With Halloween coming on Monday, that means that the Christmas season is almost upon us.  Stores have already begun to put out Christmas merchandise and Christmas CDs have begun to hit the shelves.  Next week sees the release of Real Gone's mega-Christmas slate, including three Second Disc Records titles featuring Jack Jones, Eddy Arnold and Mitch Miller.  In addition, Real Gone has just announced its exclusives for the Black Friday November 25 Record Store Day event which is part of the kickoff to the holiday shopping season and the label's December batch of titles.

Real Gone will release two vinyl exclusives on Black Friday.  The first is a double LP vinyl edition of their  Got a Mind to Give Up Living - Live 1966 from The Paul Butterfield Blues Band.  This album was originally released on CD by Real Gone in June of this year.  Recorded in May, 1966, the concert finds the blues-rockers two months before the release of their classic East-West album.  This concert features music from that album and also features Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield on guitars.  This new vinyl edition is limited to 2,000 copies and features "Butter" yellow and "Bloom" blue vinyl.

The second RSD exclusive is not a music album, but more of an audiobook.  First released in 1966 on Broadside Records as a companion to the book of the same name, The Psychedelic Experience served a basically a tool to be used when taking LSD.  Authors Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert were noted proponents of the benefits of psychedelic drugs and their book, based on parts of the Tibetan Book of The Dead, takes the reader through the experience of taking these drugs.  The album is a recitation of portions of the novel.  This new edition features a replica of the 4-page insert included with the original LP and comes in magenta splatter vinyl.  It is limited to 1,700 copies.

A little after Black Friday, Real Gone has a pair of December releases.  The first is a double LP vinyl edition of Todd Rundgren & Utopia's Live at the Old Waldorf.  This concert was released on CD last year by Cherry Red as part of Rundgren's ongoing series of concert releases but it makes its vinyl debut here.  Recorded on August 5, 1978, this concert was part of the Back to the Bars tour.  Several concerts from that tour have been released and a couple of shows formed the basis of a live album.  This August 5th show features the classic Utopia of Rundgren (guitar/vocals), Willie Wilcox (drums/vocals), Roger Powell (keyboards/vocals) and Kasim Sulton (bass/vocals).  The set concentrates mostly on material from Rundgren's then-recent solo albums including Hermit of Mink Hollow from April 1978.  Included are such songs as "It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference," "Love of the Common Man," "Can We Still Be Friends" and "Hello, It's Me."  This new edition will be gold vinyl in a gatefold package and limited to 1,000 copies.

The other Real Gone December release features The Mills Brothers.  The African-American pop-jazz quartet has had a long and storied career, getting their professional start all the way back in 1928.  They recorded over 2000 songs and had hits over several decades, including the #2 "Glow Worm" in 1952.  While concentrating mostly on The Great American Songbook, the group did record some gospel numbers.  The 16-track Wonderful Words of Life - The Inspirational Recordings anthologizes this aspect of their recording career.  It features liner notes by Davin Seay and has been remastered by Mike Milchner at SonicVision.  While all of the original members have passed away, the group continues to perform to this day featuring John Mills III, the son of original member Donald Mills.

We've got Real Gone's full press release below with more information.  We've also got pre-order links for the two December titles.  The two Black Friday RSD titles will be available at participating local record stores.

LOS ANGELES - If the Summer of 1967 was the Summer of Love, the Summer of 1966 set the stage for the musical revolution that was to come. Albums released during the season, like The Beatles' Revolver and The Byrds' Fifth Dimension, brilliantly blended the burgeoning influence of Eastern exoticism into the rock music format, and the term "psychedelia" entered the common lexicon to stay. But beating them all to the punch was a multi-racial blues band that cut its teeth in Chicago, far from the hippie havens of London, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Issued in July 1966, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band's East-West took blues-rock to places only free jazz had dared to tread, offering lengthy, modal improvisational passages that sparked the West Coast rock revolution, and, in Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop, fully unleashing the first great guitar tandem in rock history. Now, Real Gone Music is very proud to release for the very first time on vinyl, in a double-LP version exclusive for Black Friday, a legendary bootleg that captures this singular sextet on the brink of the stylistic breakthrough that would shake the rock 'n' roll world to its core. Recorded live at Boston's Unicorn Coffee House 50 years ago in 1966, right before the release of East-West, Got a Mind to Give Up Living--Live 1966 reaffirms that The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was simply untouchable live, capable of turning on a dime from slow-burning blues tunes to up-tempo rave-ups. And, particularly on a pair of tunes that were soon to be released on East-West, "Work Song" and "I Got a Mind to Give Up Living," the raga influence (check Bloomfield's solos!) comes through loud and clear, combining with the band's blues tropes to create a truly new style of rock and rock guitar playing. This special double-LP release adds four unreleased tracks that did not appear on the CD release, including Bloomfield's vocal turn on "If You See My Baby," Bishop's take on Percy Mayfield's "Danger Zone," and bassist Jerome Arnold's rollicking vocals on "In the Midnight Hour" (with another fantastic Bloomfield solo) and "You're So Fine." Notes by Chris Morris featuring fresh quotes from Elvin Bishop and Mark Naftalin, rare pictures and memorabilia, editorial input from Bloomfield aficionado and co-producer Toby Byron, and some audio spit 'n' polish from Mike Milchner at SonicVision make this a package indispensable for any '60s rock (or jazz or R&B!) fan. Our Black Friday exclusive comes in "Butter" yellow and "Bloom" blue vinyl housed inside a gorgeous gatefold package...limited to 2,000 copies!

