Tag Archives: record collecting

Easy Ed’s Guide to Cover Songs,Tribute Albums and Compilations

Collage by Easy Ed

In my previous life as a sales and marketing weasel that began in the early seventies and came to an end about ten years ago,I worked for a number of record distributors in both the independent and major label world. A good deal of my time was spent on promoting tribute albums, which would usually feature at least one or multiple name artists performing other people’s work, or at least have some sort of common theme.

The one-artist tribute album has been around since at least 1952, when Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson honored his musical hero Duke Ellington with a collection that spanned two discs on Clef Records. They sold well enough that there are now well over thirty Ellington tribute albums, with the most popular from singer Ella Fitzgerald whose own discography is full of similar releases spotlighting individual composers. That concept lives on with, as an example, Steve Earle’s Townes collection and his newest album of Guy Clark songs.

By the mid-fifties a different twist on the tribute album was the low budget knockoffs. Labels would simply record the top hits of the day using studio musicians, and sell them at a steep discount in places like supermarkets. These cover versions were a great way to get incremental business for the larger labels who not only distributed the originals and often owned the publishing, but each owned their own budget divisions that existed simply to squeeze out every ounce of profit they could.

Many independent budget-only labels sprouted up in order to duplicate entire albums or bands with low paid imitators. For example, in addition to the all-female Beatle Buddies seen above, there were The Beetles, American Beatles, Bearcuts, The Liverpools, The Liverpool Beats and several more Beatle imitation bands than I recall. Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass were covered by The Mexican Brass, The Surfsiders did the music of Beach Boys and so on. Re- recorded ‘golden oldies’ or ‘dance party’ compilations were also a large part of that market.

By the mid-nineties regional and national record store chains, electronic retailers, booksellers and discount stores began to roll out the ‘big box’ concept, devoting a lot of floor space to music and featuring huge inventories. For the record labels it was a boom period, allowing them to increase production and sales simply to fill the pipeline for all that new shelf space. It also gave rise to a new type of tribute album that focused on the ultimate fan or completist.

Here’s how that worked: A fan of Metallica wanders into a Tower Store and and looks in their bin. Already knowing they don’t have anything new, they’ll see a bluegrass tribute album of their music. As crazy as that sounds, the completist would likely buy it. And in fact, on October 4, 2003 CMH Records released Fade To Bluegrass, with a string band called Iron Horse playing the songs of Metallica. For a weird one-off tribute album, it sold unbelievably well, and the video below has five and a half million views. A little bluegrass and country label based in Los Angeles created a virtual tribute industry, with hundreds of titles of multiple genres and a number of other labels followed their path.

It was a formula that worked pretty well as long as there were enough stores with enough shelf space to add them into their inventory, and different labels each had their own specialty. One would try to find at least one living member of a defunct band, throw them into a studio with session players and crank out new versions of old songs. Another did straight, cheap soundalikes that sold at bargain prices, especially in places like military PX’s or the early versions of dollar stores. CMH took another path, bringing out a series of over a hundred well- produced bluegrass recordings and later adding string quartets, techno, dance and and rock- a-bye lullabies to their catalog. They focused on quality, using well-known musicians who were purposely uncredited and spending time and resources on cover art and packaging.

Somewhere around 2007, when record stores started going bankrupt and closing their doors, the market for tributes and covers became severely impacted. I spent my last year in the music business as head of sales for CMH, and we digitized their huge catalog for iTunes and other online retailers, started looking harder at non-music specialty retailers and brainstorming new ideas and concepts. In a year I was done and gone, as was much of the staff. They made tough decisions, trimmed overhead, slowed down their release schedule, and appear to have continued to sustain their business.

While there are still labels that are put out low cost digital-only tribute/cover albums, obviously without the big box retailers left, it’s now a business of pennies rather than dollars. And why I can’t figure out the how, why and economics of it, real honest-to-God tribute albums with various well known artists are still being released albeit sparingly. While you might get plenty of press and pull off one or two concerts to publicize the project, then what? Sell a thousand copies and sit back for the quarterly $5 check from each of the streaming platforms to roll in? I really like the recent Ray Steven’s tribute but can’t imagine a market big enough to keep those type of projects going.

I’ve always been a fan of the quality tribute releases as well as multi-artist compilations such as the soundtracks to the American Epic series and Ken Burn’s Jazz. And I grew up listening to the Anthology of American Folk Music which is still the motherlode for roots music. My favorite ‘current day’ tribute release was The National’s Day Of The Dead, a sprawling effort featuring dozens and dozens of artists across multiple genres interpreting the music of the Grateful Dead. It’s simply stellar. As a long time collector of all types of cover songs, reinvention and reinterpretation can take a song far beyond the original concept, creating something new. Ask Bob Dylan about that the next time you see him.

