What happened to that 1960s optimism, the peace, the love, and the understanding? Unfortunately, the sentiment hasn’t endured socially in the mainstream dialogue over the last few decades. But—as Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello are aware—there’s nothing funny about those ideas. It may not be fashionable, but a focus on spreading peace and love and trying to understand those who are different from you are incredibly important tasks; ones that must be seriously explored if we hope to keep this world spinning for a few thousand more years.

It was Jesse Colin Young’s voice in the summer of 1967 that implored everyone to “Get Together” in a song that wasn’t just a big hit of the psychedelic ’60s, it was a clarion call that epitomized the best ideals of that summer of love. While Young didn’t write the song, it was his version with the Youngbloods that became the touchstone of the concept, transferring a feeling that so many strongly felt into a song. The message has endured as well—albeit through different generational lenses—Nirvana even lifted the introductory lyrics to use in a song from their Nevermind album in 1992.

After the breakup of the Youngbloods in 1972, Jesse continued a solo career and 2023 saw the 50th anniversary and remastered reissue of Young’s most important solo work, Song For Juli. The album was recorded at a home studio that Young built upon a ridge in Inverness, California, about 30 miles north of San Francisco. It’s a dynamic group of songs that explore a wide range of genres and styles. Jesse joins me on this episode to discuss the reissue, but also walks us through many of the high points and pivotal moments of his long career.

Read More »

Uriah Heep played Hobbit rock. The English progressive rock band’s unholy fascination with swords and sorcery, dungeons and dragons, and castles and fair damsels was enough to make you suspect the guys in the band wore sky-blue capes emblazoned with golden stars around the house. And owned extensive codpiece collections.

Depending on your feelings about Merlin-friendly fantasy, their pair of 1972 releases Demons and Wizards and The Magician’s Birthday were either manna from Middle Earth or laugh riots. I fall into the latter camp—I was once coerced into seeing a Lords of the Rings flick at a multiplex theater and spent the totality of its inexcusably protracted running time wishing J.R.R. Tolkien was still amongst the living so I could punch him in the kisser.

But musically Uriah Heep were one of the most palatable of England’s progressive rock bands, precisely because they put the rock, which in their case ventured into the metal realm, first. They were lean and mean and cast a unique spell thanks to Ken Hensley’s hard-charging steed of an organ. Throw in guitarist with mad skills Mick Box and the 43-octave pipes of David Byron, who is admittedly an acquired taste because at any given moment he may screech like a bat out of hell or shriek like a guy who’s balls are being squeezed really hard, and what you had was totally sui generis.

Their 1970 debut was entitled …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble was very ‘eavy indeed. At their best they could melt stone. At their worst they were every bit as insufferably pompous and pretentious as any progrock unit of the time, with the possible exceptions of Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Rick Wakeman.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Independent record label Independent Project Records (IPR) announced today that 1983, the first-ever release from the Torn Boys, the until-now hermetically-sealed early 80’s post-punk quartet out of Stockton, California featuring Jeffrey Clark, Kelly Foley, Duncan Atkinson, and a 19 year-old Grant-Lee Phillips, is set to be released on April 12. 

The comprehensive archival ten-track set of rare, unreleased studio and live tracks documents the short but eventful life of Torn Boys, a group comprising future members of Shiva Burlesque, Gary Young’s Hospital, and Grant Lee Buffalo. It will be available on digital formats as well as compact disc and black, white and green vinyl with both formats including a bonus all-region DVD of previously unseen live recordings and newly made music videos.

Formed in 1982 by Jeffrey Clark (vocals, electric guitar) and Kelly Foley (vocals, acoustic guitar) and disbanded by late 1983, the Torn Boys lived out their one and a half summers fusing dreamscape lyricism with ultra-’80’s synth rhythms and Fripp-meets-Carl-Perkins electric guitar textures, leaving behind a scant recorded legacy before dissolving.

