Bob Dylan once said that, upon hearing Woody Guthrie's songs, "it was like I had been in the dark and someone had turned on the main switch of a lightning conductor." Steve Earle opined that "Woody is my hero of heroes and the only person on earth that I will go to my grave regretting that I never met." No less a literary eminence than John Steinbeck noted, "Woody is just Woody," before explaining, "Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing
The new anthology Milk of the Tree, from Cherry Red's Grapefruit label, sets forth its mission statement clearly in its subtitle: An Anthology of Female Vocal Folk and Singer-Songwriters 1966-1973. Still, how to anthologize such a broad and powerful group of artists during one of the most creatively fertile periods in popular music history? Grapefruit does a fine job in distilling the essence of the period - and charting the growth of artists from a pure pop framework to one in which they
The sixth volume of Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series is coming to 5.0 multichannel hybrid SACD from Audio Fidelity in March. Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall was mixed into surround sound years ago by Sony, but the mix has sat on the shelf until now. It will arrive March 18 as newly remastered by Steve Hoffman (with a remastered stereo layer playable on all CD players). First released in 2004, Bootleg Series Vol. 6 premiered Dylan's Halloween night concert from 1964 at New York's