VA - Supernatural Fairy Tales: The Progressive Rock Era Vol.1 - 5 [5 CD, 1996]

 

Rhino has a history of doing things up right, but this time it's outdone itself. More than five hours of prog, from The Nice to Golden Earring, presented thoroughly and largely chronologically. Depending on your outlook, it's either heaven or hell. There's plenty here to occupy the idle, drug-riddled mind; some well known (Focus's "Hocus Pocus," ELP's "Knife Edge," Genesis) and some wonderfully obscure (Wigwam in their pre-Virgin days, when they were an obscure, Finnish-Irish outfit, and Hatfield and the North's delicious first single, "Let's Eat Again [Real Soon]," which had nothing to do with food). With cover art by Roger Dean, it's everything you could imagine a prog rock box being.

 

 

Bo Diddley - Road Runner: The Chess Masters, 1959-1960 (2 CD, 2008/FLAC)

 

Road Runner, the second volume of Hip-O Select's ongoing chronicle of Bo Diddley's complete Chess/Checker master recordings, covers roughly one calendar year whereas its predecessor, I'm a Man, spanned four -- a good indication that 1959 was an eventful year for Bo. During this one year, he had his biggest pop hit in the jive-talking "Say Man" and had another sizable R&B hit with "Crackin' Up," but both these sides were cut in 1958 and released as a single in 1959. As they climbed the charts, Diddley was frenetically recording, spinning off his "Bo Diddley" into "Nursery Rhyme aka Puttentang" while mythologizing himself yet again in "The Story of Bo Diddley," attempting to steal back his signature beat from Johnny Otis' "Willie & the Hand Jive" with "Willie Fell in Love," slamming out a sequel to "Say Man," trying to catch the Caribbean winds that were blowing in, hauling out his violin, pushing his amp on instrumentals -- basically doing anything that popped into his head. So many ideas were spilling out of his head that perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that by the time 1959 was coming to a close, Bo set up his own studio in his house, then delivered finished tapes to Chess -- a practice completely unheard of that year!

 

 

Lionel Richie discography [1982-2019]

 Lionel Brockman Richie Jr. (born June 20, 1949) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and television personality. During the 1970s, he recorded with the funk band the Commodores, and his solo career made him one of the most successful balladeers of the 1980s. Outside of his music career, he has served with Luke Bryan and Katy Perry as a judge for the singing competition American Idol since its move to ABC from the Fox network, since 2018.

 

 

Del Shannon - Home and Away: The Complete Recording 1960-1970 [8 CD, 2004]

 

Of all the early rock & rollers, Del Shannon is the hardest to classify. He came on the scene a little late -- his first hits, "Hats off to Larry" and "Runaway," arrived in 1961, five years after rock & roll came crashing in, a long enough period of time where his music felt much, much different than the three-chord ravers of the first wave of rock & roll. He arrived during the peak of teen idol pop and was handsome enough to ride that wave, but he was older than Fabian and Ricky Nelson, scoring his first hits in his mid-twenties. Shannon could be seen as a kindred spirit of Roy Orbison, favoring dramatic ballast to blues boogie, threading a sense of melancholy into his biggest hits, but he never verged on the operatic the way Orbison did. He was comfortable enough with country to cut an album of Hank Williams tunes in 1965 and hip enough to go psychedelic when the times shifted in the late '60s. He wrote his biggest hits but also had exceptional taste in other songwriters, being one of the first American rockers to cover the Beatles, along with such '60s pop hits as Bobby Hebb's "Sunny," Brian Hyland's "The Joker Went Wild" and the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City."

 
None of this restlessness brought Del Shannon big hits -- his run peaked early, with the back-to-back Top 10 hits of "Hats off to Larry" and "Runaway," with the latter reaching number one, then he bounced back in 1965 with the Top 10 "Keep Searchin' (We'll Follow the Sun)" -- but it did result in a singularly fascinating body of work, one that's compiled in its entirety on Bear Family's box Home and Away: The Complete Recordings 1960-1970. 

 

 

Mike Tramp - Tramp : The Bootleg Series (7 CD, 2004/FLAC)

 

Michael Trampenau (born January 14, 1961), better known as Mike Tramp, is a Danish singer and songwriter who is best known for his work with the glam metal band, White Lion. Since 1998, he has released several solo albums. In 2012, Tramp went on a solo acoustic tour releasing acoustic albums in both 2013 and 2014. He returned with a full band line up in 2015 and in 2017, released the album Maybe Tomorrow, which charted at No. 1 in Denmark.