On September 15, label Luaka Bop is issuing a deluxe 2LP box set of the 1977 album Pharoah by Pharoah Sanders. Originally released by the India Navigations label, the new collection includes the album’s original three tracks as well as two unreleased live versions of the song “Harvest Time,” a 24-page booklet containing rarely seen photographs, essays and an interview …
Head East with Forthcoming Bob Dylan Box Set That Reframes the Rock Bard’s Live Seventies Release
In 1978, Bob Dylan was in an untenable position. Rock fans still looked to the de facto troubadour to guide youth culture toward the next step to the ‘60s promised land. After all, Elvis Presley had recently died in August 1977. And John Lennon was content to stay at home, apparently baking bread. Disco was still spinning the vapid hits …
New Box Set Collects Early Triumphs of Bon Iver and Megafaun Members
This essay originally appeared in NPR Music’s weekly newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter here. There’s a scene in an old episode of The Simpsons wherein Lisa laments that no one listens to kids. Grandpa Simpson, embroiled in a B plot of his own, chimes in that no one listens to old people, either — at which point Homer pops by …
Against the odds | How Blondie shattered the conventions of punk and pop
By the early 1970s, the Greenwich Village folk scene had faded, and a new sound was wafting up from the street. New York Dolls frontman David Johansen says it found a home just north of Bleecker Street and east of Washington Square. “I was friends with Eric Emerson, who had a band called Magic Tramps, and he said that he …