Steve Cropper - With a Little Help from My Friends 1971

Probably the best-known soul guitarist in the world, Steve Cropper came to prominence in the early '60s, first with the Mar-Keys ("Last Night"), then as a founding member of Booker T. & the MG's.
A major figure in the Southern soul movement of the '60s, Cropper made his mark not only as a player and arranger (most notably on classic sides by Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Wilson Pickett) but as a songwriter as well, co-writing the classic "In the Midnight Hour." After the breakup of the MG's, Cropper spent most of the '70s producing Jeff Beck and Mitch Ryder, among others. In the '80s, he rode the classic Stax sound (which he helped shape) back to popularity with a new audience when actors John Belushi and Dan Aykroydtapped him for service in the Blues Brothers, a Saturday Night Live skit that stretched into several albums and a movie. Cropper remained in demand as a session man, producer, and collaborator into the new century, although very little appeared under his actual name as a recording artist. That changed in 2008 with the release of the affirming Nudge It Up a Notch, a project recorded with former Rascals frontman Felix Cavaliere and tracked at Jon Tiven's Hormone Studio in Nashville, on the revitalized Stax Records imprint. A second collaboration between Cropper and Cavaliere, Midnight Flyer, appeared in 2010. In 2011, Cropper released Dedicated: A Salute to the 5 Royales on 429 Records. The concept album was an all-star celebration and acknowledgment of the influence of seminal soul guitarist Lowman “Pete” Pauling and his mid-'50s to early-'60s group the “5” Royales on his playing. Co-produced with Tiven, some of Dedicated's guests included, B.B. King, Brian May,Steve Winwood, John Popper, Bettye LaVette, Lucinda Williams, Sharon Jones, Shemekia Copeland, Delbert McClinton, Willie Jones, Buddy Miller, and 21-year-old Louisiana singer/songwriter Dylan LeBlanc.
After years of being a team player, Steve Cropper got to make a solo album for the label he helped put on the map, Stax Records (actually their Volt subsidiary). As you might figure, it turned out as an instrumental soul album, and a darn good one, too. It's a bona fide Telecaster-soaked dance workout, with Cropper turning in signature versions of "Land of a Thousand Dances," "99 1/2," (which features a particularly nasty period fuzz guitar), "Funky Broadway," "Boo-Ga-Loo Down Broadway," "In the Midnight Hour," and original instrumentals like "Crop Dustin'" and the closer "Rattlesnake." A solid and soulful little side project that holds up quite well years later. AMG.

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Sunbirds - Zagara 1973

Sunbirds were a band project formed in 1971 by German drummer Klaus Weiss. (17/02/1942-10/12/2008) Weiss had already twelve years of career as a jazz drummer behind him in 1971 and was appreciated by US jazz men touring in Europe. He had played among others with Bud Powell, Johnny Griffin, Kenny Drew and Don Byas. From 1962 to 1965 he had worked with Klaus Doldinger and in 1966 Weiss won the International Jazz Competition in Vienna. 
In 1971 he formed the multinational Klaus Weiss Quartet featuring American bassist Jimmy Woode, Dutch saxophonist Ferdinand Povel and Austrian pianist Fritz Pauer, The same musicians joined by Philip Catherine on guitar and Juan Romero on percussion recorded in august of 1971 the first self titled Sunbirds record. The record presented an interesting form of early jazz rock with an extensive use of electronic keyboards. One year later in august of 1972 the Sunbirds released their second record, Zagara, again the Klaus Weiss Quartet joined this time by Ron Carter on double bass, Leczek Zadlo on flute, Lucas Costa and Rafael Weber on guitar and Norman Tolbert on percussion. This record presented an orientation towards Latin Fusion.

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Sneaky Pete - Cold Steel 1973

Sneaky Pete Kleinow was a founding member of the Flying Burrito Brothers and much in demand as a session player by the time the pedal steel guitarist recorded this solo LP for the Dutch Ariola label during 1973. Although Kleinow is better known as an instrumentalist, he starts the record with an original song wisely rejected while he was with the Burritos, the rather insipidly titled "Wings That Make Birds Fly," which has even worse lyrics. The rest of this country-rock album is also uneven, with rather mediocre compositions by the group's members, which include drummer and lead singer Greg Attaway, pianist David Lovelace, guitarist Richard Bowden, and bassist Michael A. Bowden. FiddlerGib Guilbeau is a guest on three tracks and sings his "Sweet Suzanna" as well. Not a particularly memorable release by any means, Cold Steel will appeal mainly to obsessive fans of Sneaky Pete Kleinow who must have everything he's recorded. AMG.

