Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

Sony Legacy will be releasing a deluxe edition of Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue on June 17th, 2008. The long-unavailable 1977 album was the only released solo album from the late Beach Boys drummer, who died from drowning in 1983. This edition will be released in 2-CD and 3-LP formats, which will not only feature bonus tracks for the original album but will also feature the entire unreleased Bambu album, which was intended to be Dennis' second solo release. This will be a dream come true for many Beach Boys fans, some of whom regard Pacific Ocean Blue as a long-lost masterpiece. Personally, I do not share this view of the album. Although it did prove that Dennis could withstand comparison to his brother Brian in the songwriting and production departments, Pacific Ocean Blue suffers from a tragic flaw: Dennis' vocals. The aging Beach Boy's voice had become worn and ragged, and it tended to clash with the album's well-crafted arrangements. Pacific Ocean Blue ...

It has now been nine years since I first made my website Rarebird's Rock and Roll Rarity Reviews viewable to the public. Time is certainly flying, because it seems like only yesterday that I was surprised that eight years had passed since the beginning. I've probably made fewer additions to the site in the past 12 months than in any previous 12-month period in the last nine years. The reason is because I have basically accomplished what I wanted to accomplish with the site. However, I will continue to make updates and additions as I see fit, and I will point them out on this blog when I do. In the meantime, I want to once again thank everyone who has visited and supported the site over the years. I hope to keep the site online for many more.

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.