These guys were not on my radar during the ‘90s- and after two albums, the lead singer died of a drug overdose in the band’s tour bus outside a venue. Vinyl releases of the first album were extremely limited, and are now very costly. Music on Vinyl (“MOV”) has done a reissue worth buying. That label, which presses through the old CBS plant in the Netherlands, is a prolific reissue house, but source material is often digital files, making it less desirable than other, more “audiophile” reissue labels that promise full analog reissues. (Though astute readers are aware that... Read More
Warps, Budget Ultrasonic Cleaning and Surface Dust: An Introduction
Warps, Budget Ultrasonic Cleaning and Surface Dust: An Introduction I buy a lot of used records and encounter some “challenged” copies in the process. This is hardly deliberate but comes with the territory: sometimes, the records are purchased in “lots” or more often, over the Internet, where physical inspection is impractical if not impossible. Even new, sealed records have problems. (Older “sealed” records can be the riskiest in my estimation- a complete unknown and if too tightly shrink-wrapped, are prone to warps over time). But, through a combination of... Read More
Opeth- Damnation Steve Wilson Remix
Opeth- Damnation I had heard of Opeth and even had a couple of their albums- very heavy metal, of the death/speed/black metal variety, that is not my usual fare. An Internet colleague with an impeccable taste for avant-garde music of all types had recommended Damnation and another denizen of the Net, known for his depth of knowledge in all things progressive, clued me into the recent Steve Wilson remix. The album was, at the time, apparently an outlier for Opeth; the crunch and growling voices were replaced by natural vocals and far more melodic themes. Although Wilson had mixed the... Read More
Blodwyn Pig- Ahead Rings Out
Blodwyn Pig- Ahead Rings Out On the heels of our recent look at early Jethro Tull, it is worth spending a little virtual ink on Blodwyn Pig’s first album. Tull’s debut, This Was, a blues-drenched mix of hard rock was, in many ways, a “one-off.” Mick Abrahams, Tull’s guitarist left, and the band’s direction on the next album–the seminal Stand Up—and thereafter, was shaped by Ian Anderson. Some Tull fans were disappointed that it didn’t continue as a blues-rock band. I’m not. The common wisdom was that Abrahams wanted to continue in a blues vein and Anderson... Read More
Featured Book Review: The Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy
This book—an in-depth biography of Morris Levy, a legendary music business figure with reputed “mob ties” —is long overdue. We seem to have a collective fascination for scoundrels, thugs and gangsters. But Levy was no mere thug: from his Birdland, a midtown jazz club where Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Monk, Miles, Bud Powell and Count Basie played, to his mass marketing of pop music in the decades that followed, Levy had a keen sense of where the business was headed and capitalized on it. Yet Levy always remained a shadowy figure, even decades after his death.... Read More
Interview with Richard Carlin, Author of The Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy
Interview with Richard Carlin, Author of The Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy Why a book about Morris Levy? Was it the dearth of information about him, the shadowy reputation or something else that drove you to research and write this? RC: The project did not start as a Morris Levy biography. I was doing some work on a broader project- about a generation of mostly Jewish men who were the children of first generation immigrants-all from the Bronx, who were successful in the music business. I was familiar with some of the published material on Levy- there was a... Read More
From the Editor- Ian Anderson Interview
I’m thrilled to publish an interview with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull on TheVinylPress. Anderson is a deeply reflective, articulate man who was willing to share some of his thoughts on his extraordinary style of music-making- particularly the early, seminal albums during a period of dramatic change in popular music– a transformation in which Anderson played a vital role. Anderson gives us a first hand perspective on this watershed period that reshaped popular music forever. We owe a debt of gratitude to this gifted and deservedly legendary composer and artist. Here is the... Read More
Early Tull on Vinyl
In connection with the Ian Anderson interview, I spent a fair amount of time listening to the early Jethro Tull albums. My focus was that transitional period when the band morphed from the blues into something that straddled hard rock, folk and then emerging “progressive” sounds – a path traced from This Was, to Stand Up, Benefit and Aqualung. Since I had already done an extensive vinyl shoot-out of different Aqualung pressings over the summer of 2015, I thought I might add my thoughts on some of the other early Tull pressings to coincide with the Anderson... Read More
Ageless Troubadour: A Chat with Ian Anderson
Few popular artists have remained as relevant or inventive as Ian Anderson over the course of nearly fifty years. Best known as the flamboyant front man of Jethro Tull, Anderson is a gifted songwriter, showman and performer. He is also someone who has repeatedly redefined himself throughout his professional career. Transitioning from electric blues to minstrel-tinged rock, Anderson established an identifiable sound that became uniquely associated with Tull: drawing on medieval motifs, hard rock, folk and other elements, Anderson and the band invested the troubadour’s ballad... Read More
One Year of TheVinylPress
One Year of TheVinylPress.com Self-congratulatory pieces are usually distasteful to me. But, I wanted to mark the first anniversary of TheVinylPress.com for several reasons. This all started rather innocuously- and for entirely selfish reasons. I got serious about hunting for the best sounding vinyl LPs- “ordinary” records, not necessarily “audiophile” releases — of hard rock, folk, psychedelia and offbeat stuff that didn’t always make “best of” lists, wasn’t necessarily reissued or remastered and in many cases, might prove... Read More
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