Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

The 49th set of exclusive vinyl items offered to members of Third Man Records’ Vault service was mailed out to the members in September of 2021. 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 members every three months. The 49th Vault package featured a 4-LP vinyl edition of Bob Dylan’s box set titled Springtime In New York: The Bootleg Series Vol. 16 (1980-1985) . This edition contained 42 songs recorded by Dylan in the early-to-mid-‘80’s, 40 of which were previously unreleased. This edition is slightly condensed from the commercially released 5-CD edition, which contained 57 tracks. However, it should not be confused with the 2-LP vinyl highlights version which was released commercially. That 2-LP set contains 11 of the 57 t...

For Record Store Day Black Friday in 2021, a previously unreleased live album from the Gun Club – the early punk rock band led by the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce – was issued in a limited run of 2,000 gold-colored vinyl copies. Sex, Murder, Drugs, and Bad Vibes – Live at the Starwood 1981 was recorded at the titular Hollywood club on January 20th of ’81. This live show took place before the release of the Gun Club’s 1981 debut album Fire Of Love . The show was performed by the lineup which recorded that album, which was comprised of Pierce, guitarist Ward Dotson, and former Alice Bag Band members Rob Ritter (bass) and Terry Graham (drums). (Contrary to what the Record Store Day website states, this should not be confused with the original lineup which included Kid Congo Powers). The Starwood Club in Hollywood was known as a venue which helped to launch the careers of many heavy metal and punk bands between 1973 and 1981. This show was performed five months before the club was closed dow...

On Record Store Day Black Friday in 2021, a limited edition live LP by two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Carole King was issued. Carole King In Concert: Live At The BBC, 1971 was recorded during the year when King’s hugely successful Tapestry album was released. This vinyl LP was limited to 6,550 copies. This concert was performed on July 15, 1971 at the BBC Television Centre in London, and its original BBC broadcast took place on October 2nd of that year. King was backed by the band Jo Mama, which included King’s former collaborators in the folk-rock trio known as The City: her then-husband Charles Larkey on bass, and Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar on conga and electric guitar. James Taylor, another frequent collaborator, made a guest appearance playing acoustic guitar on “So Far Away”. For a time during the ‘70’s, the Tapestry album held the title of the best-selling album of all time. As of this writing, the album is the 38th all-time best-seller, having sold over 13 mi...

For Record Store Day Black Friday 2021, Aerosmith issued a limited edition album in LP and cassette formats, containing their first known recorded tracks from 1971. The vinyl LP was limited to 10,000 copies, while the cassette had a print run of 2,000 copies. The seven tracks on 1971 – The Road Starts Hear (the actual spelling) were just recently discovered by the band. No one remembers exactly where they were recorded or for what purpose, but Mark Lehman (Aerosmith’s first roadie) guesses they are rehearsals which were recorded in the basement of a women’s dormitory at Boston University, while singer Steven Tyler thinks they may have been soundchecks recorded inside an empty club shortly before a gig. The source tape was recorded on a reel-to-reel machine that belonged to guitarist Joe Perry. The resulting sound quality is clearly not studio level, but is better than that of a typical demo. The recording took place in October of 1971, about one year after Aerosmith’s first show, an...

September 24th of 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Nirvana's landmark Nevermind album on the same date in 1991. Nevermind , which has sold over 30 million units worldwide, is one of the best-selling albums of all time, as well as one of the most influential. The album, which mixed punk rock rage with accessible pop hooks, effectively kicked off the alternative rock revolution of the early-to-mid-'90's. We all know the sad ending to the Nirvana story: Kurt Cobain, the band's founder and frontman, committed suicide less than three years later, after repeatedly stating that he was unhappy with the trappings of fame and the demands of the music business. On a positive note, former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl went on to form the Foo Fighters, whose popularity endures to this day. The Nevermind album is often acknowledged as a game-changer for rock and roll, and it was certainly pivotal to the history of popular music. But one debatable claim that is ofte...

