Author: Jeff Burger

 By Jeff Burger Goats Head Soup, which the Rolling Stones cooked up in Jamaica, Los Angeles, and London in late 1972 and the first half of 1973, topped charts in the U.S., England, and other countries. It also delivered a number-one international single, “Angie.” But critics offered lukewarm reviews for this 11th (British) album—and those […]

  Even if you listened eight days a week, it would take you almost forever to hear all the Beatles cover versions out there. A new anthology, however, narrows the field to ones that will fit on three discs by focusing on a noteworthy subset of this material. Called Looking Through a Glass Onion: The […]

By Jeff Burger The Grateful Dead’s first three albums—their eponymous 1967 debut, 1968’s Anthem of the Sun, and 1969’s Aoxomoxoa—feature psychedelia-influenced, experimental, sometimes sprawling numbers that reflect the milieu of the group’s Haight-Ashbury home base in San Francisco. On their June 1970 fourth studio album, however, they follow such artists as Bob Dylan (1968’s John […]

If you buy only one album by Little Richard, who died in May at age 87, it should be the three-disc Specialty Sessions. That terrific 1990 anthology is where you’ll find the original versions of all of his Bumps Blackwell–produced blockbuster hits from the late 1950s as well as everything else he released during his […]

  By Jeff Burger Various Artists, Willie Nile Uncovered. Forty years after the release of his debut album, Willie Nile still isn’t widely known, and neither are some of the most impressive artists on this two-disc tribute album. That fact underscores how easily fine musicians can get lost in the shuffle, though in the case […]

By Jeff Burger Hate for Sale is only the fourth album to be credited to the Pretenders in this century, but that’s misleading: Pretender-in-chief Chrissie Hynde has also released a couple of CDs under her own name in recent years as well as a collaborative project with Welsh singer JP Jones, and it’s often difficult […]

When Roxy Music fans first heard that cofounder and lead singer Bryan Ferry had recorded a batch of 1950s and 60s rock hits, the news must initially have seemed as surprising as Bob Dylan’s decision decades later to tackle Christmas standards and the Great American Songbook. The year was 1973, and Roxy Music had so […]

  Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’s most significant and best-known collaboration was in 1966 for the Beach Boys’ legendary Smile album, which remained unreleased for decades, though a bit of its material surfaced on 1967’s Smiley Smile. Parks contributed lyrics for that project, which gave birth to such elaborately constructed classics as “Heroes and […]