The Biggest Record Show in Texas (and the United States)- The Austin Record Convention 2019 Yep, stuff is big here- trucks, some people (fit, not fat), buildings, hair, BBQ, hell the entire state is big. And the Austin Record Convention, which has been operating since 1981, was pretty great this year. Lots of dealers (over 300, according to the website) occupying 40,000 sq feet of clean, well air-conditioned modern space. The show takes place in South Austin, just a stone’s throw from the river in the middle of downtown Austin. It claims to be the biggest record show in the United... Read More
Arts, related and otherwise… including books, film and miscellaneous adventures.
Peter Green: A Love That Burns- Definitive Reference Guide by Richard Orlando (3 volumes, Smiling Corgi Press 2017).
Peter Green: A Love That Burns- Definitive Reference Guide by Richard Orlando (3 volumes, Smiling Corgi Press 2017). To call this exhaustive study of Peter Green’s performances an ambitious undertaking would be damning by faint praise: over 1,900 pages, cataloging and commenting on the history and attributes of 1,000 recorded performances by the legendary guitarist Peter Green spread among three volumes. These volumes took author Richard Orlando more than 15 years to assemble. Green is a relatively modern artist who composed and performed within our lifetimes—and within a fairly... Read More
SEDUCED BY SOUND: AUSTIN, 100 Musicians on Why They Make Music
SEDUCED BY SOUND: AUSTIN, 100 Musicians on Why They Make Music Even if you hung out in every bar, dive and dance hall in a town for the last 40 years, you wouldn’t capture the musical influences, history and “feel” of a place as well as this book tells it. Part history, part interviews with music makers, SEDUCED BY SOUND: AUSTIN is far more than a cheat sheet for the vast array of talent that inhabits this “live music capital of the world.” It tells the story of the Austin music scene, in the words of the people who lived and made it, in a way no narrative history... Read More
From the Gulch to the Delta
From the Gulch to the Delta- On Pawn~ in Asheville, N.C. We are down in the Gulch, Nashville’s newest “hot” urban enclave, bubbling with fashionable boutiques and trendy nightspots. Our trip from Virginia was uneventful, if wet; the views along the higher ridges were hampered by fog. With a brief stay-over in Winston-Salem, a quiet town of old architectural gems (and one of the best café lattes ever, at a place called “The Hive”), we landed in Asheville. This is a vibrant city nestled into the Blue Ridge Mountains with the charm of the south but a distinct culture all its own.... Read More
The War of Fog
The War of Fog -Adventures in Audiophile Moving. For forty days and nights, we’ve been packing boxes and squaring away our Hudson River home for sale to the new owners: roughly 12,000 records have gone through my hands recently; a few thousand left a while ago, and are now in the hands of a friend who returned to vinyl; as many were handed off to a wholesaler who dealt with the listings and shipping (none of the really rare stuff got sold, so you didn’t miss a thing). The wholesaler came back a couple weeks ago to take another 2,000 records out of here. That left me with about 6,000... 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
Yuri Grishin- “The British Recording History”
Yuri Grishin’s name should be familiar to some readers; he is the polymath who assembled the extensive labelographies of Island, Vertigo, Harvest and Charisma in a series entitled “The Famous British Collectable Record Labels. ” Those books–which include images of the releases, catalog numbers, details about cover art, mastering, matrix information and details on sleeves, variations in different countries, along with “inside” interviews—provide an invaluable resource to collectors, are now out of print and are themselves collectible. Grishin... Read More
New Skynyrd Documentary: Gone with the Wind
Not long after writing a retrospective on Lynyrd Skynyrd, I happened on this film documentary– Gone with the Wind– about the band. Without knowing much about the film, I was thoroughly surprised by its depth and the care that went into making it; not just talking heads, or jarring, badly filmed footage of concert excerpts, it tells the story of Lynyrd Skynyrd from the earliest days, and includes interviews with some of the surviving members. Drummer Burns, who is featured in a number of interview clips, died earlier this year. The film benefits from some pretty candid... Read More
Road Trip!
photo credit: Modestas Urbonas The weather was glorious this weekend in the Hudson Valley and we took full advantage. Our path eventually led to Beacon, New York, which has been transformed from a sleepy river town to Brooklyn-on–the-Hudson. In addition to a couple of interesting antique stores and a great little taqueria named after a Mexican wrestler (Tito Santana), we visited Audioccult, a sweet little new/old record shop in town. We found some nice records- mostly U.S. ‘60s and ‘70s rock and R&B. (Some were first pressings and in better than usual condition at very... Read More