Monthly Archives: March 2018

VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Dream Syndicate brought strains of psychedelia to the early ’80s American indie-rock movement with their influential Slash Records album The Days of Wine and Roses. And they made a critically hailed comeback with 2017’s How Did I Find Myself Here on Anti- Records. But when the band took a hiatus around 1990, frontman Steve Wynn recorded two solo albums that both preserved the Dream Syndicate’s intensity while enabling him to spread his musical wings and work with some friends from other groups. Omnivore Recordings will release the albums — Kerosene Man and Dazzling Display — in expanded editions on April 27, 2018.

In 1990, Wynn struck out on his own to record his solo debut, the acclaimed Kerosene Man. With 11 new Wynn originals and help from friends including Johnette Napolitano (Concrete Blonde), D.J. Bonebrake (X), Steve Berlin (Los Lobos), and even Mark Walton from the Dream Syndicate and the Continental Drifters, Kerosene Man showed a new side to Steve, while retaining everything that attracted music lovers to him in the first place. “Tears Won’t Help” became a radio staple, and “Carolyn” found its way to MTV.

As Wynn writes in the new liner notes: “Sure, I was nervous. I had spent most of my adult life making music with the Dream Syndicate — a very good, successful band, with musicians I still considered very good friends. Bands break up because the members hate each other, or because nobody cares, or because someone in the band joins the Rolling Stones, or something. That wasn’t the case with us. I just wanted to try something different. I wanted to play different kinds of music, make new sounds, play with new people. I wasn’t running away from anything. I was just running towards something new.”

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“My first physical connection to music was in the early nineties via cassette tape. I can still picture the frustration, when I listened to a tape so much that it finally unraveled in my tape deck. It was the compact disc that dominated most of my adolescence. It wasn’t until high school that I got a proper introduction to vinyl, and it was quite a revelation. My good friend Jason, who at the time was well into his twenties, put it upon himself to get me educated.”

“I didn’t even know how the record player worked. He sat me down and told me the first thing I needed to listen to on vinyl was Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. It was like I was listening to music for the first time. We sat cross-legged in his living room and took in every nuance of the sound. The full range of the vinyl was hitting my ears in such a profound way. After we finished both sides of the record, I looked at him and said, “What else do you have?”

My introduction to vinyl was really my introduction into the music and genres that would help form the foundation to my songwriting. My youth was mostly filled with pop music, but after I was introduced to Jason’s record collection my tastes really started to evolve. I then started diving into the Ryan Adams and Wilco records. These artists, along with a healthy dose of bands from the sixties and seventies, became a huge influence. I still remember hearing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on vinyl and thinking “I don’t get this.” It was somewhere after the third listen that Jeff Tweedy’s musical genius hit me like a ton of bricks. Most likely it was the full attention that vinyl demands of you that helped reveal his brilliance.

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When it comes to Southern Rock, The Marshall Tucker Band can be beat. To my way of looking at things they occupy the No. 3 spot in the Southern Rock pantheon, far below Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band. That said, Toy Caldwell and Company bequeathed us some mighty fine music, and they did it with a flute player no less.

Caldwell was a boogie man at heart and a country boy right down to his shitkickers, and he reconciled heart and feet with a magic touch for producing snazzy down home hoedowns that swing. He may have lacked Ronnie Van Zant’s ornery rock’n’roll edge, and the Allman Brothers’ dedication to the blues, but he added an essential ingredient to the pot–call it sweetening in the form of a melodic sensibility that brings to mind Dickey Betts more than anybody else. And Caldwell not only played ‘em prettier than the competition, he made ‘em jump like trout at the end of a fishing line. And at his best he could break your heart while he was at it.

Which is by no means to say that the Marshall Tucker Band couldn’t kick out the jams; the two live sides of 1974’s Where We All Belong stand as proof positive that they had no trouble settin’ the woods on fire, and the barn too while they were at it. Their three-guitar army may not have blitzkrieged with the same ferocity as Skynyrd’s, but one listen to their live take of “24 Hours at a Time” should be enough to convince anybody that they sure knew how to ramble on down the road.