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Eddie Hinton - Very Extremely Dangerous 1977

In his book Sweet Soul Music, Peter Guralnick described Eddie Hinton as "the last of the great white soul singers," and his debut album, 1978's Very Extremely Dangerous, sounds like a glorious throwback to the salad days of the Muscle Shoals, AL, R&B hit factory of the 1960s, where Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin cut some of their most memorable songs. Hinton had already earned an estimable reputation as a session guitarist by the time he finally got to step up to the mic as a solo artist, and Very Extremely Dangerous features him backed up by the always-expert Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, and Hinton's strong and wiry guitar runs fit the group's emphatic support like a glove. (Hintonand his friends also knew how to bring a solid rock drive to these songs without losing their soulful groove in the process.) As a singer, Hinton was never afraid to step on the gas, and if his vocals are sometimes a bit over the top, they're also consumed with a raw and sweaty joy; like Wilson Pickett,Hinton is able to bring a surprising musicality to a shouting style that can express the pleasures of a hard-partying Saturday night ("Shout Bamalama") as well as the tender agony of love ("I Got the Feeling"). It was Eddie Hinton's poor fortune to cut a great blue-eyed soul album just as disco and funk had bumped deep soul off the charts, but Very Extremely Dangerous still stands as a fine example of latter-day soul at its most accomplished. AMG.

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Spooner Oldham - Pot Luck 1972

The legendary Spooner Oldham's long deleted early solo albums are now available on CD.  One of the most influential musicians of the pop history, Spooner Oldham wrote countless songs and left unforgettable hit songs by famous musicians. This CD package comes with the entire tracks of the two albums along with original covers in LP miniatures. First Time on CD.

 So why would this obscurity be so expensive?  Well, seemingly because it is so obscure ...  as far as I know it only recently saw CD reissue on the Korean Big Pink Music label (paired with Oldham's "Spare Change" album) and as far as I can tell, you're looking at the only copy readily available on the web right now.
 It probably isn't a major surprise that today Spooner Oldham's best know for his work as a writer - much of it with Dan Penn.  Lesser known is his work as a studio musician and the fact that he's recorded a handful of intriguing solos studio efforts l. Oldham started his professional musical career in the mid 1960s while attending the University of North Alabama.  Already a gifted keyboard player, he started playing sessions at Rick Hall's Muscle Shoals Fame Studios. Within a matter of months Oldham had dropped out of college and become Fame's in-house keyboard player.  In 1967 Oldham went to work for Chips Moman's Memphis-based American Studios where he started his long-standing collaboration with Dan Penn, enjoying a truly amazing string of hits with the cream of mid-1960s pop and soul artists (The Box Tops, Clarence Carter, Aretha Franklin, James and Bobby Purify, Percy Sledge, etc. etc.).  The late 1960s saw Oldham head for Southern California where he focused on sessions work.
 Signed to a contract by Gulf + Western's short-lived Family Records subsidiary, 1973 saw Oldham release his first solo album.  Produced by Ed Cobb, "Pot Luck" sported one of the year's ugliest covers, but about half of the songs made up for that lapse in marketing taste.  First a quick warning.  Anyone familiar with Oldham's catalog will understand why he's known for his writing and keyboards - his gruff voice managed to make Kris Kristofferson sound truly polished (in contrast, songwriting partner Dan Penn had a far more commercial voice).  Still, if you could get over Oldham's raw voice, tales of  life's woes and darker sides such as "The Lord Loves a Rolling Stone", "Life's Little Package of Puzzles" and "Easy Listening") had a rugged and odd charm to them.  There was no way this was going to appeal to the rank and file of collectors and there are still times when I struggle to get through the collection, but the investment of time and patience does yield some charming results.  a  personal "best of" package with Oldham covering some of his better known compositions ("Kentucky Grass" and "Cry Like a Baby").  Again, it certainly wasn't very commercial, but the album's quirky factor made it easy to see why the album's become highly sought after by collectors.

