Category a) Sixties and earlier [0 – 1969]
WEIRD SCENES
1/1 Hey, get that couple dancing. Her latin rhythms hot and slippery as a bourbon kiss, his rock energy thrusting towards her like an ICBM. They’re one explosive unit; the floor can scarcely hold ‘em. Something’s gonna give for sure. “Break On Through (To The Other Side)”. 1/2 “Soul Kitchen” is a lush with a couple too […]
THAT FUSION VIBE
Between 18th and 20th April 1967, while The Beatles were in Abbey Road mixing ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ and ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’, influential young vibraphone player Gary Burton was in RCA Victor’s New York Studio B recording an album with his new quartet. Although only twenty-four years old, Burton was a […]
YOUNG AS TODAY
It’s incredible to think that 1967 saw the release of the fourth album by The Byrds. The Fourth! How could they have been around that long? No longer known mainly as the janglifying popularizers of Bob Dylan songs, Messrs McGuinn, Crosby, Hillman, et al had expanded their palettes and musical interests for the preceding Fifth Dimension, […]
BEARDED RAINBOWS
Eric Clapton and girlfriend Charlotte Martin were at London musician’s club The Speakeasy in Spring 1967. It was the same club where, not long previously, Eric had his first taste of LSD in circumstances that were probably not your average first trip, even in that much mythologized year. The way Eric tells it, ‘the Beatles came in […]
FEED YOUR HEAD
What can you say about an album that boasts two of the best songs—not just of 1967—but of the entire 60s decade? An album that took San Francisco’s psychedelic “turn on, tune in, drop out” philosophy to the rest of America and indeed the world and has been garnering five-star reviews ever since? Grace Slick […]
NOT PANTS
Here is the groove test. Spin “Green Onions” by Booker T. & The M.G’s and if your booty doesn’t shake, your hips don’t swivel, your head doesn’t nod or your fingers snap, man, you dead to the rhythm. “Green Onions” was the lead track and hit single from the 1962 album of the same name, […]
COMPACT COLLECTING
It’s not all vinyl! vinyl! vinyl! here at Vinyl Connection^. Half a lifetime of collecting Compact Discs has resulted in a well entrenched habit, meaning a steady trickle of the little silver coasters has entered VC Headquarter over the past twelve months. Here is a selection. King Crimson — Absent Lovers, Montreal 1984 [DGM 2007] […]
AN IDEAL PRESENT
Christmas trading at Max Rose Electronics was rarely frantic but usually busy. Which was just as well. Like many small businesses, Max relied on a significant spike in December sales to coast through the hot holiday months of January and February. In those years when I was a part-time sales assistant on Friday nights and […]
2016 REPORT FROM THE FIELD — PART 1
Top Five Secondhand Record Purchases It is revealing that there was more than enough material in the acquisitions book to produce a Top 50 list of secondhand records entering the Vinyl Connection domain during the past twelve months. We are talking fifty highlights, by-the-by, not gap-fillers, pass-markers and also-rans. So much good music and such […]
BARRON PLANET
What links Shakespeare, composer John Cage and actor Leslie Nielsen? What, for that matter, do robots, tape loops, and the invention of the micro dress have in common? Still scratching the old cranium? How about this: A connection between electric tonalities, Anne Francis, and monsters from the unconscious mind. Loosely based on The Tempest, Shakespeare’s […]
7 STEAMIN’ ALBUM COVERS
When the boy was little we took an afternoon drive around the ring road to Altona, home of Victoria’s Railway museum. To me it seemed, on that Autumn afternoon, a windswept mausoleum, but the youngster enjoyed clambering up, through, and around the old steam engines. Despite their size (big to enormous), it seemed to make sense […]
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