Monthly Archives: August 2022

VIA PRESS RELEASE | The first-ever, career-spanning documentary on the life and times of legendary metal icon Ronnie James Dio comes to cinemas worldwide for two days only on Wed Sept. 28 and Sun Oct. 2. Executive produced by Dio’s widow and longtime manager, Wendy Dio, and fully authorized by the artist’s estate, DIO: Dreamers Never Die delves deep into the singer’s incredible rise from a ‘50s doo-wop crooner to his early rock days in Elf and Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, to replacing Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath, and finally cementing his rock star status with his own band, DIO.

The film incorporates never-before-seen footage and personal photos, as well as offering intimate scenes with his closest peers, family, and friends, among them Wendy Dio, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Glenn Hughes, Vinny Appice, Lita Ford, Rob Halford, Sebastian Bach, Eddie Trunk, and Jack Black, as they bring viewers inside the life of one of rock and roll’s true heroes and one of the most beloved figures in rock.

In addition to the feature-length film, this special cinema event will also include a hand-picked selection of outtakes from the cutting room floor, creating an experience that is exclusive only to fans in attendance. Presented in cinemas worldwide by Trafalgar Releasing and BMG, tickets for DIO: Dreamers Never Die go on sale on Wed Aug. 24 at 15.00 UK time at www.diodreamersneverdie.com

“We are excited to be partnering with BMG and Wendy Dio to present DIO: Dreamers Never Die in cinemas worldwide,” said Kymberli Frueh, SVP for Programming and Content Acquisitions for Trafalgar Releasing. “Ronnie James Dio has and continues to influence the heavy metal movement. This cinema event will take fans on a big screen journey into the creative and personal life of this notable frontman.”

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Celebrating Dave Brock in advance of his 81st birthday tomorrow.
—Ed.

What do I know about Hawkwind? Jack Shit, I’m afraid. Okay, I know Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister spent three years in the band. And I know they play what they call “space rock,” which I’m not quite sure what that means but what I hear is a sort of hybrid of Neu-style Krautrock and acid rock with lots of prog-lite keyboards and sci-fi lyrics, some based on the writings of such top-notch futuristic writers as Michael Moorcock—who had his own band, Michael Moorcock’s Deep Fix—and J.G. Ballard.

Unfortunately, I hate science fiction almost as much as I hate Hobbits, which I shoot on sight with my sister’s cat rifle in Drúadan Forest, which most people are surprised to learn is located in York, Pennsylvania. And when I feel the need to explore outer space, I generally stick to the weird and wonderful skronk and star-fire headpiece of Sun Ra and His Arkestra, because Sun Ra wasn’t just obsessed with space, he was a bona fide citizen. (I have my brother Sterno to thank for my Sun Ra obsession; he owns some 168 Sun Ra LPs, including an extremely rare 45-minute bootleg of Ra brushing his teeth. For a bootleg, the sound quality is excellent.)

Well, the joke, as usual, is on me, because I finally checked out England’s Hawkwind, and they kick interstellar ass. Many of their songs travel at warp speed and they all have great melodies, and if I don’t always like the lyrics it doesn’t much matter, because I’m pressed back into my easy chair with the G-forces turning my mouth into a sideways O and flattening my nose against my left cheek. Or they drone on in a cool, slower way that is every bit as satisfying. In short, Hawkwind knows how to rock, and should it ever decide to roll, the existence of planet Earth itself could be in peril.

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The process of creating prerecorded music has always been shrouded in a fair amount of mystery; one of the most curious figures in the production chain is the role of the mastering engineer. Once a recorded album is completely finished, it is sent to that person who uses their magical and mystically unique skills to tweak the overall sound of the music and inject that otherworldly quality that most professionally recorded materials contain.

To help us demystify this enigmatic process is Grammy award winning mastering engineer Michael Graves. Mr. Graves has recently remastered the entire Blondie catalog for a sprawling box set highlighting Blondie’s complete recorded output, including many rare tracks that have never seen the light of day. Graves discusses not only his work on the Blondie project, but also his lauded output for Analog Africa, Omnivore Records, Dust to Digital, and other highly respected labels. He also mastered my most recent album, The Show.

Michael Graves isn’t just any mastering engineer, he’s also an audio restoration expert. While many listeners love hearing their favorite professionally recorded albums, remastered to sound even better than the originals—if that’s possible—just remember that there is much wonderful music that has been forgotten. Oftentimes, those tapes, records, cassettes, and CDs are not in the best physical condition. So, it takes an audio restoration expert like Graves to resurrect those recordings so that they sound the best that they can.

