Remembering Jackie Wilson, born on this day in 1934. —Ed.

Singer Jackie Wilson landed a slew of hit singles in the 1950s and early ’60s with a sophisticated strain of R&B that crossed over to the pop charts. In 1967, he managed a sizable comeback with the song for which he is now likely best remembered, “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” The coinciding LP Higher and Higher, finds Wilson in strong form throughout with typically dynamic backing from members of the Funk Brothers.

To insinuate that Jackie Wilson is today a neglected figure would be ludicrous given how “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” has endured as a musical staple. It feels safe to say I’ve heard this tidy platter of pop-soul uplift at least 50 times while shopping for groceries alone, a number that can be doubled (probably tripled) when taking oldies station rotation into account.

To be clear, Wilson has other killer songs in his body of work, and to expand on his importance, he’s a crucial figure in bringing an admittedly smooth and erudite strain of R&B to wider acceptance. In turn, he helped lay the groundwork for soul music of a refined variety. But here’s another flat fact: Wilson hasn’t been well served in the vinyl reissue market, perhaps in part because none of the full-length albums he cut have grown into consensus classics.

Wilson recorded over two dozen albums between 1958 and 1976, but only a small number made a dent in either the R&B or the pop charts. But just as germane to the issue is how that many LPs is a surefire recipe for an uneven discography, especially considering Wilson’s penchant for Broadway show tunes and straight schmaltz (a tendency spanning back to the ’50s that necessitated his comeback).

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly soundtrack pioneered socially aware soul in the early ’70s with its groundbreaking, orchestral-funk arrangements and unflinching lyrical commentary. Today, new audiophile editions are available from Rhino High Fidelity on reel-to-reel and vinyl.

Super Fly (Rhino High Fidelity R2R) was duplicated in real time from a 1:1 copy of the original analog master tape. The result is a master-quality listening experience that captures the full dynamics of the recording. The 15 i.p.s. half-track 1/4” tape is produced to the IEC equalization standard on premium RTM LPR90 tape stock and stored on a 10.5” metal reel. The Reel-to-Reel edition is limited to 350 copies worldwide and available exclusively at Rhino.com.

Super Fly (Rhino High Fidelity) was cut from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray and pressed on 180-gram black vinyl at Optimal in Germany. It comes in a glossy gatefold sleeve with newly written liner notes. The album is limited to 5,000 individually numbered copies and available exclusively at Rhino.com and select Warner Music Group stores internationally.

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Celebrating Nancy Sinatra on her 86th birthday. —Ed.

The pairing of singer Nancy Sinatra and singer-songwriter-producer Lee Hazlewood made for one of the 1960’s most delightfully unusual pairings, though the collaboration was a relatively short one, consisting of a slew of singles and a sole LP…until they reunited for a follow-up in 1972. Nancy & Lee Again is that album.

It might seem like the delayed nature of Nancy & Lee Again’s reissue is to some extent down to neglect on the part of the rights-holders, but please understand that the duo’s 1968 debut Nancy & Lee wasn’t given a standalone new edition until last year, also by Light in the Attic, the label that has, along with the Nancy Sinatra Archival Series, returned a fair portion of Hazlewood’s solo catalog to print since early last decade.

The main reason for Nancy & Lee’s belated appearance is due to the easy availability of the contents on compact disc, the entire record included on Rhino’s 1989 compilation Fairy Tales & Fantasies: The Best of Nancy & Lee. Plus, secondhand copies of the LP were easily findable (in varying degrees of condition, of course) in thrift shops, if not necessarily music stores. Unlike Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’ Whipped Cream & Other Delights, Nancy & Lee wasn’t ubiquitous, but like Herb Alpert Presents Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 and The Association’s Greatest Hits!, it was quite a common find.

As these comparisons should help make clear, the descriptor of unusual isn’t interchangeable with strange. Now, anybody familiar with “Some Velvet Morning” and to a lesser extent, “Sand,” knows that pop psychedelic strangeness was part of Sinatra and Hazlewood’s stylistic bag. But weird took a back seat to playful C&W duets and proto-Vegas Middle-Of-The-Road-isms, with the palatability of both modes, and especially the latter, intensified by the combination of Sinatra’s youthful verve and Hazlewood’s buzzsaw tones and general eccentricity, a quality that was only laid on thick when it benefitted the song.