Local musician Duncan Atkinson started helping out as sound engineer before joining the band live on Pro One synthesizer and drum machine. In the Spring of ’83 nineteen-year-old Grant-Lee Phillips was recruited on lead guitar, his Chet-Atkins-plays-Scary-Monsters sound adding an indelible and unique ingredient to the band’s alchemy. “What Jeff (Clark) and Kelly (Foley) were doing, you just didn’t see that kind of thing happening in Stockton,” says Grant-Lee Phillips. “So we connected right away over a mutual obsession with the alluring fringes of music, art and film.”

Forty years after the fact, the Torn Boys recordings still fend off basic categorization, conjuring the darker corners of neo-psychedelic California, infusing New Wave-era sensibilities with the moodier angle of home-grown, art-punk-surrealism.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Latino announces a vinyl reissue of 1970’s La Gran Fuga (The Big Break), the Gold-certified sixth collaboration between the legendary duo of trombonist, composer, and musical director Willie Colón and famed singer Héctor Lavoe.

Set for release on April 12 and available for pre-order today, La Gran Fuga features such classics as “Barrunto,” “Pa’ Colombia,” and “Abuelita”—all newly remastered, featuring (AAA) lacquers cut from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and pressed on 180-gram vinyl. Rounding out the package is a classic tip-on jacket and, as an added bonus, an 11” x 22” insert featuring the album’s iconic “Wanted” poster. La Gran Fuga will also make its debut in 192/24 hi-res digital audio on April 12. In addition, a Salt ‘n’ Peppa deluxe color vinyl exclusive with an exciting bundle option that includes a limited-edition La Gran Fuga T-shirt featuring the iconic album cover art is available for pre-order at Fania.com.

One of Latin music’s most formidable duos, salsa pioneers Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe were teenagers when they began working together under Fania Records. Known as “El Cantante,” Lavoe (1946–1993) was one of the great interpreters of salsa music, revered for his bright vocals, seamless phrasing and witty, ad-libbed anecdotes. Colón (b. 1950), meanwhile, quickly became a key figure in the scene, who shaped the sound of salsa on and off stage as a trombonist, composer, producer and leader of his namesake orchestra. Together, Colón and Lavoe defined one of Latin music’s most exciting eras through 11 legendary albums, beginning with the 1967 salsa and boogaloo classic, El Malo.

Read More »

Formed in Chicago in the early 2000s, The Children’s Hour featured the vocal and multi-instrumental talents of Josephine Foster alongside the guitar and bass of Andy Bar. Gorgeously folky, they released one LP in 2003 and then recorded some tracks with the addition of David Pajo on drums, material that was long lost and recently thankfully found, mixed, mastered, and scheduled for release as Going Home. It’s available February 23 via the Sea Note label with distribution by Drag City.

Not to be confused with the mid-’80s New Zealand-based Flying Nun-affiliated outfit Children’s Hour, the outfit reviewed here, until recently, was mainly discussed as one entry in Foster’s prodigious body of work. Had Going Home been finished and released in a timely fashion, the group would surely be remembered differently, as Pajo’s involvement was a direct result of his double-duty drum backing for The Children’s Hour as they toured as openers for Zwan.

It was SOS JFK, released on CD by Minty Fresh in 2003 (and reissued on LP by Fire in 2016) that landed The Children’s Hour that plum gig. It was a terrific debut, placing the duo of Foster and Bar on the outskirts of the New Weird America, though it’s worth underscoring that there’s nothing especially freaky about SOS JFK’s folky orientation. Instead, the record establishes and sustains a high level of beauty.

Their moniker comes not from the 1934 Lillian Helman play The Children’s Hour or its 1961 William Wyler film adaptation, but the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem that was first published in 1860. The inspiration jibes well with the out of time quality that heightens the distinctiveness of Foster’s work. The characteristic of being spiritually aligned with earlier eras rather than the present truly flourishes in her later output but does have roots in SOS JFK.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | In an era obsessed with Family Values, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were well known for their struggles with addiction and parenthood. To reframe their notoriety, Kurt and Courtney consented to a rare photoshoot for Spin magazine with their newborn, Frances Bean. Only five images were originally published in Spin; the entirety of the photoshoot is seen in this book for the first time ever.

