Category Archives: Reissue

Ray Price: A New Place to Begin

RayPrice_ANewPlaceToBeginCountry and pop from the mid-80s, with unreleased sides

These sixteen tracks date to Price’s mid-80s deal with Snuff Garrett’s short-lived Viva label. At the time, their collaboration resulted in the 1983 album Master of the Art, seven low charting singles and several tracks placed in the films of Viva’s co-owner, Clint Eastwood. This collection expands on the released material with seven tracks that were left in the vault when Garrett’s illness sidelined the label’s activity. Price is in good voice throughout (as is his trademark shuffle rhythm), and arrangements featuring the Cherokee Cowboys and Johnny Gimble that range from fiddle tunes to pop standards. The country songs, including the previously unreleased “Old Loves Never Die,” have withstood the years better than the pop productions, though Price’s vocal on the steel and vibe arrangement of “Stormy Weather” suggests it might have been a good idea to follow Willie Nelson’s lead in recording standards. Newbies should start with Price’s essential honky-tonk and countrypolitan catalogs, but fans will find these mid-career recordings worth hearing. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Malo: Malo

Malo_Malo1972 debut of a Latin rock and soul powerhouse

Coming in the wake of Santana’s 1969 breakthrough debut, and led by Carlos Santana’s guitar-slinging brother, Jorge, there’s no getting away from comparing this group to their Latin-soul brethren. Malo trawled a similar groove of rock, soul, funk and Latin jams, though with a larger aggregation of musicians, a heftier dose of percussion and a tight horn section. This 1972 debut, the only album recorded by the group’s early lineup, includes their lone chart hit, “Suavecito” (presented here in its original six-minute album mix and its three-minute single edit). This is a hard-driving album that’s a great deal more energetic than the summertime vibe of the single. The album has been available part of Rhino Handmade’s limited edition Celebracion box set; fans can now get Malo’s debut as a standalone with a four-panel booklet that includes liner notes by A. Scott Galloway. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Mark-Almond: Mark-Almond

MarkAlmond_MarkAlmondA neglected early ‘70s British rock-jazz classic

Guitarist Jon Mark and wind player and percussionist Johnny Almond met in 1969 as members of John Mayall’s band. Upon their departure from Mayall in 1970, they formed this eponymous quartet (not to be confused with Soft Cell’s Marc Almond!) with bassist Rodger Sutton and keyboardist Tommy Eyre. As with the music they recorded with Mayall, Mark and Almond chose a drummerless configuration that continued to work surprisingly well. Eyre’s piano, Sutton’s bass and Mark’s rhythm playing each take turns holding down the beat, leaving the others free to jam and improvise.

The album’s original five tracks clocked in at forty minutes, with two suites (“City” and “Love”) stretching past eleven minutes apiece. This provided the players – all four – a lot space to stretch out and interplay. The opening “The Ghetto” is a gospel soul number with a moving lyric of desperation set to a vocal chorus and Eyre’s perfect mix of acoustic and electric piano. Almond’s superb sax solo is perfectly set in a middle section between the hushed vocals of the opening and closing.

“The City” has a short lyric of escape, but quickly gives way to a jazz-tinged instrumental that provides each player a chance to shine. Sutton’s bass flows underneath as Almond takes a sax solo and Eyre vamps on piano, the two occasionally joining one another for to riff. Sutton steps to the front for a short interlude before Almond returns on flute; a few minutes later the song turns heavy with Mark’s low twanging guitar and assorted hand percussion.

The moody “Tramp and the Young Girl” hits blue notes in both its vocal melody and the tragic disposition of its title characters. The bass, electric piano, vibraphone and flute provide superb backing for Mark’s perfectly wrought, jazz-tinged vocal. Things pick up for “Love,” a suite that opens in a renaissance style before transitioning into a percussive, bass- and vibe-led middle section. The song’s vocal is a short, blues should, which leads to an ear-clearing, calling-all-dogs sax solo and a mellower instrumental play out.

