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Showing posts from May, 2014

Fifteen years! (And, no, rock isn't dead).

Where does the time go? It has now been 15 years since the day I "went live" with my website, Rarebird's Rock and Roll Rarity Reviews , on May 31st of 1999. The internet and the music world have both changed a great deal since then, but I've tried to keep my website about out-of-print rock and roll albums as simple as it was in the beginning. I never thought I'd say this, but I actually think that my website has grown too large in size. The original idea was for the site to consist of about 10 different artist pages. But ideas just kept coming to me, and so the site came to have over 35 artist pages. Starting in 2003, I began using a different approach by creating pages that spotlighted one album instead of multiple albums by one artist. Again, the idea was to create about ten of those pages -- but now, there are more than twenty. I suppose that having too much inspiration is a good problem for a webmaster to have. However, I don't plan to add many more page...

Flying Burrito Brothers "Devils In Disguise"

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I recently added a review of the 2012 U.K. release Devils In Disguise to my Flying Burrito Brothers page . According to Amazon.com, the album is about to be released on CD in the U.S. on May 6th, and on limited-edition vinyl on May 19th. It is reportedly an unofficial and unauthorized release. Devils In Disguise is a live album recorded in Philadelphia in 1971, around the time of the release of the self-titled third album. The lineup consisted of Chris Hillman, Bernie Leadon, Rick Roberts, Al Perkins (replacing “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow on pedal steel) and Michael Clarke. This CD is sourced from a popular bootleg, which in turn was sourced from a July 1971 live radio broadcast on WMMR-FM. (The first track, “Six Days On The Road”, fades in at the middle). This concert finds the post-Kleinow, pre-Country Gazette quintet performing very much in an old-fashioned country mode, mostly in contrast to the relative slickness of the third album. The exceptions are Gene Clark’s “Tried So Hard” an...