Out September 21st, “Tell No One” is the debut full-length by Washington, D.C.’s Bad Moves. It’s a perfect power-pop album — alternately explosive and vulnerable, loud and tender. Recorded with Hop Along’s Joe Reinhart, it’s an album about secrecy — it’s anxiety and weight. The songs are meant to tell a story about how self-discovery works when you’re a kid and how those experiences, revelations, and regrets ripple into adult life. Bad Moves are Emma Cleveland, David Combs, Katie Park, and Daoud Tyler-Ameen.
Bruce Springsteen took the stage at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey 40 years ago as a man on a mission to prove that he wasn’t a flash in the pan who could be washed up at just 28. that night he delivered to the 3,200 fans in attendance not merely a great show but the concert that many consider the single-best performance of his career, one captured for posterity on a WNEW-FM simulcast broadcast throughout the East Coast and recorded with then state-of-the-art video technology at the venue itself.
“I’d just recently vanished for three years,” Springsteen wrote in his autobiography, Born to Run. A dispute with his manager had delayed the release of his follow up to the Born to Run album for nearly three years, an impossibly long time in the industry at the time. “[I] had barely felt visible most of my life, and if I could help it, I wasn’t going back.”
Richard Neer was simulcasting the show that night and realized from the start that something was different. “Usually Bruce would say something before the show for the simulcast in a joking way like he was a boxer ready to take the ring.” But there was no mock Muhammad Ali on this night.
“Bruce didn’t say anything that night,” remembers Neer, He was so amped up, “He just couldn’t wait to get out there. Bruce has done so many shows and many argue which one was the best one. But this one had a lot of energy. It meant a lot for him and the band to be in New Jersey. It seems ridiculous now, but then he really had to prove he wasn’t a one-album guy.” While many shows on this tour opened with a cover, Springsteen decided to begin this night with a version of “Badlands” delivered with such fiery passion that it’s hard to believe there was anywhere left to go for the remaining three-plus hours.
Springsteen shows are communal events. And the birth of that really began on this tour. His fans by then had absorbed his recordings to the point where they could participate in the show in some odd dichotomy of both choreography and spontaneity. The audience never really knew how far and exactly when Springsteen would let them venture into the show—or how far he literally would venture into the crowd. On this night, it was farther than ever before, this was after Clarence Clemens took the saxophone solo into the crowd as well in “Spirit In The Night.”
Springsteen’s story telling, now honed to the point where he can carry a Broadway show not merely with his music but his words, is in fine form in “Thunder Road,” as well as his politics and his humanity. The power of the introduction moves the crowd to a spiritual connection rarely seen in rock and roll. Suddenly, he has more than 3,000 backup singers. There’s one big stage at a Springsteen concert, especially in that period, and the audience was on it. And that would become a defining characteristic of the Springsteen concert experience.
This tour featured for the first time the two-set Bruce concert experience. The show was broken up this way, Springsteen says, so he could give the audience the new material from the Darkness On The Edge Of Town album that he felt they needed to hear, along with the then more established music that they wanted to hear.
“The live power, the strength of the of the E Street Band proved invaluable and, night after night, we sent our listeners away, back too the recorded versions of this music, newly able to hear their beauty and restrained power,” Springsteen wrote.
The “Darkness” material was so powerful live that this bifurcation soon became unnecessary. And songs from Darkness also bled into the second set. They were received with enthusiasm rarely seen at shows featuring new material. “Candy’s Room” here is the best example of this, about two hours into the show. Bruce’s restraint as he holds the artillery that he and the audience knows is coming in full fury is thrilling.
But Springsteen doesn’t want you to feel just something at a concert. He wants you to feel everything. The entire range of human emotion condensed into one, unforgettable night. And his commitment every night to delivering this has never been better chronicled.
“I want an extreme experience,” he told The New Yorker in 2006. When you leave, he wants, “your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!”
“10th Avenue Freeze Out” is three hours into the show, with Bruce drenched despite playing on what Neer said was a very cold September night. But his enjoyment is palpable and infectious.
“For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself,” Springsteen said in that 2006 interview. “Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when it’s really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that and sends me back to the hotel with it. People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time.”
There’s no letup, with the show closer featuring fans on the stage as Bruce triumphantly exiting with a woman from the crowd strapped to his arm.
Could it really be that Springsteen’s greatest concert ever was in a former porn palace in Passaic, N.J., a site that became a venue only to fill the area void created by he closing the Fillmore East? (The Capitol declined after a Sgt. Pepper year in 1978 featuring not just Springsteen but also The Rolling Stones and The Who; it eventually closed when the then Brendan Byrne Arena was opened a few miles away in East Rutherford, ironically by Springsteen before the paint was even dry.)
