"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
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Liner Notables: Dennis Wilson - Pacific Ocean Blue
"He had no brakes, and he didn’t think about consequences ... That makes for passionate music, but it can be a hard way to live."
Liner Notables: 24 of Hank Williams' Greatest Hits
"Hank Williams crowded a lot of living into twenty-nine years. Someone said he went into anything like 'killin' rattlesnakes.'"
Liner Notables: Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks
"He's as personal and as universal as Yeats or Blake; speaking for himself, risking that dangerous opening of the veins, he speaks for us all."
"The highly charged language...is full of gimmicks and almost overpowers some songs with paradoxes and subverted cliches piling up into private and secret meanings."
Liner Notables: B.B. King - Live in Cook County Jail
"...a manifestation of human generosity and beauty on B.B.’s part and the raw appreciation of 2,117 of his most ardent fans.”
Ella handles nuances of wit and humor, "one of the prime requisites with Lorenz Hart lyrics, by turns satirical, sardonic, sexy, sophisticated, and sweetly simple."
Liner Notables: The Great Lost Kinks Album
With no 20/20 about it, disheveled Davies’ ditties, B-sides and Besides are anthologized and annotated with the perceptiveness of hindsight in a house of mirrors.
Liner Notables: Nuggets, Volume Three - Pop (Various Artists)
From the Knickerbockers to the Cyrkle to Bobby Fuller, your “One Stop Pop Culture Shop” brings you a refresher course in '60s pop-rock history.
Liner Notables: Iggy and the Stooges - Metallic 2 K.O.
“It’s the only rock album I know where you can actually hear hurled beer bottles breaking against guitar strings.” --Lester Bangs
Liner Notables: Honkers & Screamers - Roots of Rock 'n' Roll, Vol. 6 (Paul Williams, Hal Singer, Big Jay McNeely, Lee Allen, and Sam “The Man” Taylor)
America's alright if you like saxophones.
Liner Notables: Frank Sinatra - In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning, Only The Lonely, No One Cares, Point Of No Return
Just in time for Valentine's Day - but we're not exactly talkin' "Songs for Swingin' Lovers" here, okay?
"About rainy days and sunny days, about sessions men and dark ladies, about P.V.C. grass skirts in Waikiki, about memories, and dandies..."
Liner Notables #9: Dave Alvin - West of the West
With California songs from Brian Wilson to Merle Haggard, a beautifully realized album completes its harmony in finely-rendered liner notes.
Liner Notables #8: The Rutles
The album that introduced the Prefab Four - the "legend that will last a lunchtime."
Liner Notables #7: Chuck Berry - The Great Twenty-Eight
Happy 80th Birthday to someone whose records are "power-packed plastic, intense sonic creations that sparkle and cut with the brilliance of diamonds."
"...SWITCH near tears when 'Going Underground' goes to the top! SWITCH 'Why'd you wear that apron?'! SWITCH a night in the nick in Leeds! SWITCH..."
"Their thing was beautiful and heavy and will be as it is." Hipper-than-thou, perhaps, but the freak flag's only at half-mast.
It was the time of the season for "well-timed diminished chords leaping through warm melodic tapestries.” Not "flat submediant key switches in Aeolian cadence!”
Liner Notables #3: The Velvet Underground And Nico
"The product of a secret marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis de Sade."
Liner Notables #2: The Best of Love
Of Arthur Lee and Company: "It was music from your brain, from your heart. That’s why it was so great."
