Ace Records is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary with special releases as well as concerts and a pop-up shop in London. Over the course of those decades, the label has established a number of long-running series including their Songwriters and Producers lines. A recent release in the Songwriters series celebrates two of the all-time greats in both categories: Philadelphia’s Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. Love Train: The Gamble and Huff Songbook brings together 24 songs from the Philadelphia International Records duo who also formed two thirds of Mighty Three Publishing along with…
Review: Frank Zappa, “Cheaper Than Cheep”
The latest archival release from the Frank Zappa camp may be called Cheaper Than Cheep, but rest assured, this concert program is actually an embarrassment of audiovisual riches. Available in a variety of formats including 2CD+Blu-ray, 3LP, and 2CD/3LP/1BD configurations, Cheaper Than Cheep preserves a long-lost concert recorded on June 21, 1974 at a rehearsal studio on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood in the wake of the Mothers of Inventions’ tenth anniversary tour. Zappa was joined by a Mothers line-up including Chester Thompson (drums), George Duke (keyboards, vocals), Jeff Simmons (guitar, vocals), Napoleon…
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Review: Eric Burdon and WAR, “The Complete CD Collection”
With the recent release of WAR’s Why Can’t We Be Friends? as an expanded edition for Record Store Day (with a CD edition to follow – links still aren’t active), TSD has given a spin to Rhino’s most recent WAR CD release: The Complete CD Collection from Eric Burdon & WAR. “Peace and love was happening, and we figured that nobody would forget the name of the band if we called them WAR. And we were right,” Jerry Goldstein remembered in Dan Epstein’s liner notes to the new box set Eric Burdon…
Goody, Goody, Goody: Cherry Red Collects Mark Wirtz Rarities on “Dream, Dream, Dream”
The late Mark Wirtz (1943-2020) – a German-French songwriter-producer who found his biggest successes in England – is best-remembered for A Teenage Opera, an embryonic rock opera which inspired the likes of Pete Townshend and Paul McCartney and spawned Keith West’s U.K. No. 2 single “Grocer Jack,” a.k.a. “Excerpt from A Teenage Opera.” Yet there was much more to Wirtz’s discography than that lone hit and its parent project. Cherry Red’s Strawberry imprint recently boxed up five discs of Wirtz’s voluminous discography as Dream, Dream, Dream: The Anthology, and it’s every bit…
Cuts The Deepest: Edsel Celebrates P.P. Arnold on “Soul Survivor” Box Set
One of P.P. Arnold’s early sides for Immediate Records was titled “Am I Still Dreaming?” The song, which the artist born Patricia Ann Cole in Los Angeles wrote at the encouragement of none other than Mick Jagger, is one of the 57 songs on 3 CDs assembled by Edsel Records on the dream of a box set appropriately entitled Soul Survivor: A Life in Song. The collection, compiled by the singer and Michael Mulligan, traces the onetime Ikette’s career from her signing to Andrew Loog Oldham’s label through subsequent collaborations with Barry…
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Review: Yes, “Close to the Edge: Super Deluxe Edition”
The cover of Yes’ Close to the Edge was a relatively simple one, with Roger Dean’s freshly-minted “bubble type” logo atop a color gradient from black to green. But the contents within the jacket – Yes’ fifth album overall, and final LP of the decade to feature drummer Bill Bruford – were anything but simple. Building on the sound and style of 1971’s Fragile, Close to the Edge was an even more ambitious suite crafted by lead vocalist Jon Anderson, bassist Chris Squire, drummer Bruford, guitarist Steve Howe, and keyboardist Rick Wakeman…
Review: WAR, “Live in Japan 1974”
“The Japanese were nice, but really afraid of us,” remembers WAR’s producer-manager Jerry Goldstein in the liner notes to the band’s new Live in Japan 1974. “That’s how we came up with the ‘Hey, why can’t we be friends?’ concept. In the dressing room that night, Lonnie was playing the keyboards and we started doing the song. No verses, just the ‘why can’t we be friends’ part. We wrote it there, went back to the U.S., and in January [1975], we recorded it.” The catchy plea “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” became…
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Holiday Gift Guide Review: Joni Mitchell, “Archives: Volume Four (1976-1980)” and “The Asylum Albums (1976-1980)”
Earlier this year, Joni Mitchell brought her now-famous Joni Jam shows to the Hollywood Bowl for two sold-out evenings. A little more than 45 years ago, Mitchell closed out her North American tour with a series of shows some fifteen minutes away from the Bowl at the Greek Theatre; a selection from that concert closes the fourth volume of the Joni Mitchell Archives series of box sets. The Bowl shows proved another triumph for the artist who’s now widely recognized for the innovations that stunned and even divided audiences all those decades…
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Holiday Gift Guide Review: ‘Dearly Beloved: A Prince Celebration’
The holidays are a time of good cheer and gratitude, where we all (in theory) come together to share in a common joy. There has not been a lot of common joy if you’re a Prince fan; we don’t need to re-litigate it more than we did this summer, but it’s worth noting that the quest to make intriguing, posthumous Prince projects under the current estate organization has maybe gotten worse than when we published our editorial. But there have been celebrations of The Purple One that honor his restless creative spirit….