What’s truly impressive about this band – aside from the talent of the four players – is its range between songs and within suites. The compositions carry over the ballroom jam of the ‘60s, but tighten them up and expand the instrumental and musical palettes, much as did Traffic, Steely Dan and others. It’s hard to imagine how this album was allowed to fall out of print; even Line’s German reissue disappeared. Varese’s domestic issue augments the original five tracks with a pair of single edits and a four-page booklet that includes liner notes by Jerry McCulley. [©2015 Hyperbolium]

Dee Dee Warwick: The Complete ATCO Recordings

DeeDeeWarwick_TheCompleteAtcoRecordingsThe early ’70s recordings of a talented soul sister

Dionne Warwick’s younger sister, Dee Dee, may have had less commercial success, but in many ways, she was the stronger singer. Coming from an extended family that also included gospel singing aunt Cissy Houston and superstar cousin Whitney Houston, Warwick’s lack of hits is especially confounding when weighed against the wealth of music industry heavyweights that tried to help her break out. Her older sister succeeded in large part through the creation of a unique place in pop music; Dee Dee, on the other hand, sang more straightforward soul that put her in direct competition with the stars of Atlantic, and the attention of her label.

Warwick recorded for Jubilee (where she waxed the original version of “You’re No Good“), Leiber and Stoller’s Tiger, Hurd, Mercury and its subsidiary Blue Rock throughout the 1960s. She landed in the R&B Top 20 several times, and crossed over to the pop charts with 1966’s “I Want to Be With You.” But in 1970 she was lured to the Atlantic subsidiary ATCO by the label group’s president, Jerry Wexler. By that point, ATCO had been quite successful in the rock marketplace, but hadn’t penetrated the soul and R&B markets its parent label had helped define. Wexler paired Warwick with producer Ed Townend (with whom she’d worked at Mercury), but shelved the four excellent tracks that lead off this collection, including Townsend’s dynamic “You Tore My Wall Down.”

Next up were sessions at Miami’s famed Criteria Studios with the Dixie Flyers as the backing band and the Sweet Inspirations as backing vocalists. This resulted in the 1970 album Turning Around, which spawned two singles, including the R&B hit “She Didn’t Know (She Kept on Talking).” The album drew material from soul writers Charles Whitehead, Gary U.S. Bonds, Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams and Van McCoy, but also from country writers Charlie Rich (“Who Will the Next Fool Be”) and Jerry Crutchfield (“A Girl Who’ll Satisfy Her Man”), and pop songwriters Jimmy Webb (“If This Was the Last Song”) and Pat Upton (“More Today Than Yesterday”). Arif Mardin’s string arrangements accompany several tracks, but it’s the gospel-blue Southern soul of the Dixie Flyers and Warwick’s passionate performances that provide the dominant flavors. To reproduce the album’s running order, program disc one, tracks 12, 6, 9, 14, 5, 13, 8, 10, 7, 11.

For her third sessions of 1970, ATCO sent Warwick even deeper into the South, to the famed Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. Three singles were released from the ten tracks laid down, and only one, a cover of “Suspicious Minds,” charted. The unreleased tracks (disc one, tracks 15 and 17, and disc two, tracks 5 and 7) are solid productions, with full bass lines, crisp horns and good material from Ashford & Simpson, Little Jimmy Scott and Brill Building graduate, David Gates. The latter cover of Bread’s “Make it With You” is more soulful than one had a right to hope, but it’s ill-fitting and suggests that ATCO (and producers Dave Crawford and Brad Shapiro) simply didn’t know how to help Warwick achieve commercial success.

To their credit, ATCO still didn’t give up, sending Warwick to record at Detroit’s Pac-Three Studio in 1971. The sessions’ lone single, “Everybody’s Got to Believe in Something” b/w “Signed Dede,” failed to chart, and more than half of the tracks (including two alternate versions included here) were left in the vault. Among the previously unreleased material, the most unusual are Warwick’s takes on Don Gibson’s “Sweet Dreams.” Warwick takes off in a soulful vein from Patsy Cline’s countrypolitan interpretation for the master recording, but really lays on the funk for the alternate take. Bacharach & David’s “In the Land of Make Believe,” which had been recorded by Dusty Springfield, as well as big sister Dionne, fits Dee Dee’s emotional vocal between the low bass line and high strings.

