Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

Rarebird’s Rock and Roll Rarity Reviews would like to wish you and yours a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, or whatever you personally call this time of year. During the Christmas season in 2000, Weezer issued a two-song Christmas CD to members of their official fan club, and also sent the CD to radio stations as a promo item. It was simply titled Christmas CD , and its two tracks ran for a total of five-and-a-half minutes. The same two tracks were sold on iTunes beginning in 2005, under the title Winter Weezerland . The songs have not been offered on iTunes since 2008. (This EP should not be confused with the 2008 digital EP Christmas With Weezer , which does not contain either of these two tracks). Some time between 2000 and 2005, the tracks were available as free downloads on Weezer’s official web site. Some rabid fans were evidently unhappy that formerly free downloads were later being sold as commercial downloads, and expressed their supposed outrage on Weezer- and iTunes-rela...

Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, died on Friday, December 17, 2010, at the age of 69, from complications caused by multiple sclerosis. Beefheart recorded 11 studio albums between 1967 and 1982. On his 1967 debut album Safe As Milk , Beefheart came across as a blues-rocker in the Stones/Animals mold. But his sound became more avant garde on the albums that followed. He and his sometime collaborator Frank Zappa had been friends since boyhood; amazingly, Beefheart’s off-the-wall recordings tended to be more bizarre than Zappa’s. Beefheart has been cited as a major influence on many artists, especially from the alternative rock genre. In 1982, Beefheart quit the music business to focus full-time on painting, and never recorded another album for the remaining 28 years of his life. Some people interpreted his refusal to re-enter the music biz as a telling statement about that industry. Although it is easy to believe that Beefheart disliked the “business” side of the music b...

Jack White continues to amuse me with his creativity with vinyl records, among other things.

I just read an interview with Gene Simmons of Kiss at the MSN reality TV site: http://tv.msn.com/reality-tv/gene-simmons-interview/story/feature/?gt1=28103 I don't always agree with Gene, but it's almost always interesting to hear his insights. When it comes to expressing his opinions, Simmons certainly doesn't bite his famous tongue. There are two insights from the interview which I felt compelled to share on this blog. Here is the first one: Interviewer: What motivates you to work as hard as you still do after such a long career? Simmons: Every day you want to wake up and do something, otherwise what good are you? The simple idea is, if you have enough money for food and stuff, and then you quit working, you're just waiting to die. The hours go by and the years go by and what have you got to show for it? At the end of the day, you've got to be able to look in the mirror and say, "I used this day." When you work hard you get to sleep really hard and food ...

The Bubblemen were a pseudonymous side project for Love and Rockets, the alternative trio who scored an unlikely smash hit called “So Alive” in 1989. The band’s three members – David J, Daniel Ash, and Kevin Haskins – dressed up in bumblebee costumes for this endeavor. The same costumes were sometimes seen in Love and Rockets videos, during concerts, and in the between-videos segments of their 1991 VHS release The Haunted Fishtank . Under the Bubblemen name, the trio released one 12” single called “The Bubblemen Are Coming!” in 1988. For your viewing pleasure, I have embedded a creative YouTube video for the song below. Without the chuckle-inducing visuals, the recorded track is an enjoyably trippy five minutes of inside-joke silliness, with a slow-building whimsical intro that is omitted from the video edit. This novelty song portrays the title characters as friendly aliens from the planet Girl. The B-side track (alternately known as “Bees” and “B Side”) consists of over three minutes...

Although Def Leppard will always be remembered as the definitive pop-metal band of the 1980’s, they originally came from the late-‘70’s scene referred to as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, which also gave rise to less melodic metal bands such as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Def Leppard’s earliest work showed them in a somewhat different light than their classic mega-selling albums Pyromania (1983) and Hysteria (1987) did. Before they were produced by Mutt Lange, the band’s recordings had a slightly heavier and less polished sound. Joe Elliott’s vocals sounded quite different on these early recordings than they did years later. From the second Def Leppard album (1981’s High ‘n’ Dry ) onward, Elliott sounded like he was partially influenced by AC/DC’s Brian Johnson. But these late-‘70’s recordings predate AC/DC’s Back In Black , and if you contrast these early Def Leppard recordings with their later work, it provides telling evidence of that AC/DC album’s impact on heavy metal. ...

A long-in-the-works album by INXS is finally set for release on January 11th, 2011. The album titled Original Sin will feature remakes of songs which originally were recorded with their late original lead singer Michael Hutchence, recorded with various guest vocalists. Here is the USA Today story: http://usat.ly/aO1PyJ Here is a key paragraph: The resulting album, Original Sin , out Jan. 11, features such latter-day artists as Ben Harper (on the first single, Never Tear Us Apart), Rob Thomas, Nikka Costa, Tricky and Train's Pat Monahan providing vocals for songs made famous by original INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, who died in 1997. John Mayer also appears, playing guitar on one track; another features J.D. Fortune, who sang on 2005's Switch album after winning the CBS reality series Rock Star: INXS . You read that right. J.D. Fortune, who started a ridiculous feud with INXS early last year, has rejoined them. He has been performing live shows with the band, and they are ...

More great news for those lucky few of us who are fans of the Distractions, the unjustly overlooked Manchester band who released only one full-length album called Nobody’s Perfect in 1980. The U.K. music label Occultation, who recently brought us a three-song EP of previously unreleased Distractions recordings from a short-lived mid-‘90’s reunion , are now set to release an EP featuring three songs resulting from another Distractions reunion earlier this year. The official Occultation site has streaming audio of the three complete songs from the Come Home EP, which the label plans to release on 12” vinyl in early November: http://www.occultation.co.uk/Occultation_Space/Releases/YMIR7DA008/ymir7da008_previ.html The three songs on the Come Home EP were recorded in June of 2010, by a lineup consisting of original vocalist Mike Finney, original guitarist Steve Perrin, bass player Nick Garside (who was a part of the mid-‘90’s lineup), drummer Stuart Mann, and guitarist Nick Halliwell. T...