With an ineffable ability to connect with people through his music, Kurt Cobain was charismatic and full of pathos, something of a lost boy poet struggling against his personal demons while holding the world in thrall. And yet in the midst of his struggles with success, fame, fortune, drugs, and the wounds of a traumatic childhood, he managed in his brief adulthood to get married to Courtney Love—who of course had her own accomplishments as an electrifying and unrestrained lead singer and lyricist. The couple had already emerged as a cultural touchstone when their baby, Frances Bean, was born in 1992.

Family Values is a photography book presenting approximately 90 images featuring Kurt, Courtney, and their baby Frances taken one morning in their modest Hollywood home. These photos are selected from a 1992 photoshoot that award-winning husband-and-wife image-making duo Guzman did for Spin amidst toys and pajamas, the sweetness, humor, irony and the simple happiness of a new mom and dad at home with their baby girl.

In addition to the never-before-seen photographs, Family Values includes two personal essays. The first is written by Michael Azerrad, American author, music journalist, and musician who was close friends with Kurt Cobain and wrote the 1993 definitive biography on Nirvana titled Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. The second essay is written by Guzman, the photography duo who shot the iconic Spin shoot pictured in the book’s pages. Below are experts taken from the two essays.

Read More »

Remembering Tim Buckley, born on this day in 1947. —Ed.

Two releases illuminate Tim Buckley as being far from the typical 1960s folkie. Light in the Attic’s Lady, Give Me Your Key uncovers two ’67 demos and is easily the more consistent of the two, its contents complementing a significant portion of Omnivore’s Wings: The Complete Singles 1966-1974. That set leaps over a highly fertile period in chronologically documenting the 45s of an artist primarily known for his albums, but still manages to detail the lessening of quality in Buckley’s work. The former comes with vinyl, compact disc, and digital options, and the latter is CD only.

Tim Buckley’s output can be divided into three segments: the early formative period that includes his self-titled ’66 debut and the following year’s Goodbye and Hello, a fertile middle section beginning with ’69’s Happy Sad and Blue Afternoon and continuing with ’70’s Lorca and Starsailor, and a highly disappointing shift into strained soulfulness and off-putting conventionality that includes ’72’s Greetings from L.A., ’73’s Sefronia and ’74’s Look at the Fool.

Since his premature death in 1975, Buckley’s discography has roughly doubled, mostly through performance material, a circumstance helping Lady, Give Me Your Key to stand out a bit; composed of a pair of demos made for producer Jerry Yester in aid of choosing the contents of Goodbye and Hello, there are enough new song discoveries to enhance the familiar numbers, and if belonging to Buckley’s earliest period the album deepens the man’s work rather than just offering minutiae for diehards.

If predominantly straightforward in approach, it’s important to qualify that on his first LP Buckley was already more than a clichéd strummer. Working largely in baroque mode with a full band including drummer Billy Mundi, his longtime guitarist Lee Underwood, and on piano, celesta, and harpsichord Van Dyke Parks, a third of the album sets Wings: The Complete Singles 1966-1974 into motion, the A-side to the first 45 lending the collection its title.

Read More »

This is a follow-up to our previous round-up of recently released books on The Beatles.

The Beatles Fab But True (Schiffer) By Doug Wolfberg

Wolfberg offers sixteen, chapter-length, individual stories about The Beatles that may be known to some fans of the group, but here receives an in-depth sort of retelling. Wolfberg digs deep and the stories reflect his richly detailed research and keen insights. The stories unfold in chronological order and collectively provide an almost alternative short-hand history of the singularity of The Beatles phenomenon. He also offers a postscript for every chapter that brings the stories up to date.

Wolfberg thankfully doesn’t just merely retell these stories, but through fresh analysis, brings into focus what really happened, and in some cases debunks some of the myths and incomplete narratives that can get preserved for posterity in some articles and books on the group. The book is a beautiful hardcover tome, with glossy pages and a dust-jacket and is fully illustrated. It is another book that makes for great reading straight through or by cherry-picking certain chapters or just paging through it.