The MTB was always an erratic proposition when it came to producing keepers, hence my love for 1978’s Greatest Hits. It lassoes the prime heifers and rounds ‘em up, and in short makes for one swell corral for the ears. At their best the Marshall Tucker Band were perhaps the greatest country boogie band in the land; from the jaunty and flute-laced “Take the Highway” (which, with its jazz breakdown, is as close as an American band has ever come to Traffic) to the plaintive and piano-laden “In My Own Way” (inspirational lyric: “I can’t act like we just met all the time”) to the immortal “Can’t You See” (which sets some truly inspired guitar playing against a set of lyrics that limn the limits of train-bound heartbreak) they split the difference between home-spun country homily and your more sophisticated jazz, swing and blues forms.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Autobiography Chronicles the Rise and Fall of the Iconic Singer and His Long Road to Recovery, Boasts as One of the Top Five Memoirs Regarding Addiction/Recovery

The poignant elucidation describing the journey of Chuck Negron as he fell from the height of worldwide fame and success, to the depths of delusion, despair and almost death, and rose again to stardom and stability is more than an interesting glimpse into the rock star lifestyle. The final edition of Three Dog Nightmare: The Chuck Negron Story features 11 new chapters, over 100 new photos, and is available now on ChuckNegron.com.

“The perception that fame and fortune entitle a person to be protected from the darker side of life and the entertainment industry is a misconception, “said Negron. “This is my raw narrative of being enslaved by the demons I faced and overpowering desire to turn my life around.”

“This amazing true story of Negron, Three Dog Night, the world’s most popular pop band (at the time) and his incredible journey through the fame, drugs, and tribulations of the era. He’s one of the lucky ones to come out fine on the other side (although, there were a few near death experiences along the way),” said Brent Harvey, Executive Producer Hollywood Music In Media Awards.“I found this to be a VERY entertaining read.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Among the (overwhelming) reactions to our 2-CD set compiling The Rascals’ complete singles was the question, why isn’t this out on vinyl? And the only correct answer was: it should be!

After all, if there ever was a band deserving of some deluxe vinyl treatment, it would be these guys; with two fantastic singers and songwriters in Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati, an underrated guitarist and songwriter in Gene Cornish, and the great Dino Danelli on drums (plus a pair of studio Svengalis in engineer Tom Dowd and arranger Arif Mardin to rival George Martin), The Rascals were the closest answer America had to The Beatles during the ’60s.

The resemblance wasn’t limited to the composition of their line-up and the profusion of hit releases, either; like the Fab Four, The Rascals were able to author chart-topping singles while simultaneously crafting albums that held together as artistic statements. Now, just over 50 years after they first hit the top of the charts with “Good Lovin’,” Real Gone Music is proud to present the first-ever LP compilation to collect all of the band’s single sides in one place.

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For years people have been citing 1970’s New Morning as Bob Dylan’s “big comeback” without accounting for the fact that compared to its predecessor (1970’s nearly universally scorned Self Portrait) even an album of Dylan’s answering machine messages would have constituted a return to form.

And for years I’ve been saying that while New Morning has its moments, it was just another proof that Dylan lost the plot forever after 1967, the intensely creative year he spent informally recording a whole slew of brilliant songs with the Band at Big Pink and the very biblical John Wesley Harding with session musicians in Nashville. After 1967 (or so I’ve always argued) his ambition ebbed, he embraced both domesticity and a simplicity that to me sounds forced, and I pretty much stopped caring. If Self Portrait was indeed (as Dylan has said on multiple occasions) an attempt to forever offload his own fans among the Woodstock Nation, it worked. I didn’t much like his new Kuntry Kroon either.

But I’ve been coming around, albeit slowly, to the notion that Dylan didn’t stop mattering after John Wesley Harding. Sure, most of the albums that came afterwards lack the lyrical and thematic depth and scope of his earlier work, but when I listen to New Morning now I hear it as a kind of continuation of the free-wheeling, anything goes work he was doing with the Band in the most famous basement in West Saugerties, NY, or anywhere for that matter.

New Morning is not remotely in the same league as Dylan’s best albums, and wouldn’t be even if it weren’t deeply flawed. The fantastical word spew and wicked wit that characterized his best work are nowhere to be found–New Morning lacks the spite and scorn of his best solo work, and the hilarious tumbling of The Basement Tapes. I have often wondered what happened to Dylan’s surrealistic whimsy; it’s one of the things I love most about him, and he seems to have it lost it forever somewhere between The Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding. I hear distant echoes of it–I’m thinking in particular about some of the more fanciful lines in the high-spirited “One More Weekend”–on New Morning, but they’re few and far between.

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