Welcome to this week's Release Round-Up, featuring a selection of the new titles available today! As an Amazon affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Joe Grushecky, Houserocker: A Joe Grushecky Anthology (Omnivore) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada) Houserocker: A Joe Grushecky Anthology is an all-encompassing look at the singer, songwriter, and bandleader, covering 40 years of music from The Iron City Houserockers, Joey G., Joe Grushecky and The Houserockers, and
The title of the 1979 debut album from Joe Grushecky and The Iron City Houserockers proclaimed Love's So Tough. The Pittsburgh native and his band captured their city's blue-collar milieu, recalling a harder-edged E Street Band. The group took their sound an expansive step further with 1980's Have a Good Time But Get Out Alive!, a bar-band classic which welcomed guests including Ian Hunter, Mick Ronson, and Stevie Van Zandt. That album introduced "Pumping Iron" which quickly became the band's
Last year, the recently-reactivated Cleveland International Records label reissued Joe Grushecky and The Iron City Houserockers' Have a Good Time...But Get Out Alive! as a deluxe edition for its 40th anniversary. Now, the label is returning to the catalogue of the Pittsburgh rocker for a slightly belated 25th anniversary edition of The Houserockers' 1995 album American Babylon which was produced by, and features, Grushecky's friend Bruce Springsteen. The 2-CD expansion of American Babylon is
As these words are being published, we're in Day 10 of the U.S. government shutdown, with no end apparently in sight. Could Joe Grushecky have picked a better time to release his seventeenth and latest solo album, the poltiically-charged and socially-conscious Somewhere East of Eden (Schoolhouse/Warner Nashville 2-535518, 2013)? Grushecky has always evinced that he cares deeply for America, and for its citizens - particularly the blue-collar, working class. On Eden, the rootsy