Monthly Archives: July 2018

If you stress it, they’ll press it. —Ed.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Bear Family Records has long showed its love for Lefty Frizzell. The award-winning reissue label compiled its first Frizzell compilation—the 14-LP His Life, His Music—in 1984. In 1992, Bear Family released Life’s Like Poetry, a 12-CD box set updated and expanded with many non-session recordings. Now, more than 25 years later, the label has topped itself with An Article From Life: The Complete Recordings, due out in the U.S. on October 19, 2018. Undeniably the most definitive collection of the country star’s material, this majestic 20-CD anthology delivers a complete assembling of Frizzell’s recordings—including many tracks not on the prior Bear Family releases—that provide a fascinating, in-depth look at this legendary musician’s work. No less an authority than the acclaimed author/ producer Colin Escott has hailed this epic release as “the cornerstone of every country music collection.”

An Article From Life’s first nine CDs chronologically cover Frizzell’s 25-year recording career. Disc One kicks off with the two songs on his 1950 breakout first single, “I Love You a Thousand Ways” and “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time,” while Disc Nine ends with “Life’s Like Poetry,” a Merle Haggard tune from his last album, Classic Style, which released just months before Frizzell’s tragic death in 1975, when he was just 47 years old. In between are 260-some tracks, all newly remastered, of all the songs Frizzell released on 45, 78, and LP, featuring such signature numbers as “Always Late (With Your Kisses),” “Look What Thoughts Will Do,” “Forever (and Always),” “Long Black Veil,” “She’s Gone Gone Gone,” and “Saginaw, Michigan.” A full track listing can be found here.

The set’s next trio of CDs dig even deeper into the Frizzell vaults. The first two discs are stocked with 71 tracks of demos and private recordings that include material going back to the 1940s. The third disc, meanwhile, presents hard-to-find radio recordings that Frizzell did for the Navy and Air Force on Country Music Time and for the U.S. Army-produced Country Style USA. An Article From Life’s final eight discs offer an audio book version of the well-regarded biography I Love You a Thousand Ways: The Lefty Frizzell Story read by its author, David Frizzell, Lefty’s little brother and a country music star in his own right.

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“My (new) relationship with vinyl.”

“Before I was born everyone was already using CDs… I am a newcomer to vinyl. In fact the first vinyl record I ever owned was one I bought only 6 years ago, and the purchase was just out of irony. I was eyeing off jackets in a thrift shop in Sydney, Australia, when I stumbled across a record called Hey Joe! Hey Moe! by Moe Bandy and Joe Stampley.

The cover was two cheery men, hanging out their car doors sporting cowboy shirts, holding beers, with massive ear to ear grins with their thumbs up. And, as indicated by the speech bubbles above their heads, one was shouting “Hey Joe!” and the other replying “Hey Moe!” I was hooked. Not on these guys, but the fact that album covers could be so shit, yet still make it to press. I started spotting bad record album covers all the time and kept buying them to tile across my walls at home.

A favourite and many-times repeat offender on my wall was a bloke called Richard Clayderman, who would always be found leaning painfully awkwardly on pianos, keys, or sheet music. The fun never stopped and my wall slowly tiled to multiple rooms of the apartment. I was becoming unnerved though with the number of records I had collected, as I had not actually owned a record player even once at this stage. I needed to hear what these faces on my wall had to say. I needed to know what was going on through their heads whilst these terrible photos of them were being taken. I needed to hear their music. So, at a point roughly 4 years ago, I went to the local record store to buy a record player.

The record store changed me.

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Lightnin’ Sam Hopkins remains one of the crucial figures in the annals of the blues. By extension, he recorded a ton, and owning all his music will require diligence and a seriously long shelf. However, there are a few albums that are a must even for casual blues collectors, and his self-titled effort from 1959 is one of them. Recorded by historian Samuel Charters in Hopkins’ apartment while he played a borrowed guitar, it served as the door-opener to years of prominence. A highly intimate gem of nimble-fingered deep blues feeling, Lightnin’ Hopkins is out now on vinyl through Smithsonian Folkways, remastered from the source tapes in a tip-on jacket with Charters’ original notes.

To call Lightnin’ Hopkins the byproduct of rediscovery isn’t inaccurate, but it does risk stripping the contents of its unique story. Unlike Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and John Hurt (all from Mississippi), Texan Hopkins had only been inactive for a few years when Samuel Charters found and recorded him in Houston, and if he’d been playing since the 1930s, he was still very much in his musical prime.

Hopkins debuted on record in 1946 for the Aladdin label of Los Angeles in tandem with pianist Wilson “Thunder” Smith, the partnership bringing him his sobriquet. From there, a solid decade of studio dates (and some R&B chart action) commenced; his additional sides for Aladdin fill a 2CD set, and the sessions for Gold Star take up two separate CD volumes. Additionally, there were worthy recordings for Modern, Sittin’ in With, and majors Mercury and Decca. 1954 brought a massive spurt of wild, highly amplified material for the Herald label; it contrasts sharply with the one-man circumstance of Lightnin’ Hopkins.

If commercial recording industry prospects had dried up by ’59 and Hopkins’ guitar was in hock, there was no trace of rustiness from inactivity, though the comfort level does increase as these songs progress (the bottle of gin Charters bought likely had something to do with it). What’s shared with his prior electric band stuff is a recognizable, eventually signature style based in the conversation between rural blues verve and more citified boogie motion (in this he shares much with John Lee Hooker).

