Video of the Week: On Drums–Hal Blaine
29 Jan 2018 Leave a comment
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Video of the Week: The Making of 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”
27 Jan 2018 Leave a comment
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Video of the Week: “CowZ”
24 Jan 2018 Leave a comment
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14 Followup Albums That Were Almost Great
12 Jan 2018 Leave a comment
in General Posts Tags: followup albums
(via music aficionado) by Chris Willman
If only our all-or-nothing culture gave out ribbons for “almost as good.” But you definitely won’t find many critics devoting their energy to praising (or knocking) the slightly flawed appendices to blockbusters and masterpieces.
So here’s to those awfully good, B+ albums that really suffer only in comparison to what directly preceded them. And let’s relive, if you will, these Great Moments in Slightly Inferior Follow-ups! May we all be blessed to wane this well…
Eagles – ‘The Long Run’
Talk about a non-self-fulfilling prophecy of a title: Of course the Eagles would break up after putting this much blood, sweat, tears, and bickering into a follow-up to Hotel California, only to have the world sigh en masse, “Yeah, I like it about three-quarters as much as the last one.” Already inclined toward perfectionism to begin with, the band was following what mainstream rock fans would consider one of rock’s perfect albums, with nowhere to go but (slightly) down. The result was a 7-million seller—hardly a bummer, unless you’re rating it against 16 million ‘Hotel’ check-ins (or the still record-breaking 29 million certified units for their first Greatest Hits collection). Given the pickiness and expectations that made things tense in the studio, then, it’s a wonder that ‘The Long Run’ has as much looseness and life as it does. Leaving the three big singles out of it, this has some of their strangest and most mordantly funny album tracks, like Those Shoes and The Disco Strangler, not to mention the not-so-dark Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks, a song it’s still hard to believe that guys who took themselves this seriously let onto an LP. On top of those period-cynical oddities, you get one of Don Henley‘s best elegiac album-closers in Sad Café, a near-acknowledgement that the Eagles would be saying sayonara for 14 years. A lot of folks loved the ’80s just a little less without having their SoCal snark to take a temperature of the times…
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A Hard Day’s Night: Solving a Beatles Mystery with Mathematics
12 Jan 2018 Leave a comment
in General Posts Tags: a hard days night, beatles
(via ABC Australia) by Joel Werner
It’s probably the most recognisable sound in popular music.
“This is the one chord that everyone around the world knows,” says Randy Bachman, a rock star in his own right from The Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive.
It dates to July 1964 — the height of Beatlemania. The band was about to release its third album.
For the first time, it was all original music. Plus, the Beatles were shifting away from their rock ‘n’ roll roots to a more poppy sound, and this album was to be the soundtrack for their first feature film.
They needed to make a statement…
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50 Iconic Album Covers: The Fascinating Stories Behind the Sleeves
12 Jan 2018 Leave a comment
in General Posts Tags: album covers
(via NME) by Emily Barker
They’re images you’ve seen a thousand times, but what do they mean, and how did they end up on the cover of your favourite ever albums?
We rounded up 50 of the most iconic pieces of album artwork from indie releases from Joy Division, David Bowie, Amy Winehouse, Nirvana, The Smiths, Strokes, Killers and more and dived into their back stories. Some of the tales of these covers’ creation are as interesting as the albums themselves…
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Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.’: 10 Things You Didn’t Know
12 Jan 2018 Leave a comment
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(via Rolling Stone) by Dan Epstein
“Bruce Springsteen is a bold new talent with more than a mouthful to say,” raved Lester Bangs in his Rolling Stone review of Springsteen’s 1973 debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. “He’s been influenced a lot by the Band, his arrangements tend to take on a Van Morrison tinge every now and then, and he sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth sorta like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck. It’s a tuff combination, but it’s only the beginning. Because what makes Bruce totally unique and cosmically surfeiting is his words. Hot damn, what a passel o’ verbiage!”
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