Part of this show’s legacy was that it was recorded in radio quality and went on to become one of the most bootlegged concerts in history. Not to mention the video. Here it’s listed in the top spot on a very well-thought-out list of Springsteen performances. And note the live recording released by Springsteen last year was of the show at the venue the next night, featuring a revamped set list (another Springsteen innovation to keep the crowd even more on edge). Of course, the top Springsteen performance ever is no doubt a very strong contender for the best rock concert in history, too. All in an obscure New Jersey town, with Springsteen spurred on by fear of irrelevance and a desire to live out one of his iconic songs.
“Everybody’s got a hunger, a hunger they can’t resist
There’s so much that you want, you deserve much more than this
But if dreams came true, oh, wouldn’t that be nice
But this ain’t no dream we’re living through tonight
Girl, you want it, you take it, you pay the price”
Prove It all Night with the classic, searing, intense guitar work that was the hallmark of the ’78 Darkness Tour. From the 19th September, 1978 Passaic show. Play this LOUD.
Radio broadcast, soundboard tapes (all three nights in Passaic were recorded by the Record Plant’s mobile unit, both on multi-track and live-to-two track) and professionally shot in-house black and white video. Probably one of the best all-time concert recordings. Broadcast on WNEW-FM New York and nine other stations in the north-east, including WBCN-FM and WCOZ-FM Boston, WIOQ-FM Philadelphia and WIYY-FM Baltimore. Set includes great versions of “Because The Night” and “Fire,” and also includes what many consider to be the finest examples of “Racing In The Street” and “Thunder Road” ever. ”
Sarah Shook sings from the perspective of a problem child of the highest caliber: impulsive, unapologetic, and impassioned. The songs she sings and the music she makes with her band the Disarmers on their latest record Years is the kind of stuff that defies a calendar. Could be 1962, could be 1974; that it’s 2018 only makes these songs sound more ageless. Sarah Shook & The Disarmers are a country band with a sneer, a bite, and no apologies. Shook’s original songs take on the usual country spin on shitty relationships, bad decisions, and excessive alcohol consumption for damn good reasons. I’d certainly accompany each listen with a bottle of whiskey too, cos these are great drunken tunes about life’s ups and downs.
The Leeds band Girls at Our Best! were only around for a couple of years in the early 1980s, but they left behind some solid tunes, including one of the finest songs from the post-punk era.
The story of Girls at Our Best! begins in 1977, when singer Judy Evans and guitarist James Alan met while attending art school. Alan was in a punk outfit called SOS, which Evans eventually joined. The group morphed into another act, the Butterflies, a purposefully pretty name that was a response to all of the negative and/or nasty monikers from the punk period. The Butterflies got some notice and had at least one high profile fan in Sid Vicious, but broke up as the decade was coming to an end. Evan and Alan started Girls at Our Best! simply to document the songs they were writing, but after Rough Trade Records heard one of the tracks, they encouraged the duo to put out a 7-inch vinyl. In April 1980, the GaOB! debut, “Getting Nowhere Fast” b/w “Warm Girls,” was released via their own label, Record Records, which was distributed by Rough Trade. “Getting Nowhere Fast” was named NME’s “Single of the Week,” and made the top ten of the UK indie chart, but Girls at Our Best! wasn’t exactly a band; it was still just Evans and Alan. So, with high demand for a second 45, a bassist and a drummer were brought aboard.
“Getting Nowhere Fast” is a perfect post-punk song. Possessing a killer, angular guitar riff, and a propulsive bassline, the defiant lyrics speak to the emptiness of capitalism, the passiveness of the masses, and the feeling that your failing life isn’t what you signed up for. After two exhilarating minutes, the number ends in an abrupt, dramatic fashion. Girls at Our Best! never performed for TV cameras, and there’s no known footage of the group,
The cover of the first Girls at Our Best! single up above. After their second 7-inch, Girls at Our Best! signed with Happy Birthday Records. The label put out a couple more GaOB! singles, as well as what ended up being the group’s lone full-length, Pleasure, in October 1981 (a pre-fame Thomas Dolby plays synth on the record).
In late ‘81, GaOB! headed to America for a brief tour, which did not go well. Seemingly no one knew about the band—they had a Spinal Tap-like experience when nobody showed up for a record store appearance—and they all grew increasingly sick of each other. Girls at Our Best! called it a day in 1982.
Phoebe, Sophie and I all play in other bands, but we run in the same circles. Phoebe and I have toured together as Happy Accidents and Fresh, and Sophie is in a band called Finish Flag too, but we played in a band together briefly that was called Don’t Die (Dean from Doe’s project). Because we’re all the only women in our main bands, we decided to make a band that explores being women together.