I’m going to close this out with a few suggestion for those who haven’t really paid attention to cover songs, tributes or compilations. Some are historical, some whimsical. Most can easily be found somewhere, sometime or someplace online or at your local sore. I’m primarily sticking to the ‘various artist’ releases, but there’s so much more to explore. Willie Nelson doing a tribute to Ray Price songs or Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Dawn McCarthy’s exceptional album of Everly Brothers tunes are examples. And for those of you who have been following Uncut magazine over the years, their free samplers are a collector’s dream. Tough to come by, but well worth the sleuthing. Have fun.

Keep Your Soul: A Tribute to Doug Sahm
Chimes of Freedon: Songs of Bob Dylan
Subterranean Homesick Blues: A Tribute to Bob Dylan
A Nod To Bob
Bob Dylan: The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration (Deluxe Edition) Endless Highway – The Music of the Band
King of the Road: A Tribute to Roger Miller
Light of Day: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen
Reefer Blues: Vintage Songs About Marijuana
Let’s Do Rocksteady: The Story of Rocksteady
Sing Me The Songs: Celebrating The Works of Kate McGarrigle
Mercyland: Hymns for the Rest of Us
Will The Circle Be Unbroken
The Unbroken Circle: The Musical Heritage of the Carter Family
Looking Into You: A Tribute to Jackson Browne
The Harry Smith Project: Anthology of American Folk Music
The Harry Smith Project Revisited
Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating The Music of Inside Llewyn Davis Smithsonian Folkways Classic Series
The Tejano Roots Series
Okeh Stomping Boogie: The Best of Western Swing
Hot Dance Bands From Okeh
The Okeh Rhythm and Blues Story
The Aladdin Records Story
Columbia Country Classics
Timeless: Hank Williams Tribute
The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams
Sweet Soul Music
The Doo Wop Box
Cohen Covered
We Love You Mr. Cohen
Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (Motion Picture Soundtrack)
I Am Sam (Music Inspired From The Movie)
Beat The Retreat: Songs of Richard Thompson
Avalon Blues: A Tribute to Mississippi John Hirt
Poet: A Tribute to Townes Van Zandt
I Am The Resurrection: A Tribute to John Fahey
The Life and Songs of Emmylou Harris
Like A Hurricane: A Tribute to Neil Young
This Notes For You: A Tribute to Neil Young
Cinnamon Girl: Women Artists Cover Neil Young
This One’s For Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark
Things About Comin’ My Way: A Tribute to The Mississippi Sheiks Big Bend Killing: The Appalachian Ballad Tradition
The Executioners Last Songs
Look Again To The Wind: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited The Oxford American Southern Annual Music Issue samplers Sing To Me Sleep: Indie Lullabies
Commemorative: A Tribute to Gram Parsons
Return Of The Grievous Angel: Tribute to Gram Parsons
Gram Parsons All Star Tribute Sessions
Tulare Dust: A Songwriters Tribute to Merle Haggard
Dear Jean: Artists Celebrate Jean Ritchie
R. Crumbs Heroes of Blues, Jazz and Country
Almost You: The Songs of Elvis Costello

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Americana and Roots Music Videos: RPM 5

An occasional series of Americana and roots music videos. Sharing new discoveries, and revisiting old friends.

This started out as a story about my travels throughout the world in a quest to find hidden and long forgotten places of pleasure, often called record stores. Getting down on my hands and knees, pushing through cobwebs and kicking away a dead rodent or two in order to find those elusive hidden musical artifacts that I take home, place on my turntable while pouring myself two fingers of a fine whiskey, and then let the sweet sounds baptize my body and soothe my searing soul.

So that didn’t happen. I’m on the wagon, haven’t stepped on a winged vessel for over six years, and my turntable awaits my oldest son’s ability to rent a van, enlist a helper, and transport it to Brooklyn, where such things are cherished. I surf in the stream and scour YouTube.

Here’s a few things that caught my eyes and ears this season.

