Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

The 40th set of exclusive vinyl items offered to Platinum members of Third Man Records’ Vault service was mailed out to the members in June of 2019. For those who are unaware, Third Man Records is the label owned by Jack White, who is 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 Platinum members every three months.

The 40th Vault package contained an exclusive vinyl edition of the Raconteurs’ 2019 studio album Help Us Stranger, and a 7-inch single containing early demo versions of two of the album’s songs.



The 180-gram Vault edition of Help Us Stranger was pressed in green vinyl with black and copper swirls, and was packaged with moving-image lenticular cover art. The album was the Raconteurs’ first studio album in eleven years, and is their third studio album to date. The album’s title continues the tradition…

Twenty years! Yes, it has been 20 years since my website Rarebird's Rock and Roll Rarity Reviews first went live on May 31, 1999. It was hard enough to believe when my site reached its ten-year mark. In my 10-year anniversary post in 2009, I said that I hoped to keep the site up and running for another ten years. Well, hooray for me! Mission accomplished.

Since their name resembles the Roman numeral XX, I will enlist the band called the xx to provide the background music for this post:



So, now that I have succeeded in my long-term goal of keeping my site online for two whole decades, the next question is: What now? I honestly don't know how much longer I will be keeping the site online, at least in its traditional form. As proud as I am of the site, it is getting more expensive to preserve its online presence. I recently renewed both the domain and the storage, so it will at least stay online until next Spring of 2020. But beyond that, the site's future is uncertain. Pa…

For Record Store Day 2019, the Detroit soul label Revilot Records issued a 10-inch EP with six tracks from The Parliaments, the George Clinton-led ‘60’s doo wop quintet which later evolved into Clinton’s ‘70’s funk collectives known as Parliament and Funkadelic (among other variations). The EP, titled Baby I Owe You Something Good, was limited to 2,000 copies.

Side A contained three tracks taken from the group’s ‘60’s doo wop singles, all of which were later redone by Clinton’s ‘70’s variations of the Parliaments. These tracks are decidedly more straightforward and more innocent soul recordings than Clinton’s later psychedelic funk experiments, but they are good early displays of his unique talents.

“All Your Goodies Are Gone” was originally released as a single in 1967 (Revilot RV 211); it was later rerecorded by Parliament for their 1974 album Up For The Down Stroke. Although this earlier doo wop version is less stylized, it has the edge in terms of real emotion. It’s an excellen…

For Record Store Day 2019, John Hiatt (the 66-year-old veteran singer-songwriter from Indiana) and his daughter Lilly Hiatt (who is a 35-year-old alt-country recording artist) recorded a 7-inch split-single limited to 450 copies. On the A-side, John covered Lilly’s song “All Kinds Of People”, which originally appeared on her 2017 album Trinity Lane. On the B-side, Lilly covered her father’s song “You Must Go”, from his 1995 album Walk On.

When you hear the elder Hiatt sing his daughter’s song “All Kinds Of People”, it’s hard to believe it’s not his own composition. The heartbroken lyrics about losing a true lover who is bound for the ocean (sort of a first-person variation on the Looking Glass song “Brandy”) have an emotional depth and a sense of down-to-earth realism that seemingly run in the family. John’s gentle guitar-and-harmonica arrangement, in which he is accompanied only by drummer Kenneth Blevins, also makes the song sound very much like it is one of his own creations.

Li…

Swervedriver, the reunited English shoegaze band of the ‘90’s, released a 12-inch single on Record Store Day 2019. Pressed in the clearest and most transparent vinyl I’ve ever seen, this disc featured previously unreleased covers of two songs from 1967: Gene Clark’s “Think I’m Gonna Feel Better” and the Supremes hit “Reflections”. The single was limited to 1,500 copies.

Although this 45-rpm single is 12 inches wide, the two songs would easily fit on a normal 7-inch single, at least one that was pressed in plain black vinyl. I have not been able to find recording dates for the unearthed tracks, either in the packaging or online. But judging from the sound, they were more likely to have been recorded during Swervedriver’s original ‘90’s run than during more recent times.

“Think I’m Gonna Feel Better” was originally a song that Gene Clark recorded with the Gosdin Brothers in 1967, not to be confused with his ’65 Byrds classic “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better”. Clark’s original was a jan…

On Record Store Day 2019, Legacy Records issued a limited edition vinyl LP reproducing the original test pressing of Bob Dylan's landmark 1975 album Blood On The Tracks. The LP was limited to 7,500 copies. This was the first time the much-bootlegged test pressing -- commonly referred to as the "New York version" -- was made available commercially. All ten tracks on the test pressing were recorded at A&R Recording Studios in New York City.

The 1975 commercial release of Blood On The Tracks contained five original New York tracks and five rerecorded Minnesota tracks. Dylan’s brother David Zimmerman encouraged him to rerecord those five latter tracks at Minneapolis Sound 80 Studios with local musicians to make the overall sound of the album less downbeat. There were originally only five copies of the Columbia test pressing known to exist. Amoeba Records in Los Angeles, California acquired one of those copies in 2015 and reportedly sold it for a whopping $12,000.

The …

The 39th set of exclusive vinyl items offered to Platinum members of Third Man Records’ Vault service was mailed out to the members in March of 2019. For those who are unaware, Third Man Records is the label owned by Jack White, who is 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 Platinum members every three months.

The 39th Vault package contained a 4-LP live set from the stoner-metal band Sleep, recorded directly to acetate at Third Man Records in Nashville on December 12, 2018. The four LP’s in this set were pressed in different colors of vinyl: one blue, one green, one purple, and one orange.

Sleep are a California trio who recorded three albums in the 1990’s. The trio’s latest album The Sciences, their first in two decades, was released by Third Man Records in 2018. Their brand of heavy metal is the slow…