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Making Vinyl, the biannual meeting for the vinyl manufacturing industry, came to Alexandria, Virginia,
May 27 to May 29

When Ian MacKaye’s high school band broke up, they decided to put out a record only then to chronicle the sound they had urgently turned out for their fervent community. They had saved any cash received from the 50 or so gigs they played, stashed it in a cigar box, and were ready to spend it on making a record.

“We could have made a cassette and kept $200 a piece, but we wanted to document something that was fucking important to our friends and us,” MacKaye said. “And we had no idea how this was done.” The future Fugazi frontman told his tale late May as a keynote speaker at the twice-annual Making Vinyl conference, this one at the Westin Hotel in Alexandria, VA.

Before more than 200 professionals involved in mastering, manufacturing, labeling, and distributing vinyl records in a time of rapid growth, MacKaye related how he stepped gingerly into the record industry as a teen, a path that would lead to the creation of his own Dischord Records, an indie survivor that endures, chronicling underground bands in the DC area.

The process to make his first punk record involved advice from a local record store and a cold call to a Nashville pressing plant whose regular business was making country records. “They were so kind,” MacKaye said of the patient manufacturer in Tennessee, who found a way to accommodate the kids even when they were asking for something that seemed impossible: eight songs on a 7-inch single. (They were short, it was punk rock.)

While MacKaye gathered friends for folding parties to make picture sleeves for the records they copied, cut, and pasted, he realized: “This was the record industry: Making records for real.” Some fans made predictable noises about commodification and selling out. But for the band, it was a way to capture those “transcendent isolated moments that were undocumented for the most part.”

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I’ve always had reservations about this Hendrix fella. Sure, he was probably the most brilliant and innovative rocker to ever set fire to an electric guitar, and he looked cool as shit and was cool as shit, no doubt about it, but here’s the thing—great guitar players have never been my thing.

Eric Clapton bores me. Jeff Beck gives me a bad case of diarrhea. That Mahavishnu dude is okay, in small doses. Rory Gallagher, Stevie Ray Vaughn and all those other white blues guys can suck it. I’ll take Ron Asheton or Greg Ginn or Glen Buxton or J. Mascis any day of the week including Mumsday, which falls between Tuesday and Wednesday on the Galician calendar. Evidently it’s as difficult to learn Galician as it is to learn how to play guitar as well as Jimi Hendrix.

And I’m not the only guy with reservations about this Hendrix cat. Genius can be annoying, and nobody likes a showoff. Guy lit his eyebrows on fire and played a solo while his guitar was in another state once. Well, okay. The guy’s immense talent led Chuck Eddy to write (in his 1991 book Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe) “Hendrix was a humorless blowhard as given to onanistic showboat puke as any of his metallic heirs, and by knowing a million chords and displaying every last one of ‘em to mooncalves too stoned to get up and walk the other way, he initiated rock’s cult of virtuosity for its own sake, turning a once-vernacular music into something it was never meant to be.”

In short, he was Emerson, Lake & Palmer in a single psychedelic headband!

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Varèse Sarabande and Craft Recordings announce Michael Giacchino’s iconic score for the pivotal third season of Lost will debut on vinyl in conjunction with the season’s 20th anniversary.

The 2-LP set is pressed on “forest green” vinyl and comes packaged in a gatefold jacket featuring the creative notes from the original 2006 CD release by Giacchino and producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. The release is set to hit stores on July 24 and is available for pre-order today. This follows the label’s 2024 2-LP release of the Lost: Season 1 soundtrack and the 2025 “black smoke” 2-LP release of Lost: Season 2 soundtrack.

Giacchino’s work is celebrated for both its ingenuity and his remarkable speed in developing themes and ideas, qualities that culminated in the creation of an essential score in the fast-paced world of television production.

In a 2024 interview with IndieWire, he explained: “We never really spotted any of the episodes for the entire run of the show. There just wasn’t time to discuss music episode by episode, as the showrunners were cranking out scripts and shooting episodes, so I would receive the episode and have (in many cases) three to five days to write and turn it around—meaning recording as well.”

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Celebrating Richard Butler on his 70th birthday. —Ed.

Love a band? Hate a band? It often comes down to simple timing. For instance, had My War been the first music by Black Flag I ever heard, instead of their earlier EPs and singles, I would never have given them the time of day. The same is true for The Psychedelic Furs. I first heard them when they were putting out such catchy and undeniably lovely new wave songs such as “Love My Way,” “Heaven,” and “Pretty in Pink.”