“All our writing has been collaborative and quite spontaneous, and because we’re friends first and foremost, it all feels very natural and easy. We just want to have fun—that’s why we’re doing it! Our songs are vulnerable, sometimes quiet and sometimes loud. We’re writing and making music together without any expectations and it feels very freeing.”
Just signed to Alcopop! RecordsLondon indie-punk trio Cheerbleederzand will release their debut EP ‘Faceplant’ on 24th September 2018,
The diligence of Reddening West cannot be overstated. this Austin-based quartet has toiled for the past couple of years over their self-released debut full-length, “Deltas”, its vibrant swaths of americana a sprawling, existential treatise on the inherently transitory nature of life, honing a particularly fastidious approach to their songwriting and cinematic arrangements in the process.
Anchored by the lead single, “Even if” and its opening number,“Marjorie,” Deltas finds Reddening West picking right up where their 2016 extended play, where we started, left off, with spacious vistas punctuated by Niamh Fahey’s swooning fiddle textures and Matt Evans’ soaring vocal melodies. on the early standout “Holding Hours,”Evans paints a bucolic backdrop for his pondering, with syncopated guitar lines and back-beats rolled together, in search of an apex never quite discovered. “different now” finds Evans waist-deep in reverb, again weaving observations of personal change through pristine turns of phrase and beautiful imagery.
The majesty of Deltasis contained in its sweeping gestures as much as it is in its most minute intricacies; the palate-cleansing instrumental “Inverness” is doused in nuance and contrapuntal wonders, a perfect segue to the album’s extended third act. the penultimate cut “Diffuse” is especially affecting and tender, its propulsive nature the perfect foil for the album’s finale, “Late Summer Grass,” itself a vivid and measured punctuation mark on Reddening West’s rich, slow-burning debut. full of nooks and crannies ripe for exploration and vast canyons of elegiac introspection,Deltas is a perfect autumnal vessel, a fine companion for changing times.
Fresh off a two-record stint with Asylum, Bob Dylan returned to Columbia Records in 1975 with one of the most acclaimed records of his career. Blood on the Tracks found Dylan reinvigorating the “confessional” singer-songwriter genre, even as he repeatedly insisted that the album’s songs had no relation to his own life and then-recent marital turmoil. Whatever the truth, Blood on the Tracks was painfully raw, vulnerable, and altogether exquisite, boasting such all-time classic compositions as “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” and “Shelter from the Storm.” The making of the album was anything but smooth, however – and now, the full story can be told on the fourteenth volume of Dylan’s long-running Bootleg Series. More Blood, More Tracks will be available on November 2nd as a 6-CD box set or 2-LP/1-CD highlights editions, chronicling the album’s original New York sessions and subsequent Minnesota rebirth via all of the extant session material including 75 previously unreleased tracks.
Dylan began recording at New York’s A&R Studios with producer-engineer Phil Ramone on September 16th, 1974. The first group of musicians including Eric Weissberg and his band, Deliverance, only lasted a couple of days before the artist brought in Paul Griffin on organ and Buddy Cage on steel guitar. (Tony Brown was retained from Weissberg’s group.) After ten days and four sessions with this group, Dylan had assembled an entire 10-song album which Columbia took to the test pressing stage in November. But the restless Dylan had second thoughts. With a new set of musicians, he entered Minneapolis’ Sound 80 studios in December. In a couple of days, he re-recorded five of the ten songs, and the raw, stark, and powerful Blood on the Tracks as we know it was finished.
Over the years, session material has trickled out. Only one of the five tracks from the test pressing, “You’re a Big Girl Now,” has ever been officially reissued. It appeared on the Biograph box set along with a version of the outtake “Up to Me.” Subsequently, The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3featured New York alternate takes of “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Idiot Wind,” and “If You See Her, Say Hello.” “Call Letter Blues,” an embryonic version of “Meet Me in the Morning,” was also included on that set. An alternate of “Shelter from the Storm” was released on the Jerry Maguire soundtrack, and in 2012, an alternate “Meet Me in the Morning” appeared as the B-side of “Duquesne Whistle” on a Record Store Day single. That left “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” as the only song from the New York sessions which had not been released in any take.
More Blood, More Tracks follows the format of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 in presenting all of the available studio material in chronological order and so every song is heard in multiple versions. (Alas, it seems much of the Minnesota session material no longer exists.) The leadoff “single” is the first take of “If You See Her, Say Hello.”The 6-CD box set boasts a lengthy hardcover book featuring new liner notes as well as high-quality reproductions of pages from Dylan’s original notebooks used during the Blood on the Tracks sessions. A 1-CD or 2-LP version will have one alternate version of each song plus one take of “Up to Me.”
