Record Store Day is April 22. You can celebrate locally at Newbury Comics and Vinyl Index and Somerville Grooves and a dozen other record shops. Want the local connection to go a little deeper? Go to a Boston area shop and buy one of these three RSD-exclusive releases with a Boston connection (and one that has nothing to do with our city but is too good not to pick up).
Everybody knows the Wailers. Everybody should know Word, Sound and Power.
After Peter Tosh split from Bob Marley’s outfit – he had too many great songs of his own to record – Tosh formed backing band Word, Sound and Power. This 1976 concert from Boston, available for the first time on vinyl, is a testament to that band’s might and malleability. On a collection of Tosh’s recently written gems, his musicians stretch and contract, build towers of rock and wallow in fat, loose reggae grooves.
When Tosh does a tender tune such as “Why Must I Cry,” the band sits back. When he booms – and he booms gloriously on “No Sympathy” – the group echoes his energy. Legendary rhythm section Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare anchor the beat. Guitarist Al Anderson finds welcome overlaps between reggae and rock, funk, blues and jazz. Put this LP on between spins of Marley’s “Babylon By Bus” and Jimmy Cliff’s “In Concert.”
The Grateful Dead were a rock band. Oddly enough, sometimes people need to be reminded of that.
The Dead’s spring ’77 stop at the Garden has the band in an upbeat, joyous and forward-thrusting mood. For the first time on vinyl, the album will thrill Deadheads and hopefully loads of new fans, as this is a great place to start your long strange trip with the band because it isn’t off-puttingly strange.
What starts mellow – a straight-ahead “Bertha,” breezy “Cassiday” and positively tender “Peggy-O” – pushes into thunder. Anyone who thinks the Dead are soft must listen to the hard charging “New Minglewood Blues.” Anyone who thinks they meander too much should check out the attack of “U.S. Blues.” Even the dreamy stuff cooks: Has Jerry’s guitar crescendo to “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” ever been this epic? Has “Eyes of the World” ever bounced along at such a clip? Buy the set and find out!
When your lady starts riding, you never get to see her. It’s a subject that, in the hands of, say, Luke Bryan, could make for a double entendre-riddled joke of a song. Richman makes it wistful on “Since She Started to Ride.”
Boston’s king of arty proto punk went country for his 1990 album. The results were shockingly awesome (like the flipside of a Lyle Lovett-goes-punk record).
Pressed on “Red Cowboy Boots” colored vinyl, this reissue mixes Richman’s is-it-earnest-or-is-it-all-a-lark twang-filled originals with a few country classics and forgotten nuggets including “A Satisfied Mind.” Always a good sign, Richman’s own tunes fit in with the older material. Were it not for references to Charo and Tom Jones, “Reno” could have been recorded by Marty Robbins in 1959. Cut a line or two and “Corner Store” would be ready for Roy Rogers in 1949.
No album did more to spur the “alternative rock” revolution than the Violent Femmes 1983 debut. Not the Clash’s “London Calling.” Not REM’s “Document.” Not Nirvana’s “Nevermind.”
Singer/songwriter/(mostly) acoustic guitarist Gordon Gano’s lyrics and vocal delivery have a disaffected and snotty charm that bests Johnny Rotten and Paul Westerberg’s. And yet, he switches on an earnest tenderness (and turns in a sweet violin solo) on the closing track “Good Feeling.”
It’s one of many magic tricks the band performs here. A few others: making punk rock on acoustic instruments, inventing/reinventing modern Americana, creating a guitar riff as iconic as “Walk This Way,” loads of bass solos on par with anything Flea has done, working in not one but two xylophone solos on “Gone Daddy Gone,” laying down the best loud-then-quiet-then-loud track since “Shout” (see “Blister in the Sun,” delivering an ode to teenage hormones that tops anything AC/DC wrote (see “Add It Up”).
The album is as good as “Sgt. Pepper’s” and twice as fun to listen to. Maybe it’s time to give up the copy you dubbed from your friend’s boombox in 1988 and actually buy the record, you can use the excuse that this picture disc reissue is a work of art.