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David Bowie - Hunky Dory 1971

After the freakish hard rock of The Man Who Sold the World, David Bowie returned to singer/songwriter territory on Hunky Dory. Not only did the album boast more folky songs ("Song for Bob Dylan," "The Bewlay Brothers"), but he again flirted with Anthony Newley-esque dancehall music ("Kooks," "Fill Your Heart"), seemingly leaving heavy metal behind. As a result, Hunky Dory is a kaleidoscopic array of pop styles, tied together only by Bowie's sense of vision: a sweeping, cinematic mélange of high and low art, ambiguous sexuality, kitsch, and class. Mick Ronson's guitar is pushed to the back, leavingRick Wakeman's cabaret piano to dominate the sound of the album. The subdued support accentuates the depth of Bowie's material, whether it's the revamped Tin Pan Alley of "Changes," the Neil Younghomage "Quicksand," the soaring "Life on Mars?," the rolling, vaguely homosexual anthem "Oh! You Pretty Things," or the dark acoustic rocker "Andy Warhol." On the surface, such a wide range of styles and sounds would make an album incoherent, but Bowie's improved songwriting and determined sense of style instead made Hunky Dory a touchstone for reinterpreting pop's traditions into fresh, postmodern pop music. AMG.

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Clydie King - Direct Me 1971

Clydie Crittendon (born Clydie May King,[1] August 21, 1943, Atlanta, Georgia) is an American singer, best known for her session work as a backing vocalist. Discovered by songwriter Richard Berry, King began her recording career in 1956 with Little Clydie and the Teens; before she was a member of Ray Charles' Raeletts for three years and contributed to early 1960s recordings by producer Phil Spector. She recorded solo singles for Specialty Records, Kent Records and others.

King provided backing vocals for Humble Pie, which had great success in the United States, and she went on to become an in-demand session singer, worked with Venetta Fields and Sherlie Matthews and recorded with B.B. King, The Rolling Stones, Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Dickey Betts, Joe Walsh, and many others. She was a member of The Blackberries with Fields and Matthews and sang on Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, which became a feature film.
In 1971 she was featured on the great Beaver and Kraus album Gandarva. She sang the lead vocal on the gospel-inflected "Walkin' By the River." Ray Brown played bass on the cut.

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Alexis Korner - A New Generation Of Blues 1968

A basically competent, though hardly enthralling, effort from the British bluesman that alternates between minimal, acoustic-flavored production and fuller arrangements with jazzy touches of flute and upright bass. Korner wrote about half of the material, leaving the rest of the space open for R&B/blues covers and adaptations of traditional standards. "The Same for You" has a strange, ever-so-slight psychedelic influence, with its swirling flute, fake fadeout, and odd antiestablishment lyrics. Korner's voice is (and always would be) a tuneless bark, but it sounds better here than it did on the first album to prominently feature his vocals (I Wonder Who, 1967). As such, this album is one of the best representations of Korner as a frontman. AMG.

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Kaleidoscope - Faintly Blowing 1969

For their second album, Kaleidoscope delivered something an awful lot like their debut, a body of pleasant, trippy, spacy raga-rock, with the main difference that they pushed the wattage a little harder on their instruments -- they'd also been performing pretty extensively by the time of their second long-player, and a lot of the music here was material that they'd worked out on-stage in very solid versions. The result is a record just as pretty as their debut but a little punchier and more exciting within each song than their first album. The title track is also one of the more beautiful psychedelic effects pieces of its period, while "A Story from Tom Bitz" is crunchy folk-rock, "(Love Song) For Annie" represents a more lyrical brand of druggy folk-rock, and "If You So Wish" shifts over to Moody Blues-style ballad territory circa late 1968 and early 1969. AMG.

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Jimmy Page, Sonny Boy Williamson & Brian Auger - Don't Send Me No Flowers 1964

This stomping blues album is a musical roller coaster like you haven't heard many. From the slow and down beat depressing atmosphere of Don't Send My No Flowers, to the energetic finale of Getting Out Of Town, every single track on this album is just spot on. The spontaneous intensity and the emotion in these recordings is almost touchable and the classic heart felt harmonica blues of Sonny Boy in is later years blends perfectly with the raw blues rock energy of young Jimmy Page and Brian Auger. Blues and rock, rock blues, swamp blues or whatever you want to call it, never sounded better and more intense than on this album.

