VIA PRESS RELEASE | MPL and UMe commemorate the 50th anniversary of Wings’ fourth studio album Venus and Mars half speed master edition out 21 March, 2025. Pre-order here.

One of the world’s most beloved rock outfits, Wings came to define the era of 1970s arena rock, while dominating the airwaves with no fewer than 14 US Top 10 hits and 12 Top 10 hits in the UK. Following their 1973 masterpiece Band on the Run, Venus and Mars would represent another peak of Wings’ creative and commercial heyday.

The band’s fourth studio album, it was released on 27 May 1975 ahead of the legendary Wings Over the World tour. Preceded by the US Number One single “Listen To What The Man Said” and featuring “Letting Go,” a fan favourite in Paul’s live set to this day, Venus and Mars hit Number One in the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic and went on to sell over 4 million copies worldwide.

This special 50th anniversary vinyl edition was cut at half speed using a high-resolution transfer of the original master tapes from 1975 by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios. The album is presented as a meticulous reproduction of the original UK pressing, with recreations of the original “Venus and Mars are alright tonight” circular sticker and “comparative sizes of sun and planets” bookmark sticker, and comes with two posters with photography by Aubrey Powell and Sylvia de Swaan.

The iconic album artwork by Hipgnosis has been meticulously recreated and presented in a gatefold sleeve. Venus and Mars will also be available in Dolby Atmos for the first time, newly mixed by Giles Martin and Steve Orchard.

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On January 31, Vampisoul Records is reissuing Las últimas composiciones de Violeta Parra from the celebrated Chilean vocalist, stringed instrument specialist, composer, folklorist, and ethnomusicologist Violeta Parra. Released in 1966 by the RCA Victor label, it was the final album she recorded prior to her suicide in February of the following year, a tragic loss that brings the 13 songs, already immaculately executed, additional significance that has endured right up to the present. Sourced from the master tapes and released with the original artwork, this is the album as listeners heard it in 1966.

It’s important to explain that Vampisoul is reissuing Las últimas composiciones de Violeta Parra as it was first released rather than the updated version from 1974 that added string arrangements by Nino Garcia. That subsequent edition is far from a travesty, the additional instrumentation thoughtfully conceived if superfluous. But the lack of necessity becomes moot as it’s likely some listeners who were introduced to the songs through the 1974 release, which was reportedly the better-known of the two versions for decades, prefer the augmentation to the original.

But everyone should have the opportunity to hear the music as it was recorded in 1966, and for reasons that extend beyond understanding and appreciation of Parra’s clear intentions for the album. Unadorned by posthumous pop gestures, Las últimas composiciones de Violeta Parra is no ordinary recording. It’s considered one of the greatest Chilean albums of all time, ranked as the very best by Rolling Stone magazine, in fact.

By extension, Las últimas composiciones is considered one of the greatest Latin albums ever recorded, as just last year it secured the number two spot on the list Los 600 de Latinoamérica, a ranking of 600 releases dating from 1920–2022 from across the Latin musical spectrum. For context, Parra’s album was bested by only Siembra by Willie Colon and Ruben Blades.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Motörhead, the multi-generational soundtrack and lifestyle for millions worldwide, will celebrate their 50th year in 2025, and in honor of this historic milestone, a series of releases and events will take place throughout the year.

Having played live to millions of fans, and sold over 25 million albums in their career, the Grammy-Award winning Motörhead are as popular as ever as their golden jubilee commences. In 2024, the band enjoyed a brand new UK top 10 single in October with “Lawman,” racked up over 320 million streams globally, numbered 20 million listeners on Spotify, and garnered over 112 million views on YouTube. And starting with a very special release to be announced in May, the year 2025 will be a celebration that confirms Motörhead is For Life and Lemmy is Forever.

“It’s incredible to know that our music, and all it stands for, continues to resonate with so many people,” says guitarist Phil Campbell, “of course we’re enormously grateful to still be appreciated like we are, and truthfully, the music remains as vital and important as ever because there’s a unique energy and honesty to it that we will all always need.”

