Your guess is as good as mine as to why pop/soul singer Paul Young never became a household name in the U.S. True, he topped the charts one time here, with his 1985 cover of Daryll Hall’s “Every Time You Go Away,” and he broke into the top 20 with the follow-up to that song, […]
By Jeff Burger Fifty years ago, on July 31, 1969, Elvis Presley began a concert series in Las Vegas at a critical career juncture. Nine years earlier, following his stint in the army, he had traded the stage for the screen, opting to walk away from live performances and focus on moviemaking. But after acting […]
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By Jeff Burger This has been quite a year for box sets of vintage material. We’ve already witnessed the release of a four-disc Smithsonian Folkways collection celebrating the social power of music, a 14-disc collection from Bob Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, and a 38-CD Woodstock festival box, to name just a few of the […]
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Over the years, I’ve maintained a short list in my head of musicians whose lack of a mass audience has puzzled me. Among the artists on that list is rocker Elliott Murphy, who has released more than 40 mostly exceptional albums since 1974. Nearly all of them have been gobbled up by his good-sized, […]
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By Jeff Burger In the late 60s and early 70s, Ian and Sylvia Tyson were among the brightest lights on the Canadian music scene, not only as performers but as composers of some of the era’s best folksongs. Their marriage and professional partnership fell apart in 1975, but in the current century, they’ve been […]
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The rocksteady movement—which emerged in Jamaica after ska and foreshadowed reggae—yielded a great deal of memorable music. Some of the best of it issued from the Melodians, a vocal group whose finest work was produced by the influential Leslie Kong. The last of the trio’s original members died in 2018, and most Americans know the […]
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By Jeff Burger Imagine a graph with two lines, one showing the rising net worth of Baby Boomers over the past half century, the other indicating how the size or price of music box sets has risen over the same period. The two lines, one suspects, would be rather parallel. Remember the days when a […]
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By Jeff Burger As I noted in a 2016 review, it’s a good thing that NRBQ are known by their initials rather than their full name, which is New Rhythm and Blues Quartet (or, originally, Quintet). Their music can sound like avant-garde jazz one minute, Beatlesque rock the next, and rockabilly the next, and […]
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By Jeff Burger In the liner notes to a posthumous anthology called No Big Surprise, Steve Goodman’s widow Nancy wrote that he “wanted to live as normal a life as possible, only he had to live it as fast as he could.” That he did, writing, performing, and recording a ton of eclectic music prior […]
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I stopped taking the word “complete” seriously after I shelled out big bucks for the 10-CD Complete Hank Williams in 1998, only to discover a flood of material from him that the box didn’t include. First, I encountered the two-disc Health & Happiness Shows, which had been issued five years earlier; then came such albums […]
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