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Terence Boylan - Alias Boona 1969

Terence Boylan is an American singer/songwriter. Brought up in Buffalo, New York, Terence Boylan first appeared on local radio in the late 1950s performing a song he had written at the age of 11. While still in his mid teens, in the early 1960s, he performed in Greenwich Village and, following a chance meeting with Bob Dylan, was encouraged to pursue a solo music career in upstate New York. He attended Bard College in New York, and with his older brother John formed a band, the Ginger Men. By 1967, they had both signed with Verve Records, for whom they then recorded an experimental concept album, Playback, issued in the name of the Appletree Theatre.

After John Boylan moved to California, Terence stayed in New York, returned to college, and played with classmates Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. With them, he cut a solo LP, Alias Boona in 1969, the title referring to his nickname. He then moved to California, working again with his brother. After a few years he was signed to Asylum Records, and recorded his self-titled second album in 1977. Like his previous record, this was well received by critics but was never more than a cult success. However, Boylan did enjoy some success as a songwriter when Iain Matthews turned his song "Shake It" into a top five hit.

Following a third album, Suzy, Boylan has principally involved himself with songwriting and soundtrack work, and his own record label and publishing company, Spinnaker Records.


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Taj Mahal - Music Keeps Me Together 1975

Taj Mahal had displayed a keen interest in African and Caribbean music along with the country blues that was the foundation of his sound on his first several albums, so it was no great surprise that he'd become enamored of reggae by the mid-'70s, and Music Keeps Me Together found him working with Earl "Wire" Lindo, the keyboard man and arranger who had accompanied the likes of Bob Marley, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and Burning Spear. The tough but sensuous pulse of Jamaican music certainly makes itself felt on Music Keeps Me Together, but Mahal seems reluctant to dive into it headfirst -- "My Ancestors" and "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" are both skank-heavy, but "Further on Down the Road" fuses reggae with blues and funk until all the elements have been diluted too far, and the title cut (written by Lindo) sounds curiously indecisive about its stylistic direction. Elsewhere, "Why?...and We Repeat Why?...and We Repeat!" plays more like fusion jazz than anything else (with all the lack of bite that description implies); "Roll, Turn, Spin" (a Joseph Spence cover) bears faint echoes of Afro-beat; and "When I Feel the Sea Beneath My Soul" feels more like calypso, though with the energy brought down to the level of a quiet ocean breeze. The diversity of Mahal's music has always been a key element of his recordings, but Music Keeps Me Together goes in plenty of directions without sounding especially engaged with any of them, and the polished performances only add to the aimless tone of this album. This music may keep Taj Mahal together, but it doesn't do that much for his listeners. AMG.

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Ron Elliott - The Candlestickmaker 1970

Ex-Beau Brummels guitarist and vocalist Ron Elliott recorded this, his lone solo effort, during the waning months of 1969. In much the same way that he and Sal Valentino had done on their landmark release, Bradley's Barn, Elliott's pastoral compositions and folky country-rock execution are animated by a handful of equally brilliant West Coast session heavies -- including luminaries such as Chris Ethridge (bass), jazz legend Bud Shank (woodwinds), Leon Russell (brass arrangements), Ry Cooder (guitar), Lyle Ritz (bass), Paul Humphries (drums), and Dennis Dragon (drums). Although he does bang a tambourine during the first act of the side-long "Candlestick Maker Suite," what this album is really missing is the undeniable synergy that Valentino brought to the final incarnation of the Beau Brummels. The same free-flowin' rural charm can be heard throughout, which sounds like a synthesis of early America and Marshall Tucker Band sides. "Molly in the Middle"'s light midtempo crispness is enhanced by Elliot's fluid fretwork and relaxed melody. The jazzy "Lazy Day" features some lilting flute riffs from Shank weaving through the slightly offbeat acoustic bass of Ethridge. Unfortunately, Leon Russell's somewhat overbearing orchestration on "To the City, to the Sea" detracts from what would otherwise be one of the disc's focal points. The two-part title suite utilizes a more restrained string section that actually lends to the mood of the work -- reminiscent of the Buckinghams' magnum opus "Foreign Policy." The various movements within the two-part "Candlestick Maker" are likened to a musical novella -- recalling Michael Nesmith's Prison and Garden projects (sans the written text, of course). There are also hints at the styles of Tim Buckley and David Ackles worked into the rich imagery of his narrative. While certainly not every listener's mug of fennel, The Candlestick Maker is a thoroughly enjoyable work and recommended for fans of early-'70s West Coast singer/songwriters. In 2003 Collectors' Choice Music issued the title onto CD, making it once again available after nearly three decades out of print. AMG.

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