Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

David Johansen died on February 28, 2025 after a long battle with cancer and other health troubles. Johansen was the last surviving original member of the New York Dolls, the early-'70's glam rock quintet who came to be recognized as one of the earliest punk rock bands. After that band called it quits in 1976, lead singer Johansen began a solo career that aimed closer to rock's mainstream, but with little success. Johansen finally hit it big in the late-'80's under the name Buster Poindexter, his kitschy pompadour-topped lounge-singer alter ego, who became famous for the party song "Hot Hot Hot". Johansen's fifth solo album, Sweet Revenge from 1984, is currently unavailable. This was the last album he released before he adopted the Buster Poindexter persona. (One of the songs, "Big Trouble", is about a womanizing bad guy named Buster, but it's hard to say if it refers to Johansen's soon-to-be-alter-ego). This album is heavy on synt...

For Record Store Day Black Friday in 2024, Garbage issued a vinyl LP titled Copy/Paste , pressed in magenta-colored vinyl and limited to 1,300 copies. The album collected 10 cover songs recorded by the Shirley Manson-fronted alternative band over the course of their 30-year history, nine of which were previously released. An abridged version of the album was made available digitally, featuring six of the ten tracks (marked with an asterisk in the track listing below). The other four tracks can be found digitally as bonus tracks on the Deluxe Editions of the band's first four studio albums. The album begins with a cover of David Bowie's classic "Starman", a song for which Garbage's futuristic sound is well matched; the result has a convincingly cosmic aura. The band's futuristic ethos was equally appropriate for their cover of U2's "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses", one of the songs which helped to redefine U2 as a futuristic band in 1991;...

For Record Store Day 2025, a live EP recorded by Keith Richards and the X-Pensive Winos is being issued on vinyl, in a 1,300-copy limited edition. Live 3.10.22 was recorded on the titular date at the 6th annual Love Rocks NYC benefit concert. The 3-song, 12-inch EP is pressed in red vinyl, with an etching on the second side. This short-but-sweet concert set took place at New York's Beacon Theater, at a concert to benefit God's Love We Deliver, an organization which cooks and delivers meals to sick people in New York City. This concert reunited the legendary Rolling Stones guitarist with the backing band who supported him on his solo albums Talk Is Cheap (1988) and Main Offender (1992), as well as on the respective tours to support those albums. The X-Pensive Winos lineup for this set featured guitarist Waddy Wachtel, Ivan Neville on keyboards, Steve Jordan on drums, and bassist Will Lee (replacing the unavailable Charley Drayton). This appearance was billed as their first ...

The 62nd set of exclusive vinyl items offered to members of Third Man Records’ Vault service was mailed out to the members in December of 2024. For those who are unaware, Third Man Records is the label owned by Jack White, who was the leader of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs, and the Dead Weather, and is now a solo artist. The Vault service promises to deliver exclusive vinyl-only records (usually one full-length album and one 7” single) to its members every three months. The 62nd Vault package featured a new vinyl edition of Raw Power , the raw and powerful 1973 pre-punk record by Iggy (Pop) and the Stooges. This edition utilized the 1973 David Bowie mixes of the album's eight tracks, as opposed to the 1997 mixes by Iggy Pop. But instead of being pressed on an LP, the eight tracks were pressed on four 7-inch colored-vinyl singles, packaged in a splendid silver-foil slipcase. The package also contained two additional 7-inch discs containing five outtakes from the Raw Power s...

In 1977, the jazz-rock collective known as Blood, Sweat and Tears released an album titled Brand New Day , which was their only release on the soon-to-be-defunct ABC Records. At this point in time, the band's nine-member lineup did not include one single member of the original Al Kooper-led octet which recorded the band's 1968 debut album Child Is Father to the Man . However, original percussionist Bobby Colomby is credited with playing on Brand New Day , and Colomby co-produced the album with Roy Halee. (The two men were also co-producers of the 1971 album BS&T; 4 ). But this album did feature David Clayton-Thomas, the robust lead vocalist who sang on the band's second-through-fourth albums, and who helped to propel Blood, Sweat and Tears to chart-topping and Grammy-winning success from 1969 until 1971. Clayton-Thomas was given star billing on the front cover of Brand New Day . He had left the band in early 1972, and the band's popularity quickly faded during his a...

2024 was the fourth year in a row in which Pink Floyd temporarily released numerous 50-year-old concert recordings on streaming services, for the purpose of extending their copyright ownership of the material. The previous two times, the concerts were only available on the streaming services for a matter of weeks. This time, they were apparently gone in a matter of days! In most cases, these recordings were sourced from fan-made bootlegs, and have varying sound quality, some of them very poor. These stealth-released live recordings were really not meant to actually be heard by the fans, and in this latest case, the fans missed the streams if they sneezed, let alone snoozed. I myself was not aware of this latest Floyd "copyright dump" until the recordings had already come and gone from the streaming services. According to information I was able to glean from the web, these recordings appeared on streaming services on or around December 6th, and disappeared around December 13...

For Record Store Day Black Friday in 2024, Jorma Kaukonen released a limited edition album titled Reno Road , issued in both CD and vinyl double-LP formats. The album contains previously unreleased blues recordings made in 1960 by the future guitarist of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna. The double-LP was pressed in translucent gold vinyl, and limited to 2,000 copies. The CD, limited to 500 copies, was designed to resemble a gold vinyl record. The album's acoustic blues tracks were recorded in the summer of 1960, when Kaukonen was a 19-year-old student at Antioch College, and had been recently taught to play fingerstyle blues guitar by Ian Buchanan. These recordings were made in the home of his friend Jack Casady on Reno Road in Chevy Chase, MD. Casady, as you probably know, has been Kaukonen's lifelong musical collaborator, in the Airplane, Tuna, and elsewhere. Casady recorded these homemade tracks on his Wollensak tape recorder. 60-odd years later, Casady rediscovered these ...