Zero to 180 – Three Minute Magic
Artsy-craftsy types might find connect-the-dot album covers to be a bit stultifying — where’s the creativity? Connect these dots – and in this precise order, commands the album cover. Sorry, I prefer to make my own decisions. One Donovan album I have had a hard time finding in second-hand shops
Bob Johnston – who famously produced Bob Dylan‘s Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde and Johnny Cash‘s Folsom Prison, among many other classic albums – left us last August. How startling to discover that Johnston used Nashville’s finest session musicians in 1966 to record a “dazzling anti-masterpiece” (as notes
How delightfully odd to discover that someone went to the trouble of putting together a web page tribute to Mike Bloomfield‘s 1973 CBS LP Try It Before You Buy It that (get this) only lists the songs on which Roger Troy takes the lead vocal! What’s funny is that this
I was having a rare meal out alone and needed something to read, so I purchased a Rolling Stone back issue (September 6, 1979 edition – mostly likely at Joe’s Record Paradise) that included Michael Barackman‘s article about a new and somewhat radical 10-stringed electric instrument invented by Emmett Chapman
2013’s Steven Soderbergh-directed Liberace biopic was ineligible for Oscar nominations since, as Mother Jones points out, the film was released on cable television (HBO) instead of U.S. theaters due to its “conspicuous gayness.” Along with Milton Berle, Liberace was one of TV’s earliest stars and, as pointed out in the
It was hard not to get swept up in Ed Ward‘s enthusiasm in his October 1, 1970 Rolling Stone review of an up-and-coming Texan band (by way of Prunedale, California) that had been “discovered” and mentored by Doug Sahm. The band’s debut, a masterpiece in Ward’s estimation, had been released
Three musicians – Stanley Clarke, Jeff Beck, and Steve Gadd – with keyboard embellishments from a fourth, Bayeté Todd Cochran: “Jamaican Boy“ Stanley Clarke (1979) * “Jamaican Boy” was a 45 release from 1979’s I Wanna Play for You studio/live hybrid LP and one of Record World‘s “Single Picks” for
My first encounter with a kalimba, the African instrument (also known as a “thumb piano” or mbira) was when I read the album credits for Space Oddity in my youth and learned that David Bowie played a kalimba on the title track, Bowie’s first American breakout hit (a.k.a., “Major Tom“).
Great live performance of Mikey Dread at Glastonbury in 2004 where, in his tribute to The Clash‘s Joe Strummer, he slyly mixes up the tempo about halfway through, as he veers playfully from torporific one-drop skank to ska at the drop of a hat: “Bankrobber“ Mikey Dread (2004) Here’s a
Someone posted a short list of “clavinet-fueled songs” that, of course, included “Up on Cripple Creek” by The Band. One commenter quibbled that the song should have been #1 on the list, “not only because it is better but because it was first” – but was it? The Clavinet is
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