Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

Trivia question: Which heavy metal band was the first to reach #1 on the Billboard 200 album chart? Someone my age might answer "Led Zeppelin", but a younger person will probably respond by saying, "Led Zeppelin were a rock band, not a metal band". Whatever. So, if you type the above trivia question into Google, the answer you will get is: Quiet Riot. In 1983, that band from Los Angeles, CA topped the album chart with Metal Health , which also yielded a Top 5 single with the band's cover of Slade's "Cum On Feel the Noize", as well as a band-written Top 40 hit called "Bang Your Head (Metal Health)". In retrospect, it may be hard to believe that Quiet Riot achieved that metal milestone, because they have not been able to repeat that level of chart-topping success at any other time during their long and complicated history. Something that I find hard to believe is that the first two Quiet Riot albums, titled Quiet Riot and Quiet Riot II ,...

According to a recent article in the U.K. Independent , veteran English musician and producer Brian Eno is relaunching his Opal Records music label on October 16th. The man who is regarded as the inventor of ambient music first launched the Opal label in 1988 to distribute music by artists who had similarly unconventional ways of making music, including his brother Roger, John Cale, Jon Hassell, and Daniel Lanois. The label has been technically inactive since the early '90's, although Eno has still sometimes used the Opal branding for his projects. As part of the label's relaunch, Eno is reissuing two of his later albums which have long been unavailable: Drawn From Life (his 2001 collaboration with German composer J. Peter Schwalm) and Another Day On Earth (2005). Drawn From Life reflects Eno's concept of music being designed more like a visual painting than like standard compositions, as it consists of ambient and electronic soundscapes which were composed, perfor...