Show Business is an industry of sleight of hand, a world of illusion where everything is not always what it appears to be. There are a few insiders who are adept at using the tools necessary to create that final sheen of professionalism. Join us as Michael Graves gives us a quick peek behind the curtain to understand a few tricks of the mastering trade.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector, and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Evan Toth Show and TVD Radar on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

When Lydia Lunch and her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks clawed their way onto NYC’s No Wave scene, plenty of listeners lowered the grates on their ears and shut up shop for good. 8 Eyed Spy weren’t a room clearer—they were a state clearer; a friend of mine visited Utah at the time and the entire state was deserted. Evidently someone had put the album on their turntable and the population had fled en masse to the Onaqui Mountains, leaving warm dinners still sitting on their tables and parakeets in mid-squawk. Needless to say, I loved them.

But Lunch’s subsequent band, 8 Eyed Spy, was, relatively speaking, a tamer proposition. The caterwaul factor had dropped from ten to four, and 1997’s Luncheone—which compiles 8 Eyed Spy’s entire recorded output—is the proof. Gone, for the most part, is the deliberate grating, replaced by recognizable melodies and a sound prominently featuring Pat Irwin’s saxophone, which brings to mind James Chance and the Contortions. Which isn’t to say 8 Eyed Spy share Chance’s love for free jazz and funk. But they do like his predilection for carefully reined in chaos.

Luncheone includes three covers, which in an of itself demonstrates that Lunch was no longer rejecting the rock tradition No Wave had set out to do away with. On their cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Run Through the Jungle”—which is preceded by the borderline jazzy “Swamp”—Lunch reins in the guitar slash, and while she’ll never be Debbie Gibson, like Patti Smith (you gotta hear Smith’s cover of “You Light Up My Life”) she doesn’t set out to deconstruct the song either.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Formed from putrefying remnants of The Germs, The Consumers, The Bags, The Gun Club, and The Screamers among other LA punk outfits, 45 Grave were arguably the first American Goth/deathrock band and inarguably one of the best.

Fronted by the Exene-meets-Barbarella vocal and visual stylings of Dinah Cancer (still one of the greatest stage names in a punk rock genre full of ‘em), 45 Grave also featured Paul B. Cutler on guitar, Don Bolles on drums, Rob (Ritter) Graves on bass, and Paul Roessler on keyboards, and from that all-star line-up came 1983’s Sleep in Safety, their lone studio release and only recording with the band’s original members.

Probably most famous for the first appearance of the horrifyingly graphic, true-crime track “Partytime,” the single version of which was subsequently cut in 1985 and featured on The Return of the Living Dead soundtrack, Sleep in Safety also offered the early MTV track “Evil” and the band “theme song” “45 Grave” among other blandishments for those who like their rock and roll with a side of the macabre.

For our Real Gone Music exhumation of this classic record, we have “embalmed” a very special edition, preserving the original album’s gatefold jacket complete with lyrics and adding a custom inner sleeve drawn from the band’s very rare “A Tale of Strange Phenomena” press release—purple with black streaks vinyl! Folks have been dying for this one!

The Beach Boys have arguably created the most fulsome and legendary canon of hit songs by any American group in popular music history. While most of those hits are confined to one decade (the ’60s), they are unmatched in durability, cultural relevance, artistry, sound and being perfect examples of post-war, popular American music.

While the youthful themes of the group’s songs of surfing and especially cars have lost most of their luster over the years, the themes of yearning love, girls, and the beach still endure. The group’s peak run (from roughly 1962 until 1966) ended with the release of its most important album, Pet Sounds, but the group continued to make more fine albums. While certain of those later songs were not bona-fide chart hits, they are key parts of the group’s unmatched legacy.

At this point in history, with the long procession of music formats that have come and gone, from singles, albums, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs and downloads to streaming, one would think that for a group whose biggest hits have been packaged and re-packaged, yet another greatest hits collection would be redundant. Disabusing that notion is the mostly welcome new updated and expanded edition of the group’s Sounds of Summer best-of package.

