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Benmont Tench
Rolling Stones: Hackney Diamonds (2CD)
by Doug Collette
The Rolling Stones have taken some risks of greater and lesser proportion over the course of their sixty-plus- year career, but perhaps no gamble is so great as the decision by the surviving members of the band to continue on after the passing of drummer Charlie Watts. With the blessing of their co-founder in place for the presence of musician/producer Steve Jordan at the kit, the self-appointed 'greatest rock and roll band in the world' carried on with ...
read moreBob Dylan: Springtime in New York 1980-1985: The Bootleg Series, Volume 16 (5CD)
by Doug Collette
Generally speaking, revelations abound within the various installments of The Bootleg Series, Bob Dylan's ongoing archive initiative, and Volume 16 is no exception. But in listening to Springtime in New York, 1980- 1985, the epiphanies come in slow bursts, flashing over the course of the five CDs to generate a cumulative momentum that reaches a flash-point with the content taken from the much-maligned Empire Burlesque (Columbia, 1985). And that outcome in itself is a truly Dylanesque curve ball: pre-release anticipation ...
read moreBob Dylan: Rough And Rowdy Ways
by Doug Collette
Bob Dylan's Rough And Rowdy Ways is a uniformly excellent piece of work. On these ten new original songs, the Nobel Laureate blends folk, blues and country music with just the slightest dash of gospel and, accompanied with sensitivity by his touring band (plus a few additional musicians including Blake Mills and Fiona Apple), the seamless sound makes this thirty-ninth Dylan studio album superior to both of the other standouts of recent years, Time Out Of Mind (Columbia, 1997) and ...
read moreJohnny Cash: Johnny Cash: American VI: Ain't No Grave
by C. Michael Bailey
In his tribute to Johnny Cash on the artist's death in 2003, commentator and VH1 Executive Director Bill Flanagan put forth this bit of wisdom on the CBS program Sunday Morning: It's becoming more apparent with every year that goes by that the period from the mid-'50s to the mid-'70s was a golden age for popular music. To have lived in the era where Cash and Presley and the Beatles and Stones and Aretha and Dylan and Miles Davis were ...
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