LATEST ADDITIONS

I've always wondered whether Otis Redding's Live in Europe, newly reissued on vinyl by Sundazed, was actually recorded in Europe. Frankly, I doubt it. The liner notes quote Redding reviews from Paris and the various cities in the UK, but they also refer to a Stax-Volt review featuring many artists, none of whom were given an album's worth of stage time, that's a guarantee. The audience here sounds as if it is predominantly Southern black Americans, and it's not racist to say you can tell the race and nationality of the woman who screams at Otis, "Sing 'Good to Me,' baby!" And the opening announcer sounds generically white-bread American (Little Feat's announcer on Waiting For Columbus copped this dude's riff). Maybe he was part of Redding's traveling entourage, but I doubt that too. Not that it matters where this supercharged performance took place.

Being out of the record-biz hype loop has certain benefits. Until I bought this album I knew nothing about Ryan Adams other than the name and a vague notion that he was an extremely talented kid who used to front an alterna-country band called Whiskeytown. I'm willing to admit to being two years behind the hype curve. So be it. That Gold was issued on a nicely packaged two-LP set (as are many Lost Highway releases) put me in a positive frame of mind. I wanted to like this record and Ryan Adams both. But when I saw the American-flag-draped cover and Adams' contrived pose, my bullshit detector went off and it didn't stop ringing throughout the four sides of this set of well-recorded musical comfort food.

At a party the other day, I heard a guy complaining about the sad state of rock’n’roll, pop, or whatever you want to call it. “Where are today’s Beatles,” he demanded to know. “Listen to the crap on the radio,” he went on. I tried to remind him that aside from the odd ‘60’s cultural inversion that made what was good, popular, (Beatles, Stones, Byrds, Motown, etc.), much of what was good was not popular (Dylan for instance), and that by the end of the decade what we consider “popular,” (Hendrix, Clapton, Cream, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, etc.) were essentially “underground” acts, way outside of the mainstream “Top 40.”

Lonely and Blue, the rarest and most valuable of Roy Orbison's Monument LPs--his first for the label--has been given splendid sonic and packaging care by Classic Records, in both monophonic and stereo editions. According to Classic's Mike Hobson, this is the first time the original master tapes have been used since the original pressings were issued in 1961. At a January 2003 Consumer Electronics Show press conference, Hobson told how the masters were discovered in Nashville and gave every indication of having not been "cracked" since they were used to generate the original LP. What Mobile Fidelity used for its gold CD, or Sony for its gold CD, remains a mystery, then, but when you hear this issue, you'll have no doubt the original tapes were used--especially if you've become accustomed to those CDs.