The 48th set of exclusive vinyl items offered to members of Third Man Records’ Vault service was mailed out to the members in June and July of 2021. 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 members every three months. The 48th Vault package featured a 20th anniversary edition of the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells album from 2001, consisting of two LP’s with previously unreleased bonus tracks, as well as a DVD of a short featurette on the making of the album, and a picture book full of related visual memorabilia. On the 2001 White Blood Cells album, which was the duo’s third studio release, Jack and Meg White continued to make high-fuzz garage rock, but this time it was based less on the blues than on folk-rock. Wher...

The soundtrack album for the excellent 2000 film Almost Famous , which was based on writer/director Cameron Crowe’s experiences as a teenage Rolling Stone magazine reporter in the 1970's, is being reissued in multiple expanded editions on July 9th. This article provides many details about those reissues: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/almost-famous-expanded-july-release/ The Uber Box Set edition certainly would be an incredible thing to possess, for those who could afford it. The track list provided in the article shows that the six songs supposedly recorded by Stillwater, the film's fictional '70's rock band, will be included on CD 4 of the mammoth set. That same disc will contain the Stillwater demos, which were also issued on a limited edition vinyl LP for Record Store Day 2021. Only one of the Stillwater songs, “Fever Dog”, was featured on the original version of the Almost Famous soundtrack album. But there was a “Director’s Edition” DVD version of th...

For Record Store Day 2021, the indie-pop duo Twenty One Pilots issued a four-song EP titled Location Sessions . This EP was pressed in grey vinyl and limited to 16,000 copies. It was released on June 12th of 2021, the first of two Record Store Day "drop dates" during that year. The EP contained live versions of three songs from the duo's 2018 Trench album, as well as a "live from outside" version of the 2020 single "Level Of Concern". These Location Sessions tracks aren't half bad. The live version of "Chlorine" is preferable to the higher-tech studio version, with Tyler Joseph's vocals sounding nearer and natural as he voices the bizarre metaphors in the lyrics, with a more organic piano sound, and with the song's length being wisely shortened. The live version of "Cut My Lip" is no less technology-based than the studio version, though it does have a slightly warmer sound here even with the AutoTune effects; it...

The 47th set of exclusive vinyl items offered to members of Third Man Records’ Vault service was mailed out to the members in March and April of 2021. 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 members every three months. The 47th Vault package contained a 4-LP live album from Jack White recorded in 2014, and a 7-inch single featuring the songs White performed on Saturday Night Live in October 2020. The mammoth 4-LP set Live At The Masonic Temple: Detroit 7/30/14 documents White’s mammoth three-hour-plus concert at that place and date. The four discs were pressed in colored 180-gram vinyl, the first one white, the second one dark blue, the third one black, and the fourth one in swirled light-blue. The LP’s were housed i...

For the first Drop Date of Record Store Day 2021, scheduled for June 12th, a live EP by Robert Plant will be issued, featuring four songs performed by the legendary Led Zeppelin frontman at the 1990 Knebworth Festival. The Live At Knebworth 1990 EP will be limited to 4,700 colored vinyl copies. It contains the same four songs that were included on the Knebworth various artists compilation album from the event. The Knebworth Festival was a recurring summer event in Knebworth, England during many of the years between 1974 and 2014, but the 1990 festival (which was broadcast worldwide on MTV) is remembered for its particularly stellar lineup of performers, which included Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Phil Collins and Genesis, Dire Straits, Cliff Richard, Status Quo, and Tears For Fears. Robert Plant’s rocking set during this festival featured a surprise appearance by Jimmy Page, and the reunited Led Zeppelin legends were heard to better effect than they were du...