Warwick recorded three additional tracks for ATCO at Atlantic’s New York studio in 1972, but with more successful soul sirens to promote, Atlantic let her slip back to Mercury. Her two-year recording career for ATCO is fully collected in the thirty-five tracks on these two discs, including non-LP singles, B-sides, her sole LP for the label, session material that was available on compilations, and a dozen previously unreleased tracks. Mike Milchner’s remastered all the material at SonicVision, and the 16-page booklet includes detailed liner notes by David Nathan. It adds up to a picture of a terrifically talented vocalist whose career never reached synergy between material, performance and promotion. [©2014 Hyperbolium]

Gene Rains: Far Away Lands – The Exotic Music of Gene Rains

GeneRains_FarAwayLandsAn exotica original finally gets his digital due

Like his exotica compatriot Arthur Lyman, Gene Rains was a vibraphonist with a jazz background. And like Lyman, and Lyman’s former band leader Martin Denny, Rains held a tenure at the Hawaiian Village Hotel’s famed Shell Bar. Unlike Lyman and Denny, however, Rains recording career was rather short – three original albums in all – and began a few years after Denny’s 1957 breakthrough with Les Baxter’s “Quiet Village” and Lyman’s return to exotica with 1958’s Taboo. Rains’ three albums for Decca didn’t gain the public renown that greeted Denny and Lyman’s releases, and until this eighteen-track sampler, his music remained available only on pricey, highly sought-after original releases.

Rains’ albums followed the same template as Denny’s and Lyman’s, combining Hawaiian folk melodies with standards, Broadway and film tunes and newly written island songs. Rains’ jazz quartet of vibes, piano, bass and world percussion were deft mixologists, and Decca’s engineers captured their sound in crisp, audiophile-quality recordings. The arrangements are alternately lush, romantic and dramatic, though even with vibraphone at their core, they don’t often swing as freely as Lyman’s work. Pianists Paul Conrad and Bryon Peterson add dramatic arpeggios and deep low notes, and bassist Archie Grant (who’d join Arthur Lyman’s group in the mid-60s) also adds flute, and several tunes are garnished with exotica’s requisite bird and animal calls.

Many of this compilation’s titles will be familiar to those who’ve collected Denny’s and Lyman’s albums, but Rains and his quartet put their own spin on the arrangements. Ernesto Lecuona’s “Jungle Drums,” which had been a hit for Artie Shaw in the late ’30s, opens with a dramatic introduction before leaning more heavily on the song’s Latin rhythm than Martin Denny’s vocal chorus arrangement. And “Caravan” (one of the three pillars of Exotica) is really more jazz than exotica, with the vibes, piano and bass each getting a solo spotlight. This is a superb collection, filled with lively playing and original nuances, and the song list includes exotica classics, jazz and popular standards, and a few inventive adaptations.

The collection’s 16-page booklet includes full-panel reproductions of all three original albums’ front and back covers, liner notes by Randy Poe, and a front-cover photo of noted mermaid, Marina; the disc is screened with a reproduction of Decca’s rainbow label. Due to a loss of the original masters, this set was sourced from vinyl, but the transfers, though not flawless, speak to the long-lived high fidelity of early ’60s pressings. It’s too bad that Real Gone didn’t go the full monty and reissue the three original albums in full; still, some Gene Rains is a whole lot better than no Gene Rains, and this disc belongs in the collection of every exotica lover. [©2014 Hyperbolium]

The Kinks: The Essential Kinks

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Kinks_Essential30 years of pivotal music on two fully-packed CDs

The Kinks touched so many musical bases that two full CDs (79 minutes each!) can still only outline their story. They blazed the British Invasion’s trail with “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” and supplied a steady stream of ever-more finely-written hits into the early ’70s. In parallel with their singles success, the band’s vocalist and primary songwriter, Ray Davies, wrote compelling B-sides and sketched out thematic collections that turned into a string of inventive concept albums. Davies ruminated on British culture, society, working class life and schooling, show business and the record industry in ever-more ambitious and increasingly theatrical productions that couched his lyrical alienation in satire, nostalgia and music hall tradition.

Banned from performing in the U.S. from 1965 until 1969, the band’s success on the American charts quickly faded. But elsewhere, particularly in their native Britain, they continued to land hit singles (including “Dead End Street,” “Waterloo Sunset,” “Death of a Clown” and “Autumn Almanac”), and their albums continued to attract critical praise. Although the band returned to the U.S. in 1969 to promote Arthur, “Autumn Almanac” signaled the start of a fallow commercial period, with a brief respite from 1968’s “Days.” At the same time, Davies was crafting what was to be among the Kinks’ most revered albums, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.

