I go digging. I don’t spend hours and hours in the stacks because I’m not producing music, but I AM an enormous fan. As such, I keep my weather eye open and my Spidey Sense on full. I’m drawn to places through intuition, happenstance, and sheer coincidence. This also happens to describe my mother’s sense of religion. Shit! I guess crate digging is my religion. This is about records I’ve found recently that I needed for my personal stacks.
Lightnin’ Hopkins - Lightnin’ and Co. - 1962 - Mono
The last of the great country blues singers, Lightnin’ was a Texas bluesman par excellence with a career that straddled a massive stretch of the American century from the 1920s into the 1980s - he was 6 when WWI ended and 57 when we landed on the moon. The sound of the Lone Star State never really left his throat, and this remains an all-time Sunday record if your idea of a Sunday is bacon and eggs, coffee, a newspaper, and a warm-up before the big jukebox guns unleash themselves Sunday night.
Guns N’ Roses - Live from the Ritz - 1988 - 10” double album, orange splatter, unofficial release from the original MTV recording
Not only does no one make rock and roll like this anymore, but they can’t, and not for purely technical reasons. Far too much booze, a metric fuck ton of narcotics, and a volatile chemistry among the bandmates position Guns N’ Roses as among the finest arbiters of misogyny to ever trash a tour bus. Here we hear them just as proper success cracked them in the face like a cocaine brick and they hit the on-ramp of excess at Mach 2 with their hair on fire.
Listen: this document is an unholy demon and must be safeguarded at all times lest the brothers Sam and Dean Winchester arrive in a ‘67 Chevy and blast everyone in the room to Hell.
Magic Sam’s Blues Band - West Side Soul - 1968 - first pressing
Ever talked to someone who’s just seen Casablanca for the first time? A common criticism is the film feels like a cliché, and to a certain degree, it’s true, but every cliché, every stereotype has an origin, and for modern electric blues, this is Casablanca. West Side Soul contains DNA coding for the Bluesbreakers, Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin, Rory Gallagher, and Stevie Ray. It served as a lamp post for contemporaries Buddy Guy, Jimmy Dawkins, and Otis Rush. To quote the sensational Tom Moon, Sam “phrased in a way that made everything he played feel like a harpoon to the heart.”
You have to reach for James Brown at the Apollo or Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square Club to rival the juice dripping off this album. The reusable energy packed into its runtime could power North America into the next century.
This was also a gift from the notorious and altogether irrepressible Dozer Jack.
Tom Waits - At the Terminal - 2025 - unofficial release, pink vinyl
Tom is a singular human, possessed by the ghost of St. Cecilia, baptized in a dumpster out back of Napoleone’s Pizza House in National City, California, anointed by Lou Curtiss in the ashes of Camel non-filters, and cursed forevermore to pluck artifacts out of thin air. Thin air… which is why it’s altogether fitting the elusive magus chose the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena airport to record his episode of VH1’s Storytellers. This double album features all of those delicious documents and then some, and the “then some” is some of the finest back pages of the Tom Waits Examiner - a fictional newspaper of my own invention.
This artifact is Tom at his easiest, most casually dressed mad man bard of the apocalypse. It’s the simplest entry point to some of his Dead Sea Scrolls storytelling and Waits Codex cryptics. I wept when Leonard Cohen died (ask Meandering Grey Matter), and mourned Prince and Bowie. When Tom goes, I’m going to sacrifice a carburetor to St. Maximilian and torch a box spring on my neighbor’s lawn.
Johnny Kidd & the Pirates - Shakin’ All Over - 1960 - first pressing, mono
Foundational structures of all-too-frequently dismissed, overlooked, or underappreciated artists slip through security unnoticed. Once upon a time, rock and roll was the hideous element that was going to cause gonorrhea and allow the communists to take over the world. Johnny Kidd and his Pirates arrived too late to form bedrock in the rock pantheon, but his attitude and approach were pure rockabilly gleaned from Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Johnny Burnette (whose white whale debut I found a few months ago). Problem was, it was 1960 when Kidd and Company cracked the code, but that didn’t stop our wily British cousins from flipping their collective lids. What’s more? A maximum R&B band out of London toured with Kidd & the Pirates in their early days and turned Shakin’ All Over into a staple of their live sets.
It’s truly only because of the obsessive archivists and liner-note bibliographers that we understand just how galvanic Johnny Kidd & the Pirates were. May whatever gods exist bless their compulsive hearts.
Little Walter - My Babe - 1955 - first pressing
Look, I’m not gonna tell you that Leonard and Phil Chess had an ear for talent. What I will tell you is that Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, and Buddy Guy all recorded for them. So, it stands to reason that Little Walter is probably pretty fucking good, yeah? Let me put it another way. Walter’s harmonica playing has drawn comparisons to Hendrix, Django, and Bird Parker.
Brother Ray Charles got to the gospel-song-reworked-as-a-sexifying-blues number first, but few did it better than Walter. To date, he is the only member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to be inducted specifically as a harmonica player. He was and remains one of one. This is his most potent statement.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.