Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

According to a recent article in the U.K. Independent , veteran English musician and producer Brian Eno is relaunching his Opal Records music label on October 16th. The man who is regarded as the inventor of ambient music first launched the Opal label in 1988 to distribute music by artists who had similarly unconventional ways of making music, including his brother Roger, John Cale, Jon Hassell, and Daniel Lanois. The label has been technically inactive since the early '90's, although Eno has still sometimes used the Opal branding for his projects. As part of the label's relaunch, Eno is reissuing two of his later albums which have long been unavailable: Drawn From Life (his 2001 collaboration with German composer J. Peter Schwalm) and Another Day On Earth (2005). Drawn From Life reflects Eno's concept of music being designed more like a visual painting than like standard compositions, as it consists of ambient and electronic soundscapes which were composed, perfor...

Frank Beard, the drummer of ZZ Top, has died at age 77. Ironically, Beard was the one member of the "Texas boogie-blues-rock" trio who was usually beardless. ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill died in 2021, and now guitarist/vocalist Billy Gibbons is the only surviving member of the classic lineup. Before the 1969 formation of ZZ Top, Beard and Hill were members of a Texas-based quartet called American Blues, which also included Dusty's older brother Rocky Hill on lead guitar, and organist Doug Davis. Dusty was the vocalist for this band, and his vocals had a smoother and clearer tone than the raspier vocals which Gibbons would later bring to ZZ Top. American Blues began under the name The Warlocks (like the Grateful Dead also did), and released two garage rock singles under that name in 1966: "If You Really Want Me To Stay" (a high-fuzz Texas variation on British Invasion rock) and "Splash Day" (a Texan-sounding Beach Boys variation about partying on Flori...

Around the time of the formation of the Police, frontman Sting (aka Gordon Sumner) took part in the recording of a European single credited to a fictitious band called Fast Breeder & The Radio Actors. This single, titled "Nuclear Waste", was an anti-nuke protest song written by Harry Williamson, who has played with offshoots of Genesis, Gong, and Hawkwind. The single was first released in 1978 on the Nuke imprint, distributed in the U.K. by Virgin Records in a 500-copy print run, then issued a second time in 1979 on the Charly imprint, distributed by Pye Records. Harry Williamson was the son of novelist Henry Williamson ( Tarka The Otter ), and a founder of the left-wing Green Party of England and Wales. Williamson immersed himself in the hippie culture of the 1970's, so it made sense that he would fall in with the free-festival musical movement championed by the likes of Hawkwind and Gong. For this one-off single, Williamson assembled musicians from that space-rock...

Strontium 90 was a quartet that briefly existed in 1977, and it featured the three musicians who would soon become The Police: Sting (aka Gordon Sumner), Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland. Who was the fourth member? That would be Mike Howlett, who had previously been the bassist for the progressive rock band Gong from 1973 until 1976, and who had sung the lead vocals on that band's 1976 album Shamal . It was Howlett who assembled Strontium 90, who recorded a half-album's worth of studio demo tracks and performed one live show before disbanding. Twenty years later, long after the Police saga had ended, a CD titled Police Academy was issued in 1997, containing studio and live tracks recorded in '77 by Howlett and the future Police men. According to Howlett's liner notes, the recordings on Police Academy mark the first time the Police trio worked together, in the studio and on the stage. At that time, like Howlett, the three future Police men had progressive rock back...

The Power Station was a supergroup formed in the mid-'80's by two of the unrelated Taylors from Duran Duran -- bassist John and guitarist Andy -- who enlisted solo artist Robert Palmer as their singer, and Tony Thompson from Chic as their drummer. Their self-titled album from 1985 was produced by Bernard Edwards -- also from Chic -- and, like the band, was named after the New York studio in which it was recorded. The booming funk-rock sound of The Power Station was a commercial success, but (like so many other supergroup recordings) the material sounded under-developed. Edwards' reverb-heavy approach seemed designed to cover up shortcomings, but it resulted in a noisy, cacophonous high-tech mess, with every instrument mixed louder than it ought to have been. The album had a strong single in the sexy ska-funk number "Some Like It Hot", but the rest of it (except maybe for the hyperactive updating of Marc Bolan's glam-rock classic "Get It On (Bang A Gong)...

Live at Cabaret Metro 10-5-88 is a rare live CD by The Smashing Pumpkins, which was given away free to people who attended the Pumpkins' concert at the Metro in Chicago on December 2, 2000, which was supposed to be the band's final concert. (The Pumpkins would later reunite in 2006). This CD documents the band's very first performance at the same venue 12 years earlier, on October 5, 1988. That '88 show was the Pumpkins' fourth concert overall, but was the first to be performed by all four members of the classic lineup. The CD was limited to approximately 1,200 copies, and included a note which said: Please enjoy this special gift from the Smashing Pumpkins and Metro. This is a recording of the Smashing Pumpkins' first show at Metro on October 5th, 1988. The artwork is by James Iha. We hope you enjoyed the show, and we thank you for your many years of support. -The Smashing Pumpkins and Metro The very first Pumpkins performance took place three months b...

As someone who began collecting out-of-print records in the early 1990's, I can easily remember a time when many Beach Boys albums were not commercially available, and seemed to be rarely discussed. Which albums were those? Well, nearly every proper album that the band recorded after 1969 was unavailable and largely forgotten during the '90's. That began to change in the year 2000, when Capitol Records issued a 2-on-1 CD containing the 1970 Sunflower album and the 1971 Surf's Up album on one disc. Similar 2-on-1 reissues followed during that same year, until all of the band's studio albums up to the self-titled Beach Boys from 1985 were available again. Since then, those albums have remained commercially available -- physically, digitally, or both -- and some of them (particularly the ones released during the early-'70's) have become more appreciated over time. However, there are two Beach Boys albums that have been un available since the 1990's, an...