Music Reviews: Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Catch a Fire Revisited and a Power Pop Anthology, plus Van Duren and John Vincent III An Expanded Edition of Bob Marley & the Wailers’ ‘Catch a Fire’ Bob Marley & the Wailers’ Catch a Fire is aptly named because it helped the reggae giant’s music catch fire […]
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Bentley’s Bandstand: November 2023 By Bill Bentley Luther Dickinson, Magic Music for Family Folk. It’s widely known in modern music circles, especially the crowd that zeroes in on the roots persuasion of the music, that Luther Dickinson is a High Priest of so many styles in that crowd. Being the son of Memphis maven Jim […]
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A 50th-Anniversary Edition of Frank Zappa’s ‘Over-nite Sensation’ Over-nite Sensation, which first appeared in 1973, ranks among Frank Zappa’s most significant and accessible releases up to that point. The record wasn’t quite what its title suggested, but it did give Zappa his first gold record and one of the biggest chart successes of his […]
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Grooves & Cuts – October 2023 Too many reviews accumulated through the month — so I postponed this month’s article to next month. Featured Reviews:Randall Kromm – Late SeptemberSteve Cropper – With A Little Help From My FriendsChest Fever – Music From Big PinkZach Berkman – The Heart Of Zach BerkmanBen Gage – Two Singing […]
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When it first appeared in 1979, Bob Dylan’s Live at Budokan garnered mixed reviews. It did go gold and receive some praise, particularly in Europe, but many listeners derided its radical rearrangements of classic material as well as its use of backup singers and brassy, big-band instrumentation. Dylan may have been in Japan, but it […]
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Music Reviews: Jimi Hendrix at the Hollywood Bowl, plus Little Feat, Jon Dee Graham, the Resonant Rogues, and Danny O’Keefe Jimi Hendrix released only four albums during his too-brief lifetime, but new LPs, CDs, and box sets have continued to appear in a steady stream in the years after his 1970 death. Today, more than […]
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Cranberries, plus Lee Gallagher, the Three O’Clock, Sylvia Tyson, and Emma Wilson The Cranberries’ third album, To the Faithful Departed, garnered decidedly mixed reviews when it first appeared in 1996. Some critics loved it, but others panned the musical and lyrical changes it introduced, with Rolling Stone, for example, giving it one-and-a-half stars out […]
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Bentley’s Bandstand: October 2023By Bill Bentley The Americans, Strays. It takes a lot of belief to name a band The Americans. And that’s exactly what Patrick Ferris, Zac Sokolow, Jake Faulkner and Tim Carr prove without doubt on STRAYS, their latest collection of songs. The band has been together since 2010, releasing a handful of […]
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Music Reviews: Lynyrd Skynyrd, plus Leon Rosselson, Half Stack, Robert Finley, and Chest Fever Lynyrd Skynyrd has never been quite as innovative or important as the jazz-influenced Allman Brothers, its most obvious competitor for the title of King of Southern Rock. That said, the Jacksonville, Florida–based group has played a pivotal role in popularizing the […]
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God knows, no shortage exists of books devoted to Bob Dylan and his music. There are album-by-album critiques, songbooks, scholarly works, biographies, a memoir, and other writings from the bard himself. There are also Q&A collections, including yours truly’s Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters. Believe it or not, there’s even a book that describes […]
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