The Bootleg Series Vol. 14: More Blood, More Tracks arrives from Columbia/Legacy on November 2nd.
The earlier album sessions that went down in New York City left many more demos and alternate versions on the cutting room than most anyone outside the innermost Dylan camp imagined.
Disc 1 consists entirely of Dylan alone in the studio, accompanying himself on guitar and harmonica, at the very beginning of the process. None of these appeared on the original album. The second disc is made up of Dylan’s initial band sessions with the group Eric Weissberg & Deliverance, whom he quickly grew dissatisfied with and replaced. Only one of those made the finished album. It’s these two discs that may represent the greatest treasure trove for serious fans.
But the remaining four discs are hardly fool’s gold themselves. Disc 3 finds him continuing to work in New York with a mostly different band that was more to his liking and produced more of the eventual album. On Discs 4 and 5 and the first part of Disc 6, he ditches that band and performs the songs solo once again, or with just a bass player, ending the New York portion of the proceedings as intimately as they started, in the creation of what many consider his most intimate album.
Bob Dylan, More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14(Columbia/Legacy, 2018)
Premonitions begins with “Thingamajig” something you can’t quite recall the name of, but you know exactly what it means and what it feels like. Like the pull of desire that comes with not quite remembering fully. The magnetism of something just on the tip of your tongue. I wanted the album to feel like that thing.
I think a lot about about memory-making as an act of creation, the words we use to describe a memory give shape to and sometimes mutate the memory itself. I believe that the way we choose to describe the events of our lives is not only a means of creative fulfillment, but an absolutely vital part of creating the world we want to live in. When we are dishonest in the present, we create a dishonest future. When we are honest in the present, we create a more honest future. I wanted this album to be the vehicle for a hopeful, truthful, generous, and loving world. I tried not to posture or pretend. I wrote about my life as I’ve seen it and how I’d like to see it, as both memory and premonition.
The producers, Justin Raisen and Yves Rothman, and I spent months collecting organic sounds to fill the world of this record. We threw away everything that felt false and tried to keep the soul of each song alive. I hope Premonitions gives you comfort and joy. I hope it feels like all the mysterious details of your lives, all your massive and mundane glories. I hope it reminds you that there is beauty in the details. Rainbows in your sprinklers. Drinking water from a hose. The way it felt to make a friend for the first time. Locking yourself in a bathroom to avoid everyone. Dancing until your shins burn. Leaving your phone in an Uber and making your best friend drive you an hour away to knock on a stranger’s door after locating it on Find My Phone. Losing a friend. Losing yourself. Remembering.
Tim Hill is a Los Angeles based musician, most recently known as the touring keyboardist for the Allah-Las. His own unique brand of songs echo the folk and roots traditions of Neil Young and Bob Dylan, while simultaneously distinguishing themselves with a wise and soulful sound all their own. It’s as though his songs transport the listener to some dark and empty bar, long past last call, where Tim’s music plays as expansive and as lonesome as the American West. His style is moody, but with a steady, plodding groove.
Tim Hill’s highly anticipated debut 7” single, “Paris, Texas”, which is available now on the Calico Discos label, is inspired by the film of the same name. The B side is a cover of Warren Zevon’s “Steady Rain”, featuring a mellow mid-tempo shuffle with the soul of the original still very much intact. Hill has collected more than enough material for a full length record, planned for later this year.
Out 09/21/18 on vinyl 7″ 45 RPM via Calico Discos Cover of “Steady Rain” by Warren Zevon
On his follow Up album, Kyle Craft continues to cement his place as one of the top songwriters around. His musical inspirations are rooted in the music of the 70s and his ability to spin a good yarns stems from his love of the folk, “I’m really just into that ’60s folk rock stuff. That’s where my heart is.”
“Full Circle Nightmare” is a rock ‘n’ roll album that tells rock ‘n’ stories. It is the type of music that lit up the airwaves during the 70s. Unlike Dolls Of Highland, Craft mines his own life on the autobiographical Full Circle Nightmare. Exile Rag mashes up a Southern twang riff with a boogie-woogie piano that The Stones mastered in the 70s as he sings of a femme fatale that leave him in the dust.
It’s a subject that he hits often, such as Heartbreak Junky & Fake Magic Angel. Slick & Delta Queen puts a nice spin on it, as he measures an ex’s current relationship with the relationship he once had. The tune features a horn that conveys a mournful, almost wistful sound as he longs for the times that were.
For the Kyle Craft experience I’d also suggest checking out “Girl Crazy“, an album where he covered only female artists. If he’s on the road . I strongly suggest you take in a set.