Originally released in 2003 as a single-CD, 30-track compilation and a digital, best-of package, it was the de-facto replacement of the group’s analog Endless Summer vinyl set, as the definitive hits collection of the group. Before and since both Endless Summer and the new Sounds of Summer, there have been many other worthy greatest hits packages of the group’s music, but these two are the most acclaimed and representative of their respective eras. This new expanded version of Sounds of Summer, now must be considered the most comprehensive and as far as packaging, design, and collectability, it can’t be beat.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Prolific artist, producer, and film composer Jon Brion’s creative work has encompassed everything from film scores for movies like Lady Bird, Punch Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to collaborations with musicians like Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Kanye West, Mac Miller and many more.

Today, he announces a remastered edition of his lone 2001 debut album Meaningless, due out October 21 via Jealous Butcher Records. The coveted collection is a master course in art rock songwriting and production, borrowing from Anglophile rock, the American songbook and folk-rock jangle, and will be available on vinyl + digitally for the first time ever! Alongside the announcement, he shares opening track “Gotta Start Somewhere.”

The track is a surging anthem dedicated to overcoming doubt and putting creativity into motion. “I just started throwing things on it,” Brion says of his layered drums, percussion, electronic gurgles, and cascading sounds. He worked fast—“I mean real fast,” Brion shares. He’d wake up, have some tea, record, and then in the evening, head to Largo, the comedy and music club where his regular performances helped make him a West Coast name of note.

The 11-track collection—which includes co-writes with Aimee Mann, Grant Lee Philips, and Jeff McGregor and a cover of Cheap Trick’s “Voices”—offers a vivid backdrop for Brion’s wry observations on love, reality, identity and the elusive nature of purpose. Though he hadn’t yet created his numerous acclaimed film scores, Meaningless suggests his future success as a movie music composer. Its widescreen quality is immediately apparent, the songs suggesting similar thematic territory to those great films.

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On August 19 Merge Records does the world a great service by compiling the work of the exquisitely sui generis New Zealand duo Tall Dwarfs onto four LPs and two CDs in the collection Unravelled: 1981–2002, its songs curated and its box designed by half of the twosome, Alec Bathgate. For the time span of the title, he and Chris Knox combined exploratory and at times even psychedelic textures with uncommonly robust songwriting and came out sounding like nobody but themselves.

I’m far from the first to make the observation, but when Tall Dwarfs emerged into the 1980s underground scene, it wasn’t easy to connect the sounds made and the songs crafted by Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate to specific precedent. And what’s particularly striking about this circumstance is that the difficulty didn’t subside as the decade progressed.

This is to say, that as the duo’s music continued to gradually expand its subterranean global reach beyond the isles of New Zealand, they remained just as resistant to easy style tags as must have been the case when clued-in Kiwis heard the debut EP “Three Songs” upon release in 1981, notably not on Flying Nun but on the Furtive label.

Today, it might be easy for a Tall Dwarfs newbie to make quick associations to lo-fi and to DIY, but neither of those terms was really common parlance in the 1980s, which left many listeners scratching their heads over just what are these cats were up to, and had many writers making some interesting comparisons, spanning from predecessors Syd Barrett and The Beatles to contemporaries Butthole Surfers and Half Japanese.

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MANSFIELD, MA | There was never a dull moment on stage at the Rod Stewart show Friday night in Mansfield, Mass. The 77 year-old British rock and pop singer and songwriter brought every bit of energy, charisma, and showmanship to the Xfinity Center.

The show opened with Cheap Trick, who remains a good rock ‘n roll band, skillful on their instruments and vocals, but with little fan interaction or compelling dynamics on stage. But, there was some renewed enthusiasm in the band thanks in part to Robin Taylor Zander, son of Cheap Trick’s front man Robin Zander. The young Zander plays rhythm guitar and offers vocals. The band played a great mix of songs from their catalog, but for Cheap Trick fans there to hear the hits that’s exactly what they got with show closers: “I Want You To Want Me” and “Surrender/Goodnight.”

Sir Roderick’s set design included a large arch of video displays over the stage, and disco-esque mirror paneling along the band’s platform. The look was sharp and the mood: exhilarating—a feeling like something special was about to happen. A group of female musicians strolled on stage, their seductive and serious expressions a nod to Robert Palmer’s memorable music video, as the man of the hour made his entrance to “Addicted to Love.” Right away, Stewart showed off some signature moves and a cheeky smile for the ladies in the front row.

Stewart was in constant motion, singing his legendary songs and offering tidbits about his writing process and memories of Studio 54. He wiggled, shook his glittered pant leg, and twirled his mic stand like it was 1982. Seventy-seven or 37—he didn’t skip a beat.

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