Posts by Doug Collette

It didn’t take five decades to discern how much Bob Dylan’s Desire benefited from its release almost immediately in the wake of the previous autumn’s Rolling Thunder tour. The public fanfare and commercial success accorded the title belied the rough-hewn nature of the nine tracks, the borderline sloppy tenor of which might well have been […]

Rhino Records has issued some very expansive archival collections of the Replacements’ music, and, at least in terms of heft, this triple-CD set of Let It Be doesn’t quite measure up to 2019’s Dead Man’s Pop/Don’t Tell a Soul and the next year’s Pleased to Meet Me.  But that’s only because the vinyl iteration of […]

It was almost six years ago to the day that Bela Fleck and the Flecktones played at the Flynn Center and, through their good-natured stage presence and keen collective musical instincts, conjured up all the convivial air of the holiday season.  Aided and abetted by some special guests on 12/9/2025, the band achieved that same […]

Anyone who thought the Byrds’ debut album was the work of a one-hit wonder based on the commercial success of “Mr. Tambourine Man” turned out to be sadly mistaken when the quintet’s sophomore LP Turn! Turn! Turn! was released on 12/6/65. The marriage of folk and rock would remain a staple of contemporary music up […]

Listening to The Who’s debut album, My Generation (released 12/3/65) with a six-decade perspective, it is hard to believe this band would evolve into the creators of some of the most enduring works in contemporary rock, i.e., Tommy and Who’s Next.  Then again, the very title song of the LP is a statement of recognition and admiration that […]

In the 60 years since its release, the Beatles’ Rubber Soul (12/3/65) has come to be regarded as one of the pinnacles of the Liverpudlians’ discography. But, sacrilegious as it may sound, innovative instrumentation and production barely offset the erratic quality of the original material. Composed to meet the contractual obligation of another full-length long player just […]

 The legacy of Brent Mydland continues to grow with this latest edition of the ongoing Grateful Dead archive series. The departure of Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux in 1979 opened up an opportunity for the iconic band to reconfigure its chemistry dramatically and, as evidenced by the two nearly-complete shows comprising Rainbow Theatre, London, England […]

Available on vinyl, digital and compact disc formats for successive late 2025 Record Store Days, Warren Zevon’s final live performance, recorded Live At The Edmonton Folk Music Festival, joins 1980’s Stand In The Fire (issued in expanded form twice) and 1993’s Learning To Flinch, as sterling examples of how the late singer/songwriter so artfully transposed […]

Looking back half a century, it only makes sense that The Band’s Northern Lights – Southern Cross compares so favorably with the iconic group’s stellar first two albums. The ‘clubhouse atmosphere’ generated in the California studio edifice they dubbed ‘Shangri-la’ was a tangible recreation of that inspiring intimacy in the ‘Big Pink’ house back in […]

With three decades’ worth of hindsight, The Rolling Stones’ Stripped (released 11/13/95) is proof positive that, as often as the iconic band has simply gone through the motions, it has endeavored to do just the opposite. And the subsequent DVD/CD package, released just over a decade later as Totally Stripped, cements that impression. After an ever-so-brief intro that […]

With five decades of hindsight, Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Zuma (released 11/10/75) boasts the most cogent, linear logic of any album in the former Buffalo Springfielder’s discography. With an ideal balance of tightly-structured tracks, extended improvisational interludes, and two essentially acoustic, harmony pieces, it readily qualifies as a perfect LP (alongside Little Feat’s Dixie […]

A half-century perspective confirms how momentous 1975 was for Tommy Bolin. The late guitarist/songwriter completed and released his splendid first solo album, Teaser, and, around the same time, was recruited into the ranks of seminal hard rockers Deep Purple, taking the place of Ritchie Blackmore. Yet whereas Bolin had never released a record under his own name […]

As much a result of his own prolific nature as the moving effect of reaching the milestone referenced in the album title, Paul Kelly’s Seventy arrives hot on the heels of Fever Longing Still, his studio album of just last year.  Shorn of the horns and strings of the latter, however, the Australian’s twenty-eighth studio […]

Because Bob Dylan’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963 covers much the same ground as the 2025 biopic A Complete Unknown, it is the ideal collection to release in the wake of that film. As has been the case with previous editions of this archival enterprise, the curators, headed by co-producers […]

The cover photos on reissues of Rory Gallagher’s Against The Grain (released 10/31/75) are much preferable to the original graphic design’s contrivance. The close-up of the late Irishman’s Fender Stratocaster shows the guitar’s well-worn finish, an apt depiction not only of Gallagher’s rough-hewn blues-rock but also of the man’s stubbornly forthright aversion to commercializing his […]

Craig Taborn/Nels Cline/Marcus Gilmore: Trio of  Bloom (Pyroclastic Records) – The Trio of  Bloom phrase may or may not be an ironic reference to the 1979 alliance of John McLaughlin, Jaco Pastorius and Tony Williams–the short-lived ‘Trio of Doom–but certainly as Ronald Shannon Jackson’s noisy “Nightwhistlers” gives way to the sweet ethereality of “Unreal Light,” […]

Over the course of their thirty-some years together, Medeski Martin & Wood have followed their collective instincts in every facet of their work as unerringly as they do within the spontaneity of their moments live on stage. A quarter-century reflection upon The Dropper thus vividly indicates how the threesome constantly challenge themselves and, in doing so, […]

As a longstanding professional musician, Greg Anton knows full well the archetypes of that universe as well as their attendant cliches, which, like most truisms, actually contain kernels of truth. Accordingly, he has no qualms about turning the platitudes inside out and on their head during the course of unreeling his fictional story of disputed […]

Ever since Chrissie Hynde courageously engaged in that tremendous leap of faith it took to form the band Pretenders in 1978, she has consistently taken great pains not to indulge in complacency or repeat herself in any way (and that goes for her solo activities too, such as the stellar 2021 collection Standing In The […]

Luther Dickinson’s concept for Dead Blues is not all that implausible. After all, in the earliest days of the Grateful Dead, blues constituted a healthy proportion of their repertoire, most of which stage presentations were led by the late Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan.  And even as the psychedelic warriors morphed over time, songs sourced in the […]