Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

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. Th...

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 sl...

Around the time of the 2019 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Nikki Sixx said in a Kerrang interview that his band Mötley Crüe were once “told by the Hall Of Fame that we would never get in, because of how we’ve acted”. Although it is understandable if an organization does not want to reward bad behavior, one must wonder what kind of bad behavior keeps someone out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Few art forms have been more frequently associated with bad behavior than rock and roll music, right? Well, anyone who wants a crash course on the L.A. hair-metal band’s wild and outrageous past needs to look no further than Netflix. The new Netflix movie The Dirt dramatizes the first 15 years or so of Mötley Crüe’s history. The film is based on the band’s autobiographical 2001 book of the same name, and was co-produced by the four band members among others. After watching this account of the band’s out-of-control party life in the ‘80’s, it’s hard to believe that all four o...