There Is Nothing Like Jason Isbell and an Acoustic Guitar

This should hardly be a surprise, as Isbell has been consistently putting out incredible music from back in his days with the Drive-By Truckers, followed by his first solo album in 2007 and those that followed with his band The 400 Unit, named for the psychiatric ward of Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital in Florence, Alabama. His wife, Amanda Shires, manager Traci Thomas, and Ryan Adams assisted in getting Isbell into treatment for alcohol and cocaine addiction in early 2012 and he now speaks openly about it. He’s intelligent, street smart, has a sharp wit, runs one of the best Twitter accounts you’ll ever follow, he was married to Shires by musician Todd Snider, is a fanatic fan of the beleaguered Atlanta Braves — and I’ll stand on Steve Earle’s coffee table and tell you he is currently the best songwriter we’ve seen since Dylan’s most prolific period, whenever that was. While I prefer him alone with his acoustic, this year I’ve gone back into his catalog from the past ten years, and if you’re a Jason-come-lately, you’d be well served to do the same.

This Is the Dawning of the Age of Geriatrics 

The other night I went to see Bob Weir and The Wolf Brothers here in NYC, and as I stepped off the subway and headed up Broadway toward the theater, it was if somebody freeze-dried 1967. People of a certain age were decked out in tie dye or wearing faded concert tees across large stomachs, and as I made my way to the loge I saw one poor soul suffering from an overdose of stool softeners. But the music? First rate and as rockin’ and rollin’ as you might not have expected, but Bobby stretched out on his guitar and sang like I’ve never heard him before. It was truly a wonder to behold.

Along with John Prine, who will likely top every person’s end of the year poll, there has been an avalanche of older musicians who’ve either gone out on tour for the first time in years or written and recorded some great music. Examples would include Willie and Dylan, who never seem to stop touring, the Sweetheart of The Rodeo show which allowed Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman to show that they still have the chops, and Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, and Dwight Yoakam criss-crossed the country. Paul McCartney has his first number one album in 36 years, and Diana Ross is killing it in Vegas. Paul Simon went around the world one last time, and I think by now you get the idea: It’s better to burn out than to fade away.

The Year That Americana Music Died

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Not that anybody, but a few, cares about such things, but when was the last time you looked at Billboard magazine’s Americana/Folk chart? A few years ago everyone made a big fuss that not only did “our music” warrant a Grammy award (never televised, of course, and who can forget Linda Chorney?), but we also got our own official chart. As I wrote this Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hitsis number nine, followed by Ed Sheeran, John Mayer, Jack Johnson, John Denver, James Taylor, and Jim Croce. Sure, Chris Stapleton occupies both the number one and three spots, but if this is the best we have to show for it — schlock pop and geriatric redux — I’m outta here.

These are the musicians who came out with some kick-ass music this year, in no particular order, and, for at least this week, aren’t on the Americana chart: Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Malcolm Holcombe, Lindi Ortega, St. Paul and The Broken Bones, Lula Wiles, I See Hawks In L.A., Laura Veirs, Milk Carton Kids, The Rails, Eliza Gilkyson, Mary Gauthier, The Jayhawks, Modern Mal, Clay Parker and Jodi James, Brandi Carlile, Shemekia Copeland, The Earls of Leicester, Pharis and Jason Romero, Tim Easton, Ry Cooder, Sarah Shook and The Disarmers, The Mammals, John Hiatt, Ed Romanoff, Jules Shear, Hayes Carll, Whitey Morgan, Rosanne Cash, and Colter Wall, to name but a few.

And now the real craziness: Of the top ten albums on this week’s chart from the Americana Music Association, not even one made it on Billboard‘s chart. Thank god for Dale Watson’s Ameripolitan music association or whatever he calls it … they’re gettin’ it right.

Why Ska and Rocksteady Have Gotten My Attention 

I haven’t inhaled for over 23 years, have no hair left even if I wanted to grow it out, and never went to Jamaica. But for reasons unknown even to me, this was the year I began to get absorbed into the roots of reggae. Blame it on a small radio station in NYC with the call letters WVIP that spends much of the day hawking vitamin supplements and selling help for your damaged credit reports. But every so often they break out the music, and it’s worth the wait. I’m a white boy who can’t even begin to explain it, but here are a few albums that shouldn’t be too hard to find if you want to dip your toes into the water. Start with Lee “Scratch” Perry and Friends – The Black Ark Years, Everything Crash: The Best of The Ethiopians and then The Story of Rocksteady: 1966-1968. 

Video Killed the Radio Star

When was the last time you pulled out your old Low Anthem albums? It’s amazing how great this band is, and after opening on the Lucinda Williams’ tour last year, they recorded and released The Salt Doll Went To Measure the Depth of the Sea. Best album title of the year and just a wonderful group of writers and players.