For the second Drop Date of Record Store Day 2021, scheduled for July 17th, an obscure live album from the Gun Club – the early punk rock band led by the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce – will be reissued in a limited run of 1,800 red-colored vinyl copies. The Birth, The Death, The Ghost was previously released in 1983 and 1989 in the U.K. only. This album was recorded in 1980, before the recording of the Gun Club’s 1981 debut album Fire Of Love . The early lineup included guitarist Kid Congo Powers (aka Brian Tristan), who later played with the Cramps and with Nick Cave. Bass player Rob Ritter and drummer Terry Graham, who both played on Fire Of Love , had previously played with the notorious Los Angeles punk band The Bags (aka The Alice Bag Band). The 13 live tracks were recorded at four different L.A. club shows during that year. These early recordings were sourced from tapes recorded by Graham’s sister Lois, so the sound has a consistently muddy bootleg-like quality. Still, it’s fortuna...

The Philadelphia band known as the Hooters achieved their widest fame in 1985, when they opened the Live Aid benefit concert in their hometown, and when their double-platinum major-label debut album Nervous Night spawned three Top 40 hit singles (“Day By Day”, “And We Danced”, “Where Do The Children Go”). The band’s founders, Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian, have also had a hand in writing hit songs for others. Most notably, Hyman co-wrote Cyndi Lauper’s 1984 #1 hit “Time After Time” (on which he also sang the harmony vocal), and Bazilian penned Joan Osborne’s 1995 #4 hit “One Of Us”. Another common thread that runs through all of the songs mentioned above is their producer, Rick Chertoff. The long friendship between Chertoff and the Hooters founders dates back to the ‘70’s, when Hyman and Bazilian formed an earlier band with vocalist Dave Kagan called Baby Grand. (Hyman, Chertoff, and Kagan also had previously played together in an unsigned early-‘70’s Philly band called Wax). The self...

The 46th set of exclusive vinyl items offered to members of Third Man Records’ Vault service was mailed out to the members in December of 2020. 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 members every three months. The 46th Vault package contained an expanded version of the White Stripes’ Greatest Hits album released in late 2020. While the regular vinyl issue of the compilation album was a double-LP set titled My Sister Thanks You And I Thank You , the Vault variation was a 3-LP set titled Aside From That And Besides This , featuring a third disc filled with bonus B-sides and rarities. The first disc was pressed in white vinyl, the second in red vinyl, and the third (the B-sides disc) in splattered red-white-and-black ...

It was good to see Van Halen reunite with their original frontman David Lee Roth while Eddie Van Halen was still alive, because it was a reunion that I once thought would never happen . Why? Because a failed attempt was made at such a reunion back in 1996. Roth briefly rejoined the band at that point, recording two new VH studio tracks for the compilation album Best Of – Volume 1 , and appearing on camera with the rest of the band on MTV . But the sham reunion ran aground after Roth and Eddie Van Halen clashed, and the VH frontman slot was then ephemerally held by former Extreme singer Gary Cherone – with whom the band recorded the ill-fated Van Halen III album in 1998. For his part, Roth went ahead and recorded his own surprisingly hard-rocking album with an outfit called the DLR Band, or David Lee Roth Band. This album was distributed on Roth's own indie label called Wawazat!!. The self-titled DLR Band CD sounded quite similar to early Van Halen, but was rawer in nature. One of...

Brian May & Friends were a one-off supergroup which paired the Queen guitarist with the late Edward Van Halen. The other “friends” in the band were drummer Alan Gratzer of REO Speedwagon, bassist Phil Chen (who had played with Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck), and session keyboardist Fred Mandel (who had recently worked with Queen and Alice Cooper). The group’s 1983 album Star Fleet Project was a spontaneous work completed in about two days, inspired by the music score for a science fiction television series. The three-song mini-album has long been out of print, but has attracted new attention since the death of Eddie Van Halen, and Brian May has discussed the possibility of an eventual reissue. Star Fleet was the British title of the early-‘80’s animated marionette sci-fi series which originated in Japan as X Bomber . The end-credits theme music for the show’s U.K. version was composed by British keyboardist Paul Bliss, who played with later incarnations of the Moody Blues and the ...