“It’s a remarkable story, the connection we have with our fans can only be described as family and it’s so exciting to see the family still growing,” says Mikkey Dee, “But it also makes sense, because people know who we are and what the music is about. Motörhead has always stood for doing it OUR way, it’s timeless, and continues to inspire people to take that path.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Evergreen Review was a touchstone of alternative publishing during the sixties and seventies, a veritable bible of progressive politics, culture, art, cartoons and photography. It was a launchpad for opinion, commentary, journalism and literature and the old and new left. Pat Thomas has assembled an invaluable oral history and collection of the best of Evergreen from that critical era when revolutionary writers and artists challenged the status quo.” —Steven Heller/art director of Evergreen Review (circa 1972)

For the first time ever since their original print date, this book presents full color reproductions of all front covers of all 100 issues of the Evergreen Review from 1957 to 1973, plus hundreds of pages from many of the issues reprinted exactly as they originally appeared—all illustrations, photography, even the ads for other books, albums, letters to the editor, subscription offers, etc.—left intact!

Historian Pat Thomas interviewed 1960s era Evergreen staffers to get the inside scoop on the day-to-day operation of the magazine, plus gathered new essays looking back on this golden era by John Oakes, Loren Glass, Kasia Boddy, Dale Peck, Ethan Persoff, Ken Jordan, and Stanley Gontarski. A book tour will be confirmed shortly in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston and London with additional dates added & announced shortly. Advance PDF review copies available by request.

Pat Thomas—the PEN award-winning author of Material Wealth: The Personal Archives of Allen Ginsberg, Listen, Whitey! The sights & sounds of Black Power 1965–1975, and Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary, now focuses on the Evergreen Review—the most influential literary/political/avant-garde magazine of the 20th Century.

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Celebrating Brian Downey on his 74th 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.

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Can you adjudge the greatness of an artist by their sheer accretion of natty nicknames? If so, New Orleans rhythm and blues pianist and singer James Booker was a God. He garnered a slew of colorful sobriquets over the course of his short life—the Bayou Maharajah, the Piano Pope, the Ivory Emperor, the Piano Prince of New Orleans. But the most telling is the one he bestowed upon himself—the Bronze (or sometimes Black) Liberace.

The Bayou Maharajah may be my favorite—it lets you know you’re in the realm of the swamp exotic. But the Bronze Liberace is the most accurate—it lets you know you’ve moved into the realm of the fabulous. And not simply because Booker was gay, had a flamboyant streak and knew his way around the classical music canon. New Orleans has spawned a legion of legendary rhythm and blues pianists, but only one of them was a classically trained child prodigy who was performing all of J.S. Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias professionally by age 12.

His classical skills would inform his music thereafter—his music was a one-of-a-kind stew of R&B, jazz, and classical. And he authentically loved Liberace and all the gaudy trappings; asked to record an album once, he would say sure, but I want a candelabrum on the piano. And that’s non-negotiable.

Classical music couldn’t contain Booker. He walked away from Chopin in favor of Jelly Roll Morton and by age 14 he’d released his first R&B single “Doin’ the Hambone.” Come 1960–by which time he’d toured and/or recorded with just about everybody who was anybody—he scored his only hit with the organ instrumental “Gonzo,” a fave of Hunter S. Thompson.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Talk Talk’s Very Best Of is to be reissued as a newly re-ordered and now career-spanning compilation. Changes to the original 1997 release puts Talk Talk’s greatest hits in chronological order and with a new inclusion from the band’s final album, Laughing Stock. The reissue will be available on black gatefold 2LP and CD on 14th March.

Talk Talk formed in 1981 by Mark Hollis, Lee Harris, and Paul Webb. Starting as a synth-pop group, their first two albums The Party’s Over and It’s My Life reached the top 40 in the UK charts and produced global hits “Talk Talk,” “Today,” “It’s My Life,” and “Such a Shame.” In 1986, they released The Colour of Spring which was followed by Spirit of Eden, the album that shifted their sound towards experimental post-rock. In 1991, Talk Talk released their last album Laughing Stock.

The band’s long-lasting legacy has manifested in many ways. Credited with inventing post-rock, cited as influences to an array of artists such as Kate Bush, Tears for Fears, and Radiohead with others covering a host of Talk Talk repertoire. Namely No Doubt’s hit cover of “It’s My Life.”