Anybody who has been paying attention these past ten years knows that I keep going back to Marissa Nadler, the Boston-based singer-songwriter-guitarist-artist who can sing about ex-Byrd Gene Clark, cover a Townes Van Zandt song, and just as easily open for a death metal band in a small club in Germany at three in the morning. When her new album For My Crimes was recently released, it coincided with this nice mention from Richard Thompson in The Quietist:

“My youngest son, Jack, introduced me to Marissa Nadler. Her music is really strange, lovely stuff. I think it’s a little bit linked to shoegazing, or that sound, although I don’t know a lot about that. I find it very mesmerising and very dreamy, especially the way she harmonises with herself. I’m also never quite sure what she’s talking about – there’s lots of ambiguity in her lyrics, which I like. Songs and stories don’t always have to be straight.”

King of The Road: Tribute to Roger Miller is a two-disc album showcasing the songwriting of Miller through artists that span all corners, from Ringo Starr to Asleep At The Wheel, Lyle Lovett to Loretta Lynn. It’s a bit uneven and sadly they really missed the mark on “Husbands and Wives,” one of my favorites. Instead of using the great Jules Shear version above (video from Sherry Wallace), they teamed a mismatched Jamey Johnson with Emmylou Harris and murdered it. Despite that, you can cull a number of great performances here if you pick and choose.

And That’s All There Is Folks … It’s Cartoon Time

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Streaming: A Music Junkie Shifts Gears

As an addict, I’ve been able to kick a lot of bad stuff out the door. Dope, alcohol, and nicotine to name but three, and if I think hard enough there’s probably a couple more things I could add to that list. Living a life unmanageable has been my calling card, and while I never suspected music to be one of those things that would or could cause me irreparable harm, as long as I didn’t inhale it, I have come to realize that the art of collecting music – the actual hunting and gathering – has consumed way too much of my life. So as an act of self-discovery and recovery, I’ve recently chosen to surrender and become baptized in the digital stream. Glory hallelujah.

 

This will not be another wistful look back at how wonderful it was to find some gem back in the ’60s because the cover art was amazing, or the first time I dropped a needle onto the edge of a disc and watched it magically spin around and around as the sweet sounds came floating ethereally out of the speakers. Y’all have done this long enough to know that the joy of finding, acquiring, and sharing new music is one of the greatest highs you can have. And while it sounds like I’m giving that up, I’m not. But I shall no longer be a prisoner of consumerism, where possession and ownership equates to my happiness. I now gladly rent my music.

 

Streaming. In this modern age, it’s access that matters. For under ten bucks a month there are over 30 million songs to fulfill my needs … 62,500 days of unlimited listening, give or take. And outside of some still undigitized and “missing in action” titles, a lot of what I love to listen to is there for the taking. With a couple of keyboard punches and a swipe of my finger, there it is. And with the “if you like this, you might like that” feature of most streaming services, along with tons of curated playlists, exploration and discovery is easier and deeper than when I used to hang out at a record store flipping the stacks. Before some of you shake your heads with disdain, give me a moment.

From the early ’60s through the mid-’80s I was a vinyl junkie, with a little eight-track and cassette chaser on the side. Then I transitioned to CDs for another 15 or 16 years before uploading, downloading, saving, converting, transferring, and backups took over much of my free time. While never a Napster or Pirate Bay dude, a few years ago I started searching for digital files of long out-of-print 78s, getting a shellac rush whenever I found an obscure recording on a Japanese or Finnish blog site. But it’s a solitary and endlessly boring way to collect songs that I only would listen to once, so I began to wonder about the value.

 

The disposal of my physical goods, what little is left of them, will be relatively easy. My eldest has offered to put everything up on the Discogs marketplace, and what won’t sell will go to the local thrift store. My massive digital library that I worked so hard to maintain with a consistent file structure and original artwork, and which is triplicated on hard drives, will likely wind up in a box or on a shelf. There’s nothing pretty to look at there, and if history is any indication, they’ll shortly become as useless as an iPod Classic.

 

 

If you want to know what tipped the scales, look no further to an endless barrage of vinyl reissues that cost 25 bucks at Barnes and Noble or some supermarket, and come from digital masters that sound like crap. And here’s my message to Gillian and Dave, and Jack White and T-Bone, who are doing these custom analog direct-to-disc projects: I don’t care and it doesn’t really sound that much better than the digital versions. Seriously … loved watching American Epic and all, but you’re in the ether of the barely one percent who give a damn. Sorry, and I still love ya.

