Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

The folks at Rhino Records are reissuing the first two Alice Cooper albums on CD on June 10th. The albums Pretties For You (1969) and Easy Action (1970) were quirky low-budget recordings that were originally released on Frank Zappa’s Straight label. Both had previously been available on CD from the Enigma label, which has been defunct for over a decade. Alice Cooper was the band name in the beginning; lead singer Vincent Furnier later took the name for himself when he went “solo” in 1975. Although the original band did not yet become masters of shock rock when the first two albums were released, they had already achieved a different type of notoriety. Zappa signed them to his label for the opposite reason that most artists get signed: they had a rep for clearing out the venues in which they played, and Zappa admired them for it. On the debut album Pretties For You , Alice and company gleefully explored bizarre musical ground that he/they never revisited. Whenever I have played the al...

Rarebird's Spotlight Album Review #16 has now been added to the site. The subject is a 1984 covers album titled Rainy Day , which was put together by David Roback (formerly of Rain Parade, Opal, and Mazzy Star). The album was recorded by a loose collective of musicians from the early-'80's California music scene known as the "Paisley Underground", including two members of the then-little-known Bangles. The review is here: http://rarebird9.net/rainyday.html I've learned that this album was the inspiration for the 2006 album Under the Covers, Vol. 1 , a similar-minded covers CD recorded by Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs. I came across this interview with Sweet and Hoffs from '06, which is mainly about Under the Covers , but there is also some discussion about Rainy Day in the second half of the interview.

Today, the web counter on the Rarebird's Rock and Roll Rarity Reviews home page finally surpassed 10,000 hits. The site has been online since 1999, but it bears mentioning that more than 8,000 of these visits were logged since mid-2004. For the first five years of my site's existence, it only had a counter on the links page . (You don't want to know why). And, after five years, that counter had only registered about 1800 hits. As I recall, I was actually beginning to think that no one was visiting the site anymore, simply because no one was visiting the links page. Finally, I installed a working hit counter on the home page around June of 2004, and learned that my site is visited nearly every day. In the nearly four years since, the home page has been visited more than 8,000 times, while the links page has only been visited about 400 times. I'll never know how many visits the home page got during the first five years, but there's no point in crying over spilt milk....

A compilation of solo tracks by Police drummer Stewart Copeland was released today. The Stewart Copeland Anthology contains 21 tracks from Copeland's solo works, most of which are instrumental. However, the first track is not an instrumental. "Too Kool To Kalypso" was a song recorded by Copeland in 1978 under the pseudonym of Klark Kent. Up until 1980, Copeland recorded over a dozen tracks under that name before his true identity was revealed. Eight of those songs were released on a 10-inch green vinyl EP called Klark Kent: Music Madness From The Kinetic Kid , which remains a cool collectible item for both its appearance and its sound. A few other songs were released as singles and B-sides (sometimes pressed in green vinyl as well). In 1995, a collection of the complete Klark Kent recordings was released on I.R.S. Records, which was founded by Copeland's brother Miles. Kollected Works is now out of print, as are the original Klark Kent releases, and it has become th...

I was rather amused to read this MSN article, which talks about bands "long thought to have disbanded" who "soldier on...long after even loyal fans believed them to no longer be in existence." There certainly are countless bands like this still out there; my brother recently went to see shows by some kind of Thin Lizzy lineup and by some kind of Kansas lineup. The MSN article doesn't go that far in depth on the subject; among the bands they use as examples are Cheap Trick, Def Leppard, and the Who(!). But, anyway, I did think the article was worth reading, and the first two paragraphs sum up the trend well: http://entertainment.msn.com/music/features/bandsofthelivingdead Imagine if you found out that new episodes of "Laverne & Shirley" were still being made. Perhaps not with the entire original cast and certainly with the remaining cast members looking kind of old and out of breath. But still, the show was technically on the air somehow, somewhere,...

In case you haven't heard this, here is a portion of the e-mail I received from the Tower.com CEO in June: Dear Tower.com Customer, We are very pleased to report to you that the legacy of Tower Records will live on through Tower.com. We are currently in the final stages of the sale of Tower.com to Tower.com Inc., which is committed to upholding and maintaining the integrity of Tower Records, and positioning Tower.com as your preferred online shopping experience. Thank you again for your business and your loyalty to Tower Records and Tower.com. Joseph L. D'Amico CEO Tower.com Didier Pilon CEO Tower.com Inc. 11/17/17 Update : Tower.com finally went offline in 2017. However, the Tower Records brand name lives on in the form of indie record stores in Ireland and Japan.

If anyone doubted that the Starbucks coffee company was serious about getting further into the CD distribution business, you've got another think coming. The company's new Hear Music label releases its first CD this week, and its first signed artist is none other than Paul McCartney. McCartney's new CD Memory Almost Full is the label's first release, and the CD will be constantly played in the thousands of Starbucks stores worldwide on Tuesday, June 5th. Here is the story: http://music.msn.com/music/article.aspx?news=264337&GT1=7702 The ex-Beatle has only signed a deal for one album with the label, but he may sign for more if things go well. And the label plans to sign two more artists this year and eight next year. According to the article, Memory Almost Full "will be sold at most Starbucks stores worldwide, in all major music retailers, and on Apple Inc.'s iTunes online music store, making it the first of McCartney's 21 solo albums to be released di...

The passage of time never ceases to amaze me. It has now been eight years since the day I made my website Rarebird's Rock and Roll Rarity Reviews viewable to the public, on May 31, 1999. It doesn't seem like such a long time ago, even though the world is certainly a different place now than it was in 1999. When I first created this site, the world was worried about a Y2K crisis that didn't happen. 9-11 was just a phone number that people called in case of emergencies. And me? I was deliriously in love with a girl who is now married to someone else; she and her husband now have a four-year-old son. So, any way I look at things, the world has definitely changed since I first created my site. But the site still stands. The day I first unveiled it, it contained six album reviews by four different artists. Now, it contains reviews of over 275 recordings by more than 40 artists. I've basically accomplished what I wanted to accomplish with the site. In fact, the day I began w...