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Morrison Hotel Gallery will present an exclusive fine art photography exhibit of the life, and many lives of Bob Dylan as shot by 17 culture-defining photographers. This will be a bi-coastal exhibit, opening Thursday, January 16th at both gallery locations. Prints will be available for purchase at both galleries, and online here.

Look Back: The Best of Bob Dylan offers forth a rare exploration of Morrison Hotel Gallery’s exclusive and extensive fine art photography collection. It is a comprehensive retrospective that chronicles Dylan’s seismic career to date, capturing moments onstage, backstage, and off-stage in portraiture and live/ reportage-style works.

The exclusive exhibit features rare and never-before-seen, including artist-printed and remastered pieces by Daniel Kramer with additional work by Jerry Schatzberg, Ken Regan, Don Hunstein, Danny Clinch, Barry Feinstein, Rowland Scherman, Elliott Landy, Lynn Goldsmith, Lisa Law, DA Pennebaker, Jay Blakesberg, Henry Diltz, Michael Zagaris, Joel Bernstein, David Gahr, and Peter Simon.

Kramer, who passed away April 29th, 2024, considered himself a “historian with a camera.” His images here capture Dylan’s transformation from the darling of the folk scene to a full-blown rock star, wielding an electric guitar and fronting a full band. This controversial evolution granted Dylan a career reset that kept him vital for many decades to come.

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Remembering Klaus Nomi, born on this day in 1944. —Ed.

Released in 1982 and featuring New Wave-era rock infused with legit elements of opera and an undisguised gay sensibility, the debut LP from German-born NYC-based singer Klaus Nomi was readymade for cult status. The record very much belonged to the fringe of its time but without being ahead of it; the man who made it endures today not as an oft-pilfered stylistic touchstone but rather as a beacon for individualistic expression. That’s cool, as is his penchant for adapting ’60s pop tunes. 

I was all of eight years old when Klaus Nomi, along with his friend Joey Arias, vocally backed-up and added performance zeal to David Bowie’s appearance on the December 15, 1979 episode of Saturday Night Live. Unsurprisingly, I missed it when aired, but have caught up with “TVC 15” and “The Man Who Sold the World” archived on the internet. Those songs blend nicely with the footage that did serve as my introduction to Nomi’s work, his entry in the 1982 various artist concert film Urgh! A Music War.

It was sometime in ’87 that I and a few friends popped the home video edition into the VCR and had a fine evening at the crossroads of punk, new wave, post-punk, and reggae. And while there’s no denying an immediate reaction of incredulousness to Nomi’s NYC club performance of “Total Eclipse,” by song’s end we’d all adjusted pretty well.

I bring up this anecdote to counteract the still occasionally extant viewpoint of Nomi as a sheer curiosity. Sure, after viewing a performance by the guy it’s unlikely he’ll be forgotten. For example, during that version of “TVC 15” on SNL he walks around the stage with an imitation pink poodle (with a TV monitor in its mouth), and yet he somehow doesn’t steal the show from Bowie. But his work, if eccentric by pop marketplace standards, holds substantial value, which means that Klaus Nomi is an album to own for reasons far beyond “Hey, get a load of this” territory.

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PHOTO: STEPHEN ZEIGLER | Julia Gorton started her career as the photographer, creative director, and publisher of the No Wave fanzine Beat It!, which offered an insider’s view of the downtown New York music scene, 1976–1980.

She recently published a compilation of issues and her book, Nowhere New York offers a visceral view of the scene through her photographs, writing, and guest essays.

She was an integral member of this era and photographed the gritty and electric energy of James Chance, The Dead Boys, Devo, and Lydia Lunch plus many more all within the context of the scene as a whole.

Julia and I sat down recently and discussed when she first picked up a camera, her evolution as an artist and member of alt culture, along with her time on the downtown music scene of New York in the prime punk and No Wave era. We also discuss current perspectives on her continuing work.

Dylan Hundley is an artist and performer. She is the co-creator and lead singer of Lulu Lewis and creator of all things at Darling Black. She co-curates and hosts Salon Lulu which is a New York based multidisciplinary performance series. She is also a cast member of the iconic New York film Metropolitan.