Paul McCartney: The Lyrics (Liveright) By Paul McCartney

Originally released in November of 2021 as a two-volume hardback set in a slipcase, covering 154 songs, presented alphabetically, that McCartney has written, this new paperback edition includes seven additional songs: “Bluebird,” “Day Tripper,” “English Tea,” “Every Night,” “Hello, Goodbye,” “Magical Mystery Tour” and “Step Inside Love.”

The book includes lyrics and annotations by McCartney and is beautifully illustrated. The original volume was nearly 900 pages and this new paperback edition is closer to 600. The size of the new edition is smaller and everything has been condensed into one paperback edition. For those who couldn’t afford the $100 original set, this new one is much more affordable at only $30 list price.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | In conjunction with the upcoming biopic Bob Marley: One Love, which is based on the life of global icon, Island/UMe will be releasing a new limited edition of Bob Marley’s timeless album, Exodus, on May 24, 2024. Including an exclusive 10” LP of rare bonus tracks and an essay by Jamaican historian Herbie Miller, this all-new package will be encased in a gatefold design for the first time and is available for preorder HERE.

Cited by Time magazine as the Best Album of the 20th Century (“Every song is a classic, from the messages of love to the anthems of revolution”) and the BBC as the “album that defined the 20th Century,” the legacy of Exodus extends beyond genres, eras, and continents, whose impact propelled Third World culture and politics into the global spotlight.

“Exodus is a timeless document that publicly reveals the contemplations and reflections on the life of one of the 20th century’s most revered artists and revolutionaries,” Miller writes in the new liner notes. “It shows Bob’s fears and vulnerability, his steadfast commitment to making humanity as equitable and ideal as imaginable and spreading his Rastafari spirituality to the four corners of the earth.”

As depicted in a critical scene in the One Love film, this special edition will feature the original cover design of the album created by longtime Marley family friend, creative designer, and lighting director Neville Garrick. Originally conceived in the context of flight, depicting a green, gold, and red-winged migrating bird, with Marley and the Wailers enclosed in a global sphere overseen by Haile Selassie, the design was symbolic of the parting of the Red Sea. Garrick’s final and now-classic album art will adorn the back of this new package.

Released on vinyl for the first time in decades, the 10” includes dub versions of “Exodus,” “Jamming,” and “Punky Reggae Party”—the latter associated with Exodus as the B-side of “Jamming”—plus the rare “Roots,” first issued as the B-side of “Waiting In Vain.”

UK singer-songwriter Liam Bailey is a sly genre blender. Nowhere is this more apparent than on his latest album Zero Grace, which is out February 23 on vinyl (bloodshot colored or standard black), compact disc, and digital through Big Crown Records. Reteaming Bailey with ace producer and Big Crown co-founder Leon Michels, the resulting 12-song set delivers a vigorous infusion of reggae and what Bailey has described as lo-fi soul. Hints of rock, elements of psychedelia, and even a little acoustic strum widen the album’s sonic landscape.

Zero Grace’s opener “Holding On” presents Liam Bailey’s sound as tough, edgy, and soul deep. It’s really no surprise his initial dalliance with a major label didn’t work out, Bailey pulling his first album Out of the Shadows prior to release in 2011; he debuted with a pair of EPs on Amy Winehouse’s label the prior year. His first proper album, Definitely Now came out in 2014. But things started getting really interesting with Ekundayo, released by Big Crown and produced Michels in 2020.

The drumming at the start of “Holding On” solidifies a ’60s soul foundation while the singing accentuates the Jamaican roots. But in a striking style switch, the guitar eschews the slinky clean crispness of reggae for a decidedly rockish rhythmic string attack that goes so far as to insinuate early ’70s hard rock by the track’s back end.

The following cut “Dumb” effectively illuminates Zero Grace’s textural unusualness: muffled drums, a keyboard set to “croak,” unperturbed horns lines gliding in, and vocals alternating between soulful finesse and desperation. “Sekkle Down” places the focus directly on reggae but with keyboard tones alternating between vintage arcade games and wind instrument settings. But the singing in “Sekkle Down” extends the rich tradition of R&B vocal groups (including some sweet bass voice accents that are recurrent but not overdone across the LP).

Read More »