With the big corporations seeing dollar signs after a self-inflicted devaluation of their content, if I see one more piece of marketing fluff touting the joy and wonder of vinyl, I might jump out the window. From a personal observation, my workplace consists of me – the old dude – and 89 people in their 20s. They are voracious music listeners and concertgoers, are constantly walking about with their earbuds, talk about and share songs and albums with each other at lunch, and every single one of them streams. Nobody buys anything anymore. The revolution was not televised; it just happened and you missed it.

 

Just to add to my overall annoyance, do y’all know about October 14th? That would be Cassette Store Day. Seriously. Did you know that tape sales have increased by 74% in 2016?  I didn’t. Thought they were just something that only experimental musicians still released. Here’s how the website explains this new phenomenon:

CSD began in the United Kingdom in 2013 and quickly grew to become a global event with the participation of the United States, Japan, Germany and France. Through the efforts of CSD and the stores, labels, bands and fans involved worldwide we’ve helped keep what was once perceived as a dead format alive and viable in today’s digital age!

This makes me want to rush out and start hoarding candles, once word gets out that lightbulbs are a thing of the past. Thomas who? Oh yeah, he also invented the phonograph player.

 

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Amanda Petrusich and A 78RPM Groovy Kind of Love

amanda petrusich

This past Christmas I bought my oldest son a few books of the non-digital variety. One was a Johnny Carson biography, another was about a topless cellist I once saw perform in a Philadelphia park, and the third was Amanda Petrusich’s latest, “Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records”.

Although he thanked me, when I saw him slightly push Amanda’s book to the edge of the table I suspected he had already read it. And he had. Which was fine with me, since I was going to borrow it anyway. I loved her previous book, a road trip journal which obviously laid the groundwork for the author’s long- title fetish, “It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways and the Search for American Music”. It’s a great read for any roots music fan, and they are both available from Amazon, along with her first inappropriately short-titled Nick Drake book “Pink Moon”.

Yesterday I read the first chapter of Do Not Sell, and I’m already hooked on the storyline and her observations. A veteran music writer with an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia and currently a teacher at NYU’s Gallatin University, Amanda has a way of articulating feelings and thoughts on music that resonate with my own connection to consumption.

Like many people in the business of music, my own background in distribution, retail, working with labels and as a serial-blogger has allowed me virtually unlimited free music for most of my adult life. It’s been great to have access. But it also messes with your head. These days, with just a little skill in technology and web-surfing, everyone can find a song or album that can be “acquired and judged in the time it takes to eat a cheese sandwich”.

Amanda speaks to the acquisition of free music, in terms of the perception and value of it, like this:

“It’s reductive to suggest that the availability of free or nearly free music-and the concurrent switch, for most of the population, from music as object to music as code-has inexorably altered our relationship with sound, and I don’t actually believe that the emotional circuitry that allows us to love and require a bit of music is dependent on what it feels like in our hands. But I do think that the ways in which we attain art at least partially dictate the ways in which we ultimately allow ourselves to own it.”

With such unlimited and easy access to music, and especially with new releases flooding the marketplace (if you can still call it that) to the tune of well over 100,000 albums per year, I’ve experienced my own listening habits change from when I was a kid who visited ten record stores every Saturday and came home juggling bags of 45’s and albums. For the next week I’d sit alone in my bedroom and listen to everything, staring at the cover art and reading the liner notes…a term soon to be as extinct as a tyrannosaurus rex. And it took me someplace that I have long ago left. It was that obsessive compulsion to seek out and discover the new and unknown that gave me the passion to want more. Once I could just have it, I became a little bored, and jaded. Fast forward to 2015.

In describing her own transition from consumer-collector to critic, Amanda nails it:

“Unless I was being paid to professionally render my opinion, I listened to everything for three or seven or nine minutes and moved on. I was overwhelmed and underinvested. Some days, music itself seemed like a nasty postmodern experiment in which public discussion eclipsed everything else, and art was measured only by the amount of chatter it incited. Writing and publishing felt futile, like tossing a meticulously prepared pork chop to a bulldog, then watching him devour it, throw it up and start eating something else.”

Overwhelmed and underinvested. And this, my friends, is only page three. What follows is the story of those who still hunt, stalk and collect…in this case, the most elusive 78 rpm recordings ever released. Leafing through the pages, I can’t wait to read this book. And so I won’t.

Visit Amanda’s website for some great music and links to other writing.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.