Though not a commercial success at the time of its release, Village Green has grown to be the group’s best selling album, and the album track “Picture Book” gained belated exposure in a 2004 HP commercial. By 1969 the group reestablished themselves commercially with the singles “Victoria,” “Lola” and “Apeman,” and the well-regarded albums Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround Part One and Muswell Hillbillies. The latter represented their shift from Pye/Reprise to RCA, and unfortunately for the latter’s immediate commercial returns, Davies’ preoccupation with theatrical concept albums led to a string of early ’70s releases that failed to garner any singles action. On the other hand, the albums slowly rebuilt the group’s album sales in the U.S., and led to renewed chart action later in the decade.

Davies finally moved on from writing rock operas (and the Kinks from RCA to Arista) with 1977’s Sleepwalker, and the group returned to the American charts with the album’s title track. Their next few albums found an audience with U.S. record buyers, and the band became a regular concert draw. The latter success was memorialized on 1980’s Top 20 One for the Road, and represented here by live versions of “Lola” and “Where Have All the Good Times Gone.” Two years later the group had their last major commercial success with State of Confusion and the single “Come Dancing.” The latter even broke through to MTV with a heavily spun video. The group’s remaining albums, through 1993’s Phobia, garnered less and less commercial attention, as did their singles, though they did continue to find a home on rock radio into the early ’90s.

Legacy’s 2-CD, 48-track, 2-hour and 39-minute collection does an admirable job of surveying the group’s lengthy catalog, covering early mono productions (disc one, tracks 1-13), UK and US hits, deeply-loved album tracks, concert favorites and live performances (including a terrific 1972 rendition of “Till the End of the Day” drawn from the CD reissue of Everybody’s in Show-Biz). The timeline spans releases from Pye/Reprise, RCA, Arista and Columbia, and stretches from the band’s primal first hit, 1964’s “You Really Got Me,” to their final release for Columbia, 1993’s “Scattered.” Absent are stellar early B-sides like “I Gotta Move” and “Come On Now,” tracks from Schoolboys in Disgrace, Percy and the band’s two 1980’s album for MCA, but what’s here paints a compelling overview of a band whose three decades of music outstripped even the sizeable recognition it’s received over the past fifty years. [©2014 Hyperbolium]

The Kinks’ Home Page

OST: How to Stuff a Wild Bikini

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OST_HowToStuffAWildBikiniCharming soundtrack to AIP’s sixth beach party film

Although pop music was a key element of American International’s beach party films, it was surprisingly elusive on record. Perhaps the value of cross-marketing hadn’t yet fully developed by the mid-60s, as the music from these films was only spottily released as singles and album tracks, often in studio versions that differed from those featured in the film. In fact, this cast album for How to Stuff a Wild Bikini is the only original soundtrack recording released in conjunction with any of the seven AIP beach party films, but it’s an excellent example of the musical variety offered by the films.

By the time this sixth entry in the series was cast, singer-actor Frankie Avalon’s busy schedule had moved him into a supporting role, where he was not featured as a vocalist. Annette Funicello was still starring, and got two superb songs from the pens of Guy Hemric and Jerry Styner. Sung in her trademarked double-vocals, “Better Be Ready” has a sweet bubblegum melody and superb guitar hook, and “The Perfect Boy” includes clever rhymes that are memorably fractured by the background singers. The album’s ballad, “If It’s Gonna Happen,” is sung by one-time Arthur Godfrey show regular Lu Ann Simms, but this solo version differs from the four-part vocal heard in the film. The version heard here was also released as a single, backed with a solo recording of this film’s group-sung “After the Party.”

The bulk of the soundtrack is taken up by group and novelty numbers that gave the film a lot of its flavor. Harvey Lembeck lays on a broad Brooklyn accent for his turn as Eric von Zipper singing “Follow Your Leader” and the ironic “The Boy Next Door,” and guest stars Mickey Rooney and Brian Donlevy each get campy Broadway-styled songs. Co-star John Ashley, who’d recorded rockabilly in the ’50s, leads the cast on the title theme, the country-rocker “That’s What I Call a Healthy Girl” and the closing “After the Party.” The latter is particularly effective in communicating the film’s idealized summer beach mood. The Kingsmen close out the album with an original garage-rock tune, “Give Her Lovin’,” and a drums-and-organ take on the title theme.

