VIA PRESS RELEASE | Regal rock icons Queen are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their monumental multi-platinum 1975 album A Night At The Opera and legendary Diamond-certified single “Bohemian Rhapsody” with opulent vinyl reissues.

Originally released in November 1975 and featuring the classic line-up of Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon, A Night At The Opera was Queen’s grandest artistic statement and most successful album to that point, reaching Number 1 in five countries, including the UK. Marking 50 years since its original release, A Night At The Opera will be reissued on lavish crystal clear vinyl with gold labels on October 18 in the UK (on National Album Day) and October 17 in the rest of the world.

“Bohemian Rhapsody,” which spent a record-breaking nine weeks at Number 1 in the UK singles chart on its original release, is also being reissued on October 31 as a transparent blue heavyweight 12” vinyl. It will also be available as a direct-to-consumer exclusive 12” picture disc and blue cassette single. Both reissues will be released on Universal worldwide excluding US, where they will be released via Hollywood Records.

“A Night At The Opera was a hugely important album for us,” says Queen guitarist Sir Brian May. “It opened up the world for us.” “We were at the peak of our confidence,” adds drummer Roger Taylor, “It felt like there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do, and it shows on that album.”

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Celebrating Frankie Avalon on his 85th birthday. —Ed.

It’s easy to say snide things about Frankie Avalon. I myself have called the teen idol who first made his name as a trumpet player, then as a singer, and finally as the star of such immortal motion pictures as 1963’s Beach Party (with Annette Funicello, natch) and 1965’s Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (with Vincent Price) the worst thing to happen to rock ’n’ roll this side of the extended drum solo.

I’m being unfair of course. Avalon was just a good Italian kid from Philly who specialized in froth, didn’t have a rebellious bone in his body, and never pretended otherwise. An earnest and wholesome boy who never got hooked on heroin or attempted to reinvent himself as a pinwheel-eyed avatar of the hallucinogenic sixties, was our Frankie. But say what you will about his escapist product, Avalon has always been and will always be true to himself.

As anybody who has ever listened to “Venus” or “Why,” Avalon was a crooner whose saccharine songs sound inconceivable as teen product to anyone reared in the rock ’n’ roll era. Lush orchestral arrangements, choirs, you name it—Frankie’s producers liked to lard it on, and on, and on. Ah, but once, just once—and it is as glorious a moment as any in the annals of rock—Avalon said to hell with it and got down with his bad self, garage rock style.

I have no idea why. Perhaps he ate an extra-large helping of some rich Italian dessert with a touch too much sweet liqueur, say amaretto, in it. Or drank one too many (as in two) glasses of red wine. Whatever the reason, on one lost day in 1963 a real, real gone Avalon swaggered into the studio, flicked a half-smoked cigarette at some studio hack, and snapped, “Fuck the strings, Johnny, and ditch the backing singers. This is Jungleland.” And proceeded to throw his everything behind as mean as guitar as he could get his goomba (no offense meant) mitts on.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Frank Sinatra’s seminal 1955 Capitol Records album In The Wee Small Hours will be reissued in Blue Note’s acclaimed Tone Poet Audiophile Vinyl Series on November 14 marking the album’s 70th anniversary.

Produced for release by Joe Harley, the new Tone Poet Vinyl Edition was mastered by Kevin Gray from the original analog master tapes, pressed on 180g vinyl at Record Technology Inc. (RTI), and comes packaged in a deluxe gatefold tip-on jacket featuring session photos by William Claxton and Ken Veeder, as well as an essay by Rita Kirwan.

In The Wee Small Hours is a melancholy masterpiece of lost love and heartbreak that was a pivotal album in the legendary vocalist’s career. Produced by Voyle Gilmore, the album embodied Sinatra’s artistic growth into a more mature singing style with stunning renditions of Great American Songbook standards given sublime arrangements by Nelson Riddle, creating one of the first-ever concept albums.

Sinatra conceived of In The Wee Small Hours as a full-length album, rather than a collection of singles, and it would become one of the first pop albums to be released on 12-inch LP. The album was met with immediate critical and commercial success, reaching #2 on the Billboard charts and bolstering Sinatra’s career resurgence following his signing to Capitol Records in 1953 and his Academy Award win for his role in the film From Here to Eternity.

Issued in 1964 by Vee-Jay Records, It’s Monster Surfing Time may appear to the sophisticated modern observer as an undisguised fusing of a trend and a gimmick. While it most assuredly fits that description, its instrumental surf bedrock has proven more than just a fad and likewise, the creature feature matinée gimmick has endured across generations. The Deadly Ones offer a fun taste of legitimate surf flavor, but their album signifies a whole lot more.

