Posts by Doug Collette

Listen My Friends, a twenty track Moby Grape compilation, is arguably superior to the now out-of-print double-cd Vintage simply because this one focuses solely on the group’s strengths.

Warren Zevon invaded the mainstream only briefly during his career but in so doing forged a memorable persona with the public. Preludes, a double disc package of unreleased demo recordings combined with an interview on cd, illustrates how much more there is to the man than the combination of comic absurdity and latent violence in songs such as “Excitable Boy” and “Werewolves of London.”

Dirt Farmer is Levon Helm’s first solo studio recording in a quarter of a century and the debut album on his own label. . An outgrowth of informal sessions in his Woodstock barn studio, its music flows with all the ease and grace with which Levon sings. Meanwhile, musicians including multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell and Helm’s daughter Amy (co-producers of the project) imbue the music with warmth and an inviting informality.

Considering how much has been written, spoken and contemplated about Bob Dylan’s appearances at the Newport Folk Festival, especially his (literally and figuratively) electric set in 1965, it boggles the mind it’s taken forty years for the film of those shows to find broad circulation. But the wait to see Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror is worth it, because the director lets the performances speak for themselves, and they constitute a profound statement indeed.

Jerry Garcia would chuckle to think of a multi-day event hosted by a major American university designed to dissect Grateful Dead culture and history. No doubt too as the weekend long series of events progressed, he would become more than bemused by the proceedings.

On John Fogerty’s new album Revival the ex-leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival acknowledges the brilliance of his past work rather than deny it. But the wry likes of “Creedence Song” notwithstanding, an air of self-consciousness pervades the album, which begs the question of whether Fogerty’s embrace of his past now overcompensates for that period he boycotted it over twenty-years ago?

The reissue of the Grateful Dead’s very first two archive titles, simultaneous with the release of Three From the Vault, reaffirms how endlessly fascinating it is to follow this band. And it’s not just the music, but also the way the group meshed aesthetic and business activities.

Rose Hill Drive’s performance set reached a frenzied conclusion, before a dwindling crowd. The threesome enganged in more free-form improvisation than their previous visit to this same venue back in May of this year: recall the instrumental conflagrations of Cream in their heyday, if you would, and relish the self-renewing aspect of great rock and roll.

Watching Chris and Rich Robinson perform together during Birds of a Feather: Live at the Roxy, prompts the observation that performing without the Black Crowes is the best thing the founders have done for their band in recent memory.

As leader of Mott the Hoople, Ian Hunter was as vulnerable as he was acerbic, seeing rock and roll as a metaphor for all facets of the human condition. The perpetually-shaded iconoclast has continued this work through a dozen post-Mott solo albums, the success of which has depended, as is the case with most literate songwriters, on the balance between musicianship/production and the material as means to a message.

Porter, Batiste and Stoltz launched back into their funk attack, which is what the increasingly animated crowd came to experience anyway: to dance not to trance. The spirit of New Orleans is really a state of mind, residing collectively, at least for one chilly late autumn evening, upstairs in Club Metronome.

All four previous Bob Dylan collections, not counting The Bootleg Series, contained nuggets sufficiently rare to entice both the completists and the novice collector. The choice selections of the new three-cd compilation (also available in a single disc distillation as well as part of a deluxe collections box) counter claims it's redundant.

Time Out, Take Five is the first in a regular Jazz column by Glide contributor Doug Collette, where he’ll take five recent releases and size them up.

With his new album Peter Case has come full circle. While Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John is not the same sharp turn as his eponymous 1986 album was (in contrast to the preceding rockin’ Plimsouls), the Californian’s first on the Yep Roc label does constitute a return to simplicity (not to mention a homage to roots) that’s refreshing in conception and execution.

It’s perfectly appropriate Jorma Kaukonen writes the brief liner notes to this recently exhumed Jefferson Airplane concert recording. Sweeping Up the Spotlight documents Jefferson Airplane just as it was fracturing along the fault line that opened earlier in 1969 when the guitarist/vocalist/songwriter launched Hot Tuna with bassist Jack Casady.