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Holiday Gift Guide Review: Alice Cooper, “Muscle of Love: Deluxe Edition”
Rare is the album that’s better remembered for its packaging than its contents. But that may well be the case with the band Alice Cooper’s seventh (and final) album, 1973’s Muscle of Love. As it followed the Platinum-certified international chart-topper Billion Dollar Babies, hopes were high for the LP. It was greeted by lukewarm critical assessments, though, and “merely” reached No. 10 on the Billboard 200 and No. 34 on the U.K. Albums Chart. As such, it was inevitably considered a disappointment. (It did go Gold.) But fans – and even those…
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Holiday Gift Guide Review: Steve Martin, ‘Steve in a Box’
At this point in time, CD box sets have been a going concern (especially around the holidays) for nearly 40 years. Thousands of them have been released, and with the unexpected shift toward listening on vinyl (who’d have thought?) and digital (particularly streaming, which has a near-total grasp on music consumption today), you’ve got to have a really strong angle to encourage fans to part with some extra money and add new titles to their shelves. What more can be done? you (and sometimes we at The Second Disc) wonder. Stand-up comedy…
Holiday Gift Guide Review: Bob Dylan and The Band, “The 1974 Live Recordings”
Big things often come in small packages. Such is the case with Legacy Recordings’ recent excavation of Bob Dylan and The Band’s 1974 tour. 40 concerts took place over 30 dates and 21 cities, with Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, and Rick Danko even playing two shows in one day in many markets. The 1974 Live Recordings takes the form of a tiny cube, packing in 27 discs and 431 tracks (417 of which are previously unreleased). The set contains every professionally-recorded Dylan track from the concerts, and…
Holiday Gift Guide Review: The Beatles, “1964 U.S. Albums in Mono”
Any Time at All Did The Beatles save rock and roll? If John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr didn’t save the still-young form, they certainly gifted it with a reinvigorating, exhilarating jolt of musical euphoria the likes of which hadn’t been seen before – and hasn’t been duplicated since. The scene was early 1964. Buddy Holly was long gone, and the big hits had dried up – at the moment, at least – for Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. Elvis had served his time in the Army and…
Holiday Gift Guide Review: Elvis Costello, “King of America and Other Realms”
It was a fine idea at the time/Now it’s a brilliant mistake… Elvis Costello delivered a powerful surprise in 1986 when he shed his backing band, The Attractions, and teamed up with T Bone Burnett for King of America. Originally credited in the U.K. to The Costello Show (Featuring The Attractions and Confederates) and in the U.S. to The Costello Show (Featuring Elvis Costello), the album backtracked from the sleek ’80s polish of its two immediate predecessors (Punch the Clock and Goodbye Cruel World) and instead tapped into a vein closer to…
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Review: Frank Zappa, “apostrophe (‘): 50th Anniversary Edition”
Strictly commercial? Not quite. Though Frank Zappa earned his first top ten record and first Gold record with apostrophe (‘) – the same LP that spun off his first single to make the Billboard Hot 100 – it would be difficult to argue that the singer-songwriter-bandleader had dramatically altered his art in an effort to hit the charts. Sure, the material was a bit more focused and the album rather tight at 32 minutes in length. Yeah, the cover artwork, with its instantly recognizable, tightly-cropped image of the long-haired artist, looked much…
Quadio Spotlight: Bette Midler, “The Divine Miss M” and Bread, “Baby I’m a Want-You”
Way back in Ye Olden Days of 2011, The Second Disc advocated for the release of the original quadraphonic mix of Bette Midler’s 1973 debut, The Divine Miss M. Well, lo these many years later, Rhino has granted our wish, and it’s been released on Blu-ray as part of the label’s still-growing Quadio series of four-channel reissues. In Craig Anderson’s stellar remaster, it’s happily as good as we remember it! The 4.0 mix by Atlantic Records veteran Tom Dowd, a legendary producer in his own right, is immersive from the get-go. The…
Review: Faces, “Faces at the BBC: Complete BBC Concert and Session Recordings 1970-1973”
Between the summer of 1969 and the fall of 1975, a joyful noise emerged whenever Faces took the stage. Ronnie Lane (bass), Kenney Jones (drums), and Ian McLagan (keyboards) had emerged from the ashes of pop’s Small Faces, while Rod Stewart (vocals) and Ronnie Wood (guitar) were blues-rock veterans of the first iteration of The Jeff Beck Group in which Wood played bass. When they came together, they created a sound unlike either of those earlier groups: rough-and-tumble, raw, ramshackle, powerful, and fun. As one of their lyrics goes, “While I’m here,…
Review: Rhino’s Sounds of the Summer Series – Randy Newman, Chicago, Daryl Hall and John Oates, Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, Al Stewart, Utopia