Unfortunately, I disliked new wave, because in the wake of first-generation punk it sounded too wimpy, emasculated, and dance-oriented for my tastes. To paraphrase one David Bowie, “I never got it off on that new wave stuff/How bland/Too many Duran Durans.” Or to quote the great Minutemen, “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?”

But had I heard the Furs around 1980, instead of, say, 1983, things would have been very different. In fact, I’d have loved them. Because 1980 was the year they released their debut LP, the eponymous and post-punk The Psychedelic Furs. Forget their melodic new wave tunes that ended up on film soundtracks and got played at every prom in the land.

The Furs’ debut is a fabulous collection of droning grooves over which vocalist Richard Butler talk/sings enigmatically about who knows what to the accompaniment of guitars and one great saxophone. And to think I never heard so much as a song off it until Kid Congo Powers covered the ecstatic “We Love You” at a live show here in DC. Thank you, Kid, for your great tastes in music and your great mustache and for turning me on to The Psychedelic Furs. I owe you big time.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Pat Travers and Bob Dylan. It’s a marriage made… if not in heaven, then at least in a place where dreams come true and the blues keep rolling. On March 20, 2004, early a tour that would keep them on the road across North America and Europe until July, the Pat Travers Band headed to Houston, Texas, to record what would become one of the most exhilarating live albums of his career, Snortin’ Whiskley.

Accompanied by southern rock maestro Greg T. Walker (Lynyrd Skynyrd/Blackfoot) on bass and former AC/DC skin basher Simon Wright on drums, Travers would lead this ruthlessly stripped back trio deep into their roots. The result, releasing on June 26, is a Texas-sized slab of electrified blues packed with epic versions of fan favorites “Boom Boom Out Go The Lights” and “Snortin’ Whiskey”; barnstorming work-outs… including a colossal 13-minute version of “Born Under A Bad Sign”; and well-chosen covers—the Allman Brothers’ “Statesboro Blues,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return); and—released as a single today—Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.”

Not that their rendition of the title track from the bard’s second album of 1965, has much in common with Dylan’s original—as Travers warns at the outset of the song, “we’re gonna kick your ass.” And then this leanest, meanest line-up of them all slams into a Mach 2 firestorm, percussion and bass setting up an irresistible pace and rhythm, while Travers plays like a man possessed, his guitar spilling liquid fire over all around.

Hungry and raw, the energy never dips. If anything, it gets even more intense as the show rolls on, until that closing salvo of “Born Under A Bad Sign” and “Statesboro Blues” makes it clear that no-one on earth could have followed it, and that includes the band.

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Celebrating Freddie Stone, born on this day in 1947. —Ed.

By 1970, Sly Stone was no longer his happy-go-lucky, upbeat-hits-producing self. Stone and his band had taken to ingesting large quantities of cocaine and PCP, a paranoia-inducing combo if ever there was one, and Sly’s own intake was such that he carried his stash in a violin case. The results were predictable. Sly went from multi-racial inspiration to Richard Nixon-level paranoiac, and hired shady characters, gangsters, and even a Mafioso as a Praetorian Guard to keep an eye on his “enemies,” some of whom happened to be members of The Family Stone. Recording came to a standstill, and Stone began his infamous habit of missing gigs.

When Stone finally dragged his bad self into the Record Plant in Sausalito to record the band’s fifth album, the results were completely unlike any previous Family Stone release. What is surprising, given Stone’s precipitous psychic decline, is that the result, 1971’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, is perhaps the most brilliant LP he ever recorded.

Dark? No shit. Gone was The Family Stone’s trademark cheery psychedelic rock and soul, replaced by a raw funk—which would reverberate in the ears of George Clinton and innumerable future funkers like a revelatory crack of thunder—that was as every bit as murky and hopelessly disillusioned as it was bracing. “I Want to Take You Higher” had become “I Want to Bring You Down, Way Down.” There’s a Riot Goin’ On was a sign o’ the times—of riots in the inner cities, Altamont, The Manson Family, and the Death of the Age of Aquarius—just as his more playful earlier LPs had been signs of theirs. But Sly had done more than just tap into the gestalt; he had just recorded his Exile on Main Street.

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