Album Reviews

Lou Reed’s bleak Berlin album dropped with a thud when first released back in 1973. The fans were probably expecting Transformer 2 and a “Walk on the Wild Side” reprise, but Lou was having none of that. He was moving on and down (both chart-wise and thematically) but times eventually catch up to vision and that’s the case with Berlin.

Laura Nyro’s most personal, mature and intense album of love’s struggles proved to be the stopping point for many fans of the earlier gospel-y good time Nyro who sung “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Eli’s Comin’,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Stoney End,” and even “And When I Die,” which was celebratory despite the song’s morbid title.

Listening to this previously unreleased 1971 Royal Albert Hall live performance makes clear that by this time The Byrds were little more than Roger McGuinn’s backing band, but with Clarence White on guitar, Skip Battin on bass and Gene Parsons on drums, what a good backing band!

The big problem with vinyl �greatest hits� compilations is that they are, of necessity, at least a generation down from the master tape. That�s because assembling the actual masters into a cutting reel usually isn�t allowed and even were a record label to allow it, levels, equalization and tape head azimuth issues make in nearly impossible to adjust between tracks as the tape reel rolls and the lacquer gets cut.

Like Richard X. Heyman, Matthew Sweet, Jason Falkner, Owsley, Myracle Brah (to a lesser degree), a guy named William Wisely, Jr. (whose record from last April I should have already reviewed but promise to right after this) and some others, Jim Boggia is a true keeper of the pop music flame lit by the early Beatles, Kinks, fellow Philadelphian Todd Rundgren and the others ‘60s icons&#151 not to mention second gen acts like Badfinger.

Before there was an Internet, before cell-phones but after smoke signals, news of this remarkable Leo Kottke album with the black and white armadillo cover spread throughout the “underground” almost immediately upon its release in 1969 on John Fahey’s Takoma Records label.