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Recordings is pleased to announce a vinyl reissue of Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66’s long-out-of-print album Greatest Hits, due out this July 27th.

Featuring 12 of the internationally beloved star’s best songs from the ’60s, this collection offers listeners a prime overview of Mendes’ signature blend of bossa nova and samba paired with distinctive pop instrumentation. Originally released in 1970 at the height of Mendes’ fame, Greatest Hits includes the group’s ’67 breakthrough “Look of Love,” bossa nova standard “Mais Que Nada,” plus chart-topping covers of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair” and The Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill.”

Greatest Hits highlights the finest cuts from Herb Alpert Presents (1966) through Crystal Illusions (1969), giving listeners a taste of Mendes’ revolutionary Latin-pop rhythms, featuring evocative female vocals and lavish orchestration by the Academy and GRAMMY®-Award-winning composer and arranger Dave Grusin.

Producer, composer, keyboardist, and vocalist Sergio Mendes began his career in Niterói, Brazil, in the early ’60s, playing with the likes of Antônio Carlos Jobim and Cannonball Adderly. It was the formation of the Brazil ’66, however, which truly sparked his global stardom-a success in part attributable to the group’s novel blending of English and Portuguese lyrics in their recordings.

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Most of us associate a specific album with a specific period of time, whether it be that special summer following graduation from high school, the night we almost got busted for underage drinking and ended up puking in the backseat of Jumbo Harner’s dad’s Plymouth Fury, or the day we fell in love with that certain somebody who tore our heart out and left us forever confused, angst ridden, and bitter.

And so it goes with John Cale’s LP Sabotage/Live, which Cale recorded with a six-piece band at CBGB on a June night in 1979.

I was 21 years old and mentally going to pieces in a house in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania that was collapsing right around me. Not that I noticed, really; when the ceiling in the room next to mine collapsed, dropping a one-ton beam square on a housemate’s bed (he fled the house that same day), it didn’t even occur to me to seek safer quarters.

To be honest, I would have welcomed a one-ton beam crushing me in my sleep. It would have come as something of a relief.

I was two months into a bona fide nervous breakdown and drinking to blot out consciousness. And I had company, for ours was a halfway house for the damned. My fellow inmates included a glassy-eyed fellow as translucent as a deep sea fish who was continually drunk and flitted silently about the house never speaking a single word to anybody. It was said he was from a wealthy family and had been thrown out of West Point and a couple of Ivy League schools for drinking before ending up at what amounted to a so-so state university in the sticks. It frightened me to even look at him. It was like looking into a lurid funhouse mirror of my future.

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Sound reads from the archives, all summer long. —Ed.

In terms of popularity, America never produced an equivalent to David Bowie. But there was Jobriath, an unfortunate victim of record label hype and consumer indifference who produced what’s easily the USA’s purest expression of glam sensibilities.

Jobriath Boone, né Bruce Wayne Campbell is one of the more fascinating casualties in rock’s colorful history. Starting out in the ultra-obscure pop-folk-psyche group Pigeon (who recorded an LP and a single for Decca in ’69) after defecting from a Los Angeles production of Hair, his demo tape was stumbled upon by ‘70s mover-and-shaker Jerry Brandt, who managed to get him signed to Elektra Records for the reported sum of $500,000. A barrage of publicity followed, including a billboard in Times Square and an appearance on the late night TV variety program The Midnight Special. Problem was, his ’73 debut tanked commercially, setting off a media backlash that left his follow-up Creatures of the Street to wither without promotion.

His relationship with Brandt severed, Jobriath was held in the clutches of a ten year contract that kept him from recording any further material. Instead, he worked as a cabaret singer under the name Cole Berlin and lived in the Chelsea Hotel, where he died of AIDS in 1983.

Jobriath’s status as an openly gay musician sets him apart from his glam contemporaries. Where Bowie and others flirted with the perception of bi-sexuality, Jobriath made no bones about his sexual orientation. He described himself to the press as a “true fairy,” displaying frankness and flamboyance that surely damaged his chances with many observers hiding a closed mind in the closet, and in fact this defiant boldness situates Jobriath as an exponent of the camp theatricality that’s long been an aspect of gay culture.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Recordings is excited to announce the release of For Discos Only: Indie Dance Music From Fantasy & Vanguard Records (1976-1981), a comprehensive collection of the music that lit up a thousand dance floors in the mid ’70s and early ’80s, inspiring a revolution in the music world.

This collection pulls killer tracks from respected and influential independent record labels on opposite coasts—San Francisco’s Fantasy Records and New York City’s Vanguard Records—and is a veritable must-have for fans of the pioneering movement from which emerged the birth of the “remix,” an innovative musical practice that prefigured house, techno, and hip-hop. The collection will be available August 24th as a 5-LP box set or a 3-disc CD package, as well as digitally.

Featuring over 30 songs, mostly extended and remixed 12″ single versions built to move the dance floor, For Discos Only includes music from groundbreaking disco artists including: Sylvester, the Players Association, the Blackbyrds, Poussez!, Frisky, the Nobles, Rainbow Brown, Bill Summers and Summer Heat, Fat Larry’s Band, Idris Muhammad, Carol Williams, Free Expression, Side Effect, Spiders Webb, Damon Harris, Slick, Roni Griffith, Ike Turner feat. Tina Turner and Home Grown Funk, Phil Hurtt, Two Tons O’ Fun, the Ring, Paradise Express, and Fever.

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