Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

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...