Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite’s Get Up! (released 1/29/13) is the collaboration of two music lovers who happen to be musicians.
ltimately, Fragments is yet another thought-provoking installment of the Dylan’s discography, not only in direct reflection of its source material but also on its very own terms.
After two excellent albums as a quartet, duly applauded by critics but overlooked by the masses (despite yeoman’s work on the promotional parts of their Warner Brothers record label), Little Feat reinvented itself as a sextet for Dixie Chicken. It is in this configuration that the group gained the fame it holds today (albeit in one of many subsequently revamped lineups).
As illustrated by David Lemieux and his crack team of Grateful Dead archivists, there’s a big difference between ‘predictable’ and ‘consistent.’ Continuing from late 2021 into and throughout this year, their ongoing efforts to provide provocative exhumations from the vault of the iconic band span decades of performances by the various personnel lineups of the Dead
The Byrds’ lush vocal harmonies, arguably as significant to their sound as the chiming twelve-string guitar, are distinguished in large measure by Crosby’s high harmonies. Hear his voice keen through “5D,” and while doing so, note that his rhythm guitar is a driving force of the performance: the man was as formidable in that instrumental role as his peers of the era John Lennon or Steve Miller.
Brighter, more polished and more overtly comedic than the haunting noir that is Warren Zevon’s Asylum Records debut, Excitable Boy is still a far cry from the overly-romanticized California pop-rock of forty-five years ago.
Bob Dylan’s eighth studio album John Wesley Harding (released 12/27/67) may be the most singular piece of work he’s ever created.
Notwithstanding his devotion to the rock community at large, Pete Townshend has never hidden his disdain for the hippie movement. Yet he’s never made a more definitive (albeit implicit) statement on the matter than The Who Sell Out, the album the band released at the end of 1967, the year of the ‘Summer of Love’.
With almost a half-century hindsight, Jackson Browne’s Running On Empty (released 12/6/77) doesn’t seem so far out of left field as it did upon its initial release.
It’s not absolutely necessary to be familiar with Neil Young’s history to enjoy Harvest Time, but it helps.
