This isn't a perfect roundup of ZZ Top's superstar years of the '80s, but it comes pretty close. It dips back into the '70s for "Pearl Necklace" and "La Grange," with a couple of selections from the post-peak '90s, but this does offer the MTV-era basics: "Gimme All Your Lovin'," "Sharp Dressed Man," "Rough Boy," "Tush," "My Head's in Mississippi," ...
The record industry's blatantly greedy ploy of remastering and "upgrading" CDs is shameful. The sonics are usually improved, but the CDs could have been mastered properly the first time. But then fans wouldn't buy the same titles twice. The Allman Brothers Band's indispensable compilation A Decade of Hits 1969-1979 was reissued in 2000, just nine ...
ZZ Top had reached the top of the charts before, but that didn't make their sudden popularity in 1983 any more predictable. It wasn't that they were just popular -- they were hip , for God's sake, since they were one of the only AOR favorites to figure out to harness the stylish, synthesized grooves of new wave, and then figure out how to sell it ...
Featuring 11 of the group's best-known songs from their first five albums (from 1971's The Doobie Brothers to 1976's Takin' It to the Streets), The Best of the Doobie Brothers contains the boogie rock band's very best songs, including the big hits "Listen to the Music," "Jesus Is Just Alright," "Long Train Runnin'," "China Grove," "Black Water," ...
Lynyrd Skynyrd's 2000 compilation All Time Greatest Hits suffers from the same ailments that plague many compilations of its time, but there is one problem in particular that hurts it: instead of offering all of the "all time greatest hits" on one disc, the compilers pulled their punches, overlooking a few big songs while occasionally substituting ...
The best studio album in the group's history, electric blues with an acoustic texture, virtuoso lead, slide, and organ playing, and a killer selection of songs, including "Midnight Rider," "Revival," "Don't Keep Me Wonderin'," and "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" in its embryonic studio version, which is pretty impressive even at a mere six minutes ...
A tribute to the dearly departed Duane, Eat a Peach rambles through two albums, running through a side of new songs, recorded post-Duane, spending a full album on live cuts from the Fillmore East sessions, then offering a round of studio tracks Duane completed before his death. On the first side, they do suggest the mellowness of the Dickey Betts ...
With the glut of Canned Heat compilations available, what makes this 19-song Capitol/EMI release better than the rest? For starters, the previously unreleased track "Henry's Shuffle," featuring guitarist Henry Vestine and recorded in 1968, which was undoubtedly the zenith year for the band; the inclusion of "Low Down (And High Up)"; the rare ...
Following Roy Estrada's departure during the supporting tour for Sailin' Shoes, Lowell George became infatuated with New Orleans R&B and mellow jamming, all of which came to a head on their third album, 1973's Dixie Chicken. Although George is firmly in charge - he dominates the record, writing or co-writing seven of the 10 songs - this is the ...
ZZ Top returned after an extended layoff in late 1979 with Degüello, their best album since 1973's Tres Hombres. During their time off, ZZ Top didn't change much -- hell, their sound never really changed during their entire career -- but it did harden, in a way. The grooves became harder, sleeker, and their off-kilter sensibility and humor began ...
Since Rhino released an exhaustive four-disc ZZ Top box in October 2003, some may question the appearance of a double-disc retrospective in June 2004, a mere eight months after the box set. The two may be released awfully close to each other, but they do play to different audiences -- in other words, there are a bunch of fans who want all the hits ...
The original lineup of the Doobie Brothers reunited in 1989, releasing Cycles. Thanks to a successful tour and single ("The Doctor"), the album went gold, but the music was just a rehashed version of the bluesy boogie of their early albums, only stiffer and less inspired. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
There have been plenty of single-disc Doobie Brothers collections released over the years. There have been two-part vinyl Best of the Doobies, there have been budget-line collections, and there have been OK overviews as well as excellent generous discs with all the big hits. There's even been a comprehensive four-disc box, but what there hasn't ...
Dazed and Confused is a lazy comedy about growing up stoned in the '70s. Appropriately, the soundtrack is filled with eight-track anthems, from Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" and Foghat's "Slow Ride" to Sweet's "Fox on the Run." In fact, with its abundance of disposable classics, the music captures the spirit of the decade better than the movie itself ...
If Dixie Chicken represented a pinnacle of Lowell George as a songwriter and band leader, its sequel Feats Don't Fail Me Now is the pinnacle of Little Feat as a group, showcasing each member at their finest. Not coincidentally, it's the moment where George begins to recede from the spotlight, leaving the band as a true democracy. These ...
Lynyrd Skynyrd begins to show signs of wear on their fourth album, Gimme Back My Bullets. The band had switched producers, hiring Tom Dowd, the producer who served Atlantic's roster so well during the label's heyday. Unfortunately, he wasn't perfectly suited for Skynyrd, at least at this point in their history. The group had toured regularly since ...
Talk about greatness -- the Doobie Brothers, with Jeff "Skunk" Baxter added to their lineup, delivered their best album to date helped by a fairly big hit, though "Take Me in Your Arms" never did anything close to its predecessors despite some chords and modulations that recalled "Black Water" ever so slightly. Stampede's virtue was its ...
After missing the boat with Lynyrd Skynyrd (for whom he played drums early on), guitarist/singer Rick Medlocke formed Blackfoot, arguably the first all-Native American rock group. The band struggled for almost a decade, playing run-of-the-mill Southern rock that they eventually injected with extra volume and attitude before signing with Atco, for ...
The Allman Brothers Band's fifth live release in 25 years, cut during 1994 in Raleigh, NC, and at the Garden State Arts Center in New Jersey, is a high-water mark in their Epic Records catalog. If anything, they're even better here than they were on the earlier Evening With the Allman Brothers Band, the old material getting fresh new approaches -- ...
By the time of 1981's Marauder album, Blackfoot's career had effectively stalled in America, as the band's hard rock sound evolved further and further from the Skynyrd-derived Southern rock sound of their successful 1979 opus, Strikes. Still, while continuing to rely on hard-driving numbers such as "Good Morning" and "Dry County," Marauder also ...
From Dusk Till Dawn follows the pattern of previous Quentin Tarantino-related movie soundtracks by concentrating on a particular musical theme -- in this case, Tex-Mex-flavored blues-rock -- and punctuating it with dialogue from the film. However, the From Dusk Till Dawn soundtrack doesn't work quite as well as the ones for Pulp Fiction and ...
There's little question that Shout! Factory's double-disc compilation The Marshall Tucker Band Anthology: The First 30 Years is exhuastive. It spans 32 songs, sampling from 20 albums, running more or less in chronological order, and giving a good idea of the group's narrative. While that's a lot of ground, some charting singles are still missing - ...
Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote the book on Southern rock with their first album, so it only made sense that they followed it for their second album, aptly titled Second Helping. Sticking with producer Al Kooper (who, after all, discovered them), the group turned out a record that replicated all the strengths of the original, but was a little tighter and a ...
Little Feat's lone official live album was chopped up for its initial CD release, with two tracks lopped off so it could fit on a single disc (they showed up, inexplicably, as bonus tracks on the CD issue of The Last Record Album). After years of neglect, the album was finally restored in 2002, except "restored" might not be the right word for it. ...
This was the record that sent Grand Funk over the top. Throwing strings into the hard rock mix on the epic "I'm Your Captain," it also contained the show-stopper "Mean Mistreater." Although the production leaves something to be desired, this record is quite a statement even by today's standards. [The 2002 reissue adds four bonus tracks: an ...
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