Founded in 1953, Vee-Jay Records stands as one of the great labels in 20th century popular music’s pre-corporate era. Initially successful in the fields of doo-wop (The Spaniels, The Dells), R&B (The Impressions, Dee Clark), blues (John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Memphis Slim) and gospel (The Staple Singers, The Swan Silvertones), the company also managed a small but worthy jazz line (Wayne Shorter, Wynton Kelly, Lee Morgan, Walter Perkins) and perhaps most famously had the foresight to be the first US home of The Beatles.

It’s well documented how the Fab Four helped to metamorphose rock ‘n’ roll and youth music in general into a more serious proposition, but the change didn’t occur overnight, and there is no better proof of its gradual transformation than It’s Monster Surfing Time. The disc positively basks in a lowbrow aura prompting visions of a cigar-chomping label-boss orchestrating an unabashedly mercantile concept through colorful language and a cloud of smoke, though I’ve discovered no evidence to actually support James Bracken or his wife Vivian Carter (the Vee to James’ Jay) fitting this salty descriptor.

Surf music naturally inspires thoughts of waves, wipeouts, beach parties, and couples doing the swim, but in its unadulterated instrumental form its range isn’t especially wide; in 1963 Vee-Jay issued Come Surf with Me by Aki Aleong & the Nobles, a fine if less than earth shattering attempt to hang ten on the style’s popularity, and it would seem that by the following year it was deemed necessary to give the template a considerable shaking up.

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The group Chicago has, for a number of years now, been wrongly consigned to the soft-rock ’70s hit parade and viewed as a classic rock boomer summer touring act. While it can be easy to describe the group this way, they created some of the most ambitious albums of the end of the ’60s and first half of the ’70s, and their hits are enduring evergreens that can satisfy both fans of ’70s FM ballads and fans of the cream of classic American ’70s rock.

Anyone who truly thinks they know the group, but who has not heard their first three studio albums, which are all double albums, and their first live four-album set (Chicago at Carnegie Hall), doesn’t really know the full breadth of their music and is missing out on some of the best albums released in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The band would continue to make fine albums and after two more studio albums would make another double album, but those first three studio albums are truly special.

Their self-titled first album, Chicago Transit Authority, released in 1969, their one and only album under that band name, displayed all the characteristics of what made them so special. While groups like Blood, Sweat and Tears were also focusing on being horn-driven rock bands, Chicago was so much more than that. Along with three horn players (Lee Loughnane, James Pankow, Walter Parazaider) and a drummer (Danny Seraphine), the group boasted three bona-fide frontmen who could sing, write, and play.

While guitarist Terry Kath in many ways drove the edgier side of the group, he wrote and sang beautiful ballads. And conversely, keyboardist Robert Lamb and bassist Peter Cetera, along with writing poppy love songs, could also write and sing bracing rockers, with all three being the base for soaring harmonies. To add to all of this, the group’s albums in this period were ambitious, sprawling affairs, that encompassed rock, pop, jazz, and soul, but with carefully crafted arrangements and occasional song suites that had movements like a classical music album structure.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “A very honest and extremely well-articulated story of coming of age, parallel and within the evolution of the alternative music world.” —Kim Gordon

The Royal We is a a poetic survey of a time and a magical city that once was and is no more by musical trailblazer Roddy Bottum, documenting a charged era of bicycle messengers, punk rock, street witches, wheatgrass, and rebellion. The book follows his travels from Los Angeles, growing up gay with no role models, to San Francisco, where he formed Faith No More and went on to tour the world relentlessly, surviving heroin addiction and the plight of AIDS, to become a queer icon.

A deeply personal work of humor, commentary, and reflection, The Royal We is much more than a musical tell-all. There are personal tales of historical pinnacles like Kurt and Courtney, Guns N’ Roses, and recaps of gold records and arena rock—but it’s the testimonies of tragedy, addiction, and a deeply loving recollection of a remarkable scene that make this book so unique and intriguing. Bottum writes about his dark and harrowing past in a clear-eyed voice that is utterly devoid of self-pity, and his emboldened and confident pronouncements of achievement and unorthodox heroism flow in an unstoppable train that’s both captivating and inspirational.

A remarkable portrayal of a creative individual in emergence, a gay man figuring out how to be a gay man, and a detailed look at the nuance of 1980s pre-tech boom San Francisco, The Royal We will be greatly appreciated by people who loved Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, and Hua Hsu’s Stay True.

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Remembering Hank Williams, born on this day in 1923. —Ed.