The album runs a scant 24 minutes, but it’s 24 minutes of musical bliss for fans of the beach party films. The vinyl has long since become a collectors’ item, and the rare stereo release – as reproduced here from the master tapes – was hard to find even at the time of its original release. Real Gone’s reissue includes the original cover art and a 12-page booklet that features detailed liner notes by Tom Pickles and several full-panel photos. It’s a shame that the film version of “If It’s Gonna Happen” wasn’t available as a bonus track, but for those who maintain a soft spot for beach party films and their kitschy soundtracks, this is a truly welcome reissue. [©2014 Hyperbolium]

The Zombies: R.I.P.

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Zombies_RIPPreviously unreleased final album sees the light of day

One might say that this final, previously unreleased Zombies album is something of a Frankenstein’s monster. Constructed after the band’s dissolution in 1968, the six previously unreleased Zombies tracks and six new tracks recorded by a prototype of Argent were meant to satiate an American market that had been late to discover “Time of the Season.” But the album’s pre-release singles (“Imagine the Swan” and “If it Don’t Work Out”) failed to ignite any commercial interest, and the album was shelved by the American label that had requested it in the first place. The tracks dribbled out on singles, compilations (most notably the double-LP Time of the Zombies and Ace Record’s omnibus Zombie Heaven box set) and bootlegs, but an official issue of the original running order from the original master takes had evaded fans until now.

The album, as the last-remaining-Zombies-standing Rod Argent and Chris White conceived it, was neatly split in two: side one was written by Argent and White, and performed by Argent, White, Russ Ballard, Jim Rodford and Bob Henrit, in a line-up soon to be known as Argent; side two was assembled from previously unreleased tracks that had been recorded years earlier by the original group, and brushed up by Argent and White (notably with backing vocals and orchestral touches) for the album. There’s a musical seam between the two sides, but the new recordings aren’t a complete departure. In fact, they sound like what they actually were: a follow-on to the progressive end-times of the original line-up’s Odyssey and Oracle, heavily influenced by the band’s keyboardist.

Listeners familiar with the Zombies’ hits will immediately resonate with Colin Blunstone’s lead vocals and the group’s harmonies on side two. These earlier songs also have beat and baroque pop touches that are closely associated with the Zombies original sound. Argent and White’s material on side two, sung by Argent, including an organ jam, “Conversation Off Floral Street” (a track that was apparently mislabeled with “of” on the singles of the time), and slinky piano-led “I Could Spend the Day” that speak to the jazz inflections of “Time of the Season.” Both album sides have material that is as good as anything the Zombie released during their hit-making tenure, including the singles “Imagine the Swan” and “If It Don’t Work Out,” featured here in both stereo album and mono single mixes.

Zombies fans probably have most or all of this material on compilations and box sets, but it’s still worth hearing the original stereo mixes, in the original sequence, from the album’s master tape. The mono single mix of “Don’t Cry For Me” (the flipside of “If it Don’t Work Out”) is offered here for the first time in a digital format, and the mono mix of “Smokey Day” makes its first-ever appearance. Despite the album’s cobbled-together origin, this is a volume that belongs on the shelf right next to Begin Here, The Zombies and Odyssey and Oracle, extending the criminally under-rewarded brilliance of the Zombies. [©2014 Hyperbolium]

The Zombies’ Home Page

Vince Guaraldi Trio: A Boy Named Charlie Brown

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VinceGuaraldi_ABoyNamedCharlieBrown2014 reissue adds bonuses to Guaraldi’s first Peanuts release

In animating the Peanuts comic strip for television, the music of Vince Guaraldi was as important a voice as that of the child actors who played the characters, as critical a story element as the plot and dialog, and as colorful a setting as the drawings themselves. The music of A Charlie Brown Christmas remains every bit as iconic as Charlie Brown’s zig-zag sweater and Linus’ blanket, and the soundtrack to that first-to-be-broadcast Peanuts special remains every bit as beloved as Peanuts itself. What many probably don’t know is that Guaraldi had first engaged with Charles Schulz, producer Lee Mendelson and the Peanuts gang a year earlier with this soundtrack for the documentary A Boy Named Charlie Brown (not to be confused with the 1969 film of the same name).