In 1966, society was on the verge of a revolution in consciousness that would shake our culture, our morals, and our values to the core, a revolution midwifed by the introduction of psychedelic drugs to a new generation eager to cast away the stifling conformity of the '50s and early '60s. In the vanguard of this change were three men: Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert. Described by Richard Nixon as "the most dangerous man in America," Timothy Leary left his professorial position at Harvard to launch a lifelong crusade to bring psychedelic drugs into the mainstream as a therapeutic and consciousness raising aid, and became a flash point for the entire movement. Co-founder of The Green Earth Foundation, Metzner has been steadfastly advocating for the use of psychedelics for the last five decades. And Richard Alpert, who adopted the name Ram Dass in the late '60s, penned the seminal book Be Here Now and continues to be a spiritual leader and inspiration for millions. Together, the three men authored the book The Psychedelic Experience, which took the themes of death and rebirth presented in the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a metaphor for the ego dissolution experienced by users of psychedelic drugs. Presented as an audio recording for the Broadside label in 1966, The Psychedelic Experience reverberated throughout the emerging counterculture; for example, John Lennon took the phrase "turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream" for his song "Tomorrow Never Knows" from the work. Now, on the 50^th anniversary of the release of The Psychedelic Experience album, Real Gone Music is proud to present, as a Black Friday exclusive, this enormously influential recording on psychedelic magenta splatter vinyl in a limited edition (of 1,700) package that features the original release's 4-page insert and vintage album graphics. This was, in essence, the first audio guide to taking LSD (the album's two tracks are simply entitled "Going Out" and "Coming Back"); it's one of the first shots in the revolution that resulted in The Summer of Love. Turn on, tune in, drop out.

The concert captured on Real Gone Music's new double-LP release Live at the Old Waldorf once again proves that there were very, very few bands in the late '70s that could match the stylistic sweep, musicianly chops, and quality of repertoire wielded by Todd Rundgren & Utopia. This August 5, 1978 set at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco captures the band at the beginning of an extensive U.S. tour, but it had already been a busy year of touring for Todd, as back in May he had assembled an all-star band for residencies at the Bottom Line in New York City and the Roxy in Los Angeles. Performances from those shows that (along with a portion of an August 23 Utopia date from this tour) comprised the release of the double live LP Back to the Bars in December 1978, and fans of that album will find much to treasure here on this well-recorded release taken from the evening's stereo ¼" master tapes. Here you get a chance to hear Utopia back Todd on songs, like  "Black and White" and "The Last Ride" (an epic version!), from which they were absent on Back to the Bars, and Live at the Old Waldorf offers such Utopia favorites as "Trapped," "Abandon City," "Back on the Street," and "Gangrene" from 1977's Oops! Wrong Planet that did not appear on Bars. Even more importantly, the band is on fire this night, displaying the rare mixture of note-perfect arrangements and improvisatory verve that made Todd Rundgren & Utopia such a must-see concert draw during the era. One last note about this release: because Todd was such a dynamic live performer, there have been a series of authorized live "bootlegs" that have come out on CD in recent years, but very few have come out on LP; we have cherry picked what just may be the best of the bunch and put it on double gold vinyl inside a gatefold package limited to 1,000 copies. It belongs on your shelf right next to your other Rundgren records from the era...don't miss it!

One of America's most iconic and beloved vocal groups, Piqua, Ohio's The Mills Brothers recorded over 2000 songs during a seven-decade career, virtually every tune in the Great American Songbook, but only a tiny sliver of their voluminous discography was devoted to gospel music. Now, Real Gone Music has put together the first-ever full-length compilation of the group's inspirational sides, recordings that were, in their own way, influential on the entire genre. For The Mills Brothers brought the same creamy harmonies and savvy blend of jazz, blues, and pop to this material that they brought to their secular repertoire, eschewing the impassioned call-and-response style of the black church to create some of the first pop-gospel recordings. Half of this collection hails from a boxed set of four 45 rpm 7" singles that Decca issued in the early '50s as part of its Faith Series, so these are peak period performances as well. With liner notes by Davin Seay and remastering by Mike Milchner at SonicVision, Wonderful Words of Life--The Inspirational Recordings is a long-overdue look at a little-known side of one of the first African-American vocal groups to cross over into widespread popular success.

NOVEMBER 25, 2016 (BLACK FRIDAY) RELEASES FROM REAL GONE MUSIC

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Got a Mind to Give Up Living--Live 1966 (Limited "Butter" Yellow & "Bloom" Blue Vinyl Edition) (2-LP Set)

Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner & Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience (Limited Psychedelic Magenta Splatter Vinyl Edition)

DECEMBER 2, 2016 RELEASES FROM REAL GONE MUSIC

Todd Rundgren & Utopia, Live at the Old Waldorf (Limited Gold Vinyl Edition) (2-LP Set) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada)

The Mills Brothers, Wonderful Words of Life--The Inspirational Recordings (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada)