If ever a Grateful Dead adventure deserved comprehensive documentation, it’s the 1978 trip to Egypt. Rocking the Cradle Egypt 1978 only manages to scratch the surface of the experience on some fronts, but that’s indicative of how expansive the experience actually was.
Dr. Dog didn’t decorate the stage of Higher Ground as they have on some stops of their current tour – but they didn’t have to. Dr. Dog’s music that night was sufficiently a world unto itself.
On his most recent albums, Rodney Crowell brandishes his keen intellect as much as a defense mechanism as a means of skewering sacred cows. But allowing Joe Henry, a songwriter of no means skills himself, to produce Sex and Gasoline, Crowell more readily opens up his heart, as if he already doesn’t exactly wear it on his sleeve.
Join the Band is shrewd in its aim toward Little Feat’s core demographic, new fan and old. Essentially it’s the same one courted by executive producer Jimmy Buffett, who sing, appropriately enough, on a reggae/calypso arrangement of "Time Loves A Hero.” Yet fans of Brooks and Dunn will be as curious to hear their heroes on "Willin'" as Black Crowes fans will be to hear Chris Robinson croon "Oh Atlanta;" the latter is a slice of vintage Feats funk in which the singer puts his distinctly Southern voice to most effective use.
This is the debut of new regular column at Glide devoted to reissues, remasters and expanded editions of archival recordings. It is designed to serve as a reminder all good music is timeless, no matter when it was originally recorded or when it’s being (re-) introduced to new musiclovers. This edition focuses on THE REPLACEMENTS
It still moves all right. There were no video projections of My Morning Jacket’s performance at Boston’s Bank of America Pavilion, but that’s understandable. The camera operators would’ve been driven crazy trying to keep up with the irrepressible Jim James as he careened around the stage.
One of rock’s greatest improvisational bands, Little Feat regrouped in the eighties after disbanding for a short interval in the wake of the death of founder and titular leader Lowell George. Little Feat’s Richie Hayward took a few moments to discuss Join The Band as well as other activities with which he fills his time personally and professionally. It was a conversation as good natured and unhurried as the music of the group for which he is drummer and founding member.
Long before any mention was made of Hot Tuna’s first (live) album, the atmosphere at Higher Ground September 2nd was very reminiscent of that eponymous work released in 1970. Quiet but focused musicianship among three empathetic highly skilled instrumentalists generated an intimate mood the likes of which is rare at any venue.
How startling it is to watch and listen to The Felice Brothers? Imagine if you will five characters that seem to have walked straight out of tunes from Bob Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes. Their connection with the rustic mythos suggests they heard that music as infants or perhaps even Music From Big Pink, from within the womb?
Stone of Sisyphus is the great-lost Chicago album, at least till now with its release via Rhino. Recorded in 1993 in the wake of a series of middle-of –the road commercial successes, and originally intended as Chicago XXII, the album was conceived by the band and its producer Peter Wolf (once a Zappa sideman) as a return to the early approach the band utilized in creating original material arranged with room for improvisation.