Hank Williams is an icon of early country music, but he recorded before the LP era really took hold, so his legacy is dominated by posthumously assembled compilations. These sets come in various sizes and levels of quality. The latest, Pictures from Life’s Other Side: The Man and his Music in Rare Photos and Recordings, offers 144 transcriptions from Williams’ Mother’s Best radio program on six CDs, all tucked into a magnificent hardcover book loaded with photos, many of them in color, that serve to broaden the life of the artist beyond the still too common reduction of strife and an early death. It’s out now, but if it’s vinyl you require, the 3LP distillation Only Mother’s Best is also currently available from BMG.

When it comes to concise surveys of Hank Williams’ exceptional musical abilities (by which I mean single or double sets), the gold standard remains Polydor’s 40 Greatest Hits. Released in 1978, it was distinguished at the time for its lack of production meddling, as those four vinyl sides weren’t rechanneled into stereo and they lacked additional posthumous meddling such as overdubs and duet fakery.

40 Greatest Hits was just pure Hank, and for those who favored his work, disappointment in the listening was an impossibility. That’s not the same as being fully satisfied however, which is where the box sets enter the picture. Mercury’s 1998 10CD The Complete Hank Williams is an award winner, but amongst the numerous two- and three-disc collections, there’s an even bigger assemblage, Time Life’s The Complete Mother’s Best Recordings…Plus!, which emerged in 2010 as a 15CD behemoth.

As one might’ve deduced, there is a relationship between that release and the one under review here, with the difference being that Time Life simply rounded up the acetates of the original 15-minute broadcasts, which were sponsored by Mother’s Best flour. This left in all the instrumental bits, the guest musicians and the chatting and joking around.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Yep Roc Records and Chuck Prophet announce the 10th anniversary edition of Night Surfer, Prophet’s widely acclaimed 2014 album. Available for pre-order now, the reissue edition features a remastered LP in “Twilight Wave” color vinyl.

Originally released September 23, 2014, Night Surfer captures Prophet’s beloved city in motion across a 12-song set—equal parts shimmering and shadowy. Produced by Brad Jones and Chuck Prophet, Night Surfer was recorded at Decibelle Recording in San Francisco and Alex The Great Recording in Nashville, and mixed by Paul Q. Kolderie. The album’s line-up and collaborators nod to Prophet’s deep network and features contributions from R.E.M. stalwarts Peter Buck (guitars) and the late Bill Rieflin, whose rhythmic instincts thread grit through the album’s glam-tinged sparkle.

Of the original album, Chuck Prophet wrote: “There are a lot of little stories on this record. But they seem to add up to one big story. What that overarching story is, I am not really sure, but I’ll know it when it punches me in the face. It’s loosely conceptual but universal all the same, I’d contend. And of course, you’ll find it laced with humor and a persistent anxiety throughout. And while I had originally considered all this leaning toward the dystopian, now I wonder. The future might just save us. But we have to get there first.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Experience Hendrix L.L.C. and Legacy Recordings, are releasing Bold As Love by the Jimi Hendrix Experience on November 7. Produced by Janie Hendrix, original Experience recording engineer Eddie Kramer, and John McDermott, this expansive collection is available as either a five vinyl LP plus Blu-ray, or four CD plus Blu-ray set.

The deluxe box set includes the original stereo and mono mixes of Axis: Bold As Love remastered from the original mixes created by Hendrix, the album’s producer Chas Chandler and original engineer Eddie Kramer. Kramer and engineer Chandler Harrod recently created brand new immersive Dolby ATMOS mixes of the entire 13 song album. The box set presents an additional 40 alternative versions, unreleased studio takes, demos, live tracks and television appearances from the album’s gestation and recording period, 28 of which have never before seen the light of day. One of these tracks, a previously unreleased October 1967 studio demo of “Stone Free/Up From The Skies [Demo],” has been made available.

By May 1967, the Jimi Hendrix Experience had finalized their groundbreaking debut album Are You Experienced at Olympic Studios in London, and immediately began work on their next album. Jimi Hendrix arrived in London in late September 1966 and soon amassed three top 10 singles in their UK homebase, followed quickly by success across Europe but were yet to conquer the US. In June 1967, the group left for the US to make their American debut at the Monterey International Pop Festival.

Their stunning Monterey debut—complete with Hendrix setting his guitar alight at the close of his performance, propelled them across the US throughout the summer of 1967. Before returning to London, producer Chas Chandler recorded the group’s fourth single “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp” b/w “The Stars That Play With Laughing Dice” at sessions in New York and Los Angeles. Bold As Love showcases previously unreleased versions of both of these songs.

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