Over the past month, Rhino has been releasing numerous titles as part of its Sounds of the Summer initiative, for a total of over two dozen vinyl releases hitting brick-and-mortar stores. These titles encompass various reissues as well as new entries in the label’s ongoing Now Playing series of compilations. As of now, these LPs are all exclusive to independent record stores and Barnes & Noble locations. We’ve given a spin to a few of these titles! How to distill the discography of one of America’s pre-eminent songwriters into the contents of…
Review: Joni Mitchell, “The Asylum Albums 1972-1975” in Quadio
The Joni Mitchell renaissance continues. Following a triumphant surprise appearance in July 2022 at the Newport Folk Festival, the singer-songwriter returned to the stage for a full-length Joni Jam in June 2023 at Washington’s Gorge Amphitheatre; tickets were quickly snapped up by ardent fans who had waited roughly two decades to see Mitchell in concert once again. The evening was a transcendent one, a taste of which was supplied to the public when Mitchell and her band of friends performed “Both Sides Now” to devastating effect on the Grammy Awards broadcast of February…
Review: Johnny Cash, “Songwriter”
“Hello out there, this is planet Earth…” If planet Earth indeed had a voice, it might well have sounded like that of John R. Cash: deep, resonant, impactful. Those lyrics open “Hello Out There,” the first track on Songwriter, the new, posthumous release from the late troubadour (1932-2003) – the fifth such collection to arrive since his death. It’s been released by UMe and Mercury Nashville, in essence adding one more album to his Mercury discography which spanned 1986-1991. The Mercury branding makes sense, as the original vocal recordings heard on Songwriter…
Review: David Bowie, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Star”
“So Long, ’60s,” David Bowie proclaims on the first track of the new 5CD/1BD Parlophone box set Rock ‘N’ Roll Star. Strumming his 12-string at a San Francisco Holiday Inn, the future superstar was embracing the new decade and its immense possibilities: “I’ll kick you in the ass, you rascal, you!” Its verse melody and the barest wisp of the lyric (“keep your mouth shut!”) would make it to a new composition, “Moonage Daydream,” the third song on his fifth album. That LP was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and…
What’s So Funny: Cherry Red, Lemon Collect Brinsley Schwarz Albums on “Thinking Back”
Brinsley Schwarz, the band, may be best-remembered today as the launching pad for singer-songwriter Nick Lowe and as a prime exemplar of the U.K. pub rock scene. The band’s studio albums, though, reveal diverse influences and a vibrant sound that more than holds up today. In recent months, Cherry Red’s Lemon Recordings imprint brought together the band’s seven albums plus more than 60 bonus tracks on the whopping 7-CD box set Thinking Back: The Anthology 1970-1975. Guitarist Brinsley Schwarz and bassist Nick Lowe had known one another since their school days in…
Stayin’ With It: Edsel Continues Kiki Dee Box Set Series, Premieres “Two Sides to Every Story” Album
When Elton John played the final stop of his final U.S. tour at Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium on November 20, 2022, Kiki Dee was right there by his side to sing their 1976 smash “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” While that duet remains a major part of the Kiki Dee story, there’s plenty more to the Yorkshire-born singer-songwriter’s discography. Thankfully, Edsel has chronicled that discography in depth on 2020’s The Fontana and Motown Years (spanning 1963-1970) and 2019’s The Rocket Years (spanning 1973-1979). Now, the third box in the label’s hardcover book-style…
Back On My Feet Again: Rhino Adds Randy Newman, WAR, AWB, Gil Evans to Quadio Roster
Today, Rhino announced four new titles in its ever-growing line of Quadio Blu-rays: Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys (1973), WAR’s The World Is a Ghetto (1972), Gil Evans’ Svengali, and Average White Band’s AWB. The Second Disc had the opportunity to preview this quartet of Blu-ray reissues of classic albums in quadraphonic (four-channel) sound, and we’re happy to report that this is another feast for surround fans with all four titles making good – or better – use of surround. (Those equipped only for stereo sound can still enjoy the two-channel mixes…
Holiday Gift Guide Review: Prince and The New Power Generation, ‘Diamonds and Pearls (Super Deluxe Edition)’
I. Come On, Save Your Soul Tonight In the years since Prince’s tragic death in 2016, one of the more shocking events in catalogue history has occurred: the construction of a cottage industry surrounding his vast recorded output – both his dozens of released albums and countless tracks rumored to exist in the mythic vault at his Paisley Park recording complex. As a lucrative artist who left no will, the matters of his heirs were not settled until 2022. In those intervening years – with only a ragtag collection of record industry…
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