Not only did the original 60-minute program fail to find an outlet, but neither did the surviving 30-minute edit (which is available on DVD from the Charles M. Schulz Museum), which was not broadcast at the time. Unusually, Guaraldi’s record label, Fantasy, had him re-record the soundtrack material and went ahead with a lavish gatefold release, initially titling it Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown to echo Guaraldi’s earlier breakthrough with Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus. Across the album’s eleven tracks, Guaraldi and his trio (which included bassist Monty Budwig and drummer Colin Bailey) laid down both the template and many of the specifics that would blossom commercially in the following year’s Christmas special.

Guaraldi’s mastery of Latin rhythms underpins several tracks, but it was the mood of his earlier hit, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” that originally grabbed Lee Mendelson’s ear. As Ralph Gleason’s original essay points out, Guaraldi created something both original and empathetic to another artist’s work. His playing is at turns sly, joyous, lyrical, confident, thoughtful and most of all, playful. Budwig provides a melodic foil with his bass, and Bailey swings his drums without ever intruding on Guaraldi’s own rhythmic phrasings. Among the specifics first released on this title are two of two of Guaraldi’s best-known compositions, “Charlie Brown Theme” and “Linus and Lucy.” The rest of the album isn’t as memorably tied to specific animated sequences, but the music is just as pleasurable and stands sturdily on its own. The 2014 reissue adds an alternate take of “Baseball Theme” to the previously included bonus track “Fly Me to the Moon.” [©2014 Hyperbolium]

OST: Porky’s Revenge

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OST_PorkysRevengeA terrific Dave Edmunds-helmed soundtrack to a forgettable film

If you don’t remember, or never knew, the film Porky’s Revenge, don’t be surprised. As the third film in the Porky’s trilogy (filled in the middle by Porky’s II: The Next Day), its sophomoric humor was a tired rehash that had little of the original film’s raunchy charm. What this sequel did have is an inexplicably fine period-influenced soundtrack piloted by Dave Edmunds and stocked with A-list talents that include Jeff Beck, George Harrison, Carl Perkins, Clarence Clemons, Willie Nelson, Robert Plant, Phil Collins, Slim Jim Phantom, Lee Rocker and the Fabulous Thunderbirds.

Edmunds was initially hired to produce only the film’s theme song, but he grew the project into a full original soundtrack – the only one of the series. And by selecting songs and then drafting friends and colleagues to perform (including a backing band of Chuck Leavell, Michael Shrieve and Kenny Aaronson), he elevated the soundtrack well beyond the artistic qualities of the film itself. At the time of the soundtrack’s mid-80s recording, Edmunds was a few years past a commercial run that began with 1979’s “Girls Talk.” But he’d maintained his well-earned reputation for modern-edged roots music, and had recently worked on projects with the Everly Brothers and the Sun class of 1955, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins.

The original album included two Edmunds originals – the bouncy “High School Nights” and the synth-laden instrumental “Porky’s Revenge.” The 2014 CD reissue adds “Don’t Call Me Tonight” (which had appeared two years earlier on Edmunds’ Information), and a Carl Perkins remake of “Honey Don’t.” The bulk of the album is filled with lovingly crafted covers, including Jeff Beck’s impressive take on Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk,” George Harrison’s recording of the obscure Bob Dylan title, “I Don’t Want to Do It,” the Fabulous Thunderbirds torrid version of Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee,” Carl Perkins remake of “Blue Suede Shoes” with Perkins’ guitar and the Stray Cats’ rhythm section dialing up some real heat, and Clarence Clemons blowing his thunderous sax on “Peter Gunn Theme.”

Edmunds finishes out his contributions with a bright, double-tracked cover of Bobby Darin’s “Queen of the Hop,” which was also released as a B-side to Harrison’s track. The album included two tracks not overseen by Edmunds: a Chips Moman production of Willie Nelson covering “Love Me Tender,” and a Robert Plant-led cover of Charlie Rich’s “Philadelphia Baby.” Other than the closing instrumental, everything here resounds with Edmunds retro sensibility and the talent of his guests. Perkins shines especially bright, with Slim Jim Phantom and Lee Rocker stoking the rockabilly rhythm. If you missed this the first time around – and most probably did – here’s a chance to get your hands on a truly unexpected treat. [©2014 Hyperbolium]