music lexicon, and in general left a faint but indelible mark on the American sound with his mellow blend of blues, country, rockabilly, and jazz. Call his music what you will (Americana, swamp rock, country rock, Red Dirt–the list goes on), the important thing to remember is that Cale was relaxed. Relaxed as dirt, relaxed as that raccoon sauntering at his leisure from your overturned trash can (keep hollering, he doesn’t care), relaxed as the oldest bluesman to ever pick out a song on yonder shotgun shack porch. Hurry just wasn’t in his vocabulary; take a potshot at him, and he’d have probably flinched slow.

In 1972 Cale, then in his thirties, finally got around to recording his first album, Naturally. Eric Clapton had just made a hit out of Cale’s “After Midnight,” and intrigued by the idea that he might be able to make some actual pocket change by being his laid-back self Cale found some time in his anything-but-hectic schedule to record 12 songs before, I don’t know, taking a long nap. Nobody would call the results electrifying, but in their own small way they changed the course of history.

I’ll say one thing for JJ–he simply refuses to be hurried. Hell, he even sings slow on the fast ones, and there aren’t that many fast ones. He’s content to shuffle along like an old dog to his supper, which isn’t going anywhere anyway. And this is both Cale’s genius and his downfall. If you’re a fan of laid back you probably love him. If you’re not a fan, like me, you find yourself wishing he’d chug a couple of cans of Red Bull and top them off with some NoDoz. Robert Christgau wrote of Naturally, “Push a little, fellas, it’ll feel so good.” I can’t help but agree with the guy.

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