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Rock tragedy: Music superstars, small suburb forever linked

• Dan Sewell The Associated Press
• 2 hrs ago

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FINNEYTOWN, Ohio – The concrete bench in a small northern Cincinnati suburb depicts a guitar, with the message “My Generation” just below it.

In the background are plaques with the faces of three teenagers, Jackie Eckerle, Karen Morrison and Stephan Preston, frozen in time 40 years ago. Bricks in the plaza around the bench carry eight other names.

All 11 were killed in a frantic stampede of people trying to get into the British rock band The Who’s concert on Dec. 3, 1979, at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum. The city of Finneytown suffered disproportionately, and its three losses included the two youngest victims, 15-year-olds Eckerle and Morrison. Their schoolmates say well over 100 other people from Finneytown were there.

“Everyone’s connected to it, everywhere you go around here,” said Fred Wittenbaum, who was a freshman at Finneytown High School then but did not attend the concert. “Either they went to the concert, or they had a friend or a family member who was there.”

Since then, the community of around 12,000 people, many living in ranch-style homes built years before the concert, has been inextricably linked with The Who, which was already well on the way to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with such hits as “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Can’t Explain,” and “My Generation,” an anthem of rebellious youth.

Most of the blame afterward focused on the first-come, first-served arrangement for seating that saw thousands of fans line up for hours ready to charge toward the coveted floor spots, and on confusion over and lack of preparation for when the doors were opening. Besides those trampled in the stampede, some two dozen other fans were injured.

Frontman Roger Daltrey and guitarist Pete Townshend, the last survivors of the original band, say they have struggled emotionally over the years with the concert carnage, which they didn’t know about until their show was ending.

“Because there’s always a certain amount, ‘If I hadn’t been doing this, it wouldn’t have happened,’ you know,” Daltrey said during an unpublicized visit last year to the Finneytown memorial site. “That’s just human nature. That’s what we carry with us.”

“It took a long time for us to get a sense that this was not just about the 11 kids, it was about the community,” Townshend told The Associated Press in a recent interview in New York.

The sad stories and traumatic memories among Finneytown alums evolved three decades later into a plan to memorialize their friends.

John Hutchins was playing an acoustic set at a nearby venue in December 2009 and dedicated songs such as The Who’s “Love Ain’t For Keeping” to those who died at the concert. Hutchins was at The Who concert; he skipped school that day, got to the coliseum nearly seven hours early to be among the first in line, and got close enough to the stage to see The Who’s song list.

Fellow Finneytown High alum Steve Bentz, who wasn’t at the concert, approached Hutchins after his performance with a thought, that “we should do something.” The thought soon grew into the memorial bench.

They joined with Wittenbaum and Walt Medlock — who remembers being pressed tightly against Preston before making the possibly life-saving decision to work his way out of the crowd — to create the P.E.M. scholarship fund, using the last-name initials of their three schoolmates.

“We wanted to take what was a terrible tragedy and try and turn it into something that could be looked at as good,” Wittenbaum explained. “We wanted to pay it forward.”

Launched in 2010, the scholarships reward three Finneytown students with $5,000 each for the study of music or any other arts. There have awarded 27 so far.

Auctions and raffles at an annual December show featuring music by alumni at the school’s performing arts centre help pay for the scholarships. The Who became involved in the third year, making an exclusive DVD for showing at that year’s benefit with comments from the band about the tragedy and new concert footage.

More aid from the band followed. Last year, Wittenbaum drove Daltrey from a private airstrip near Dayton to view the Finneytown memorials that include artwork, personal items and photos of the three in a Who-donated display case. Daltrey also met with relatives of those killed and with fans who attended the concert.

“It’s been a really cathartic process for everybody,” Wittenbaum said.

Daltrey-autographed books, albums, guitars and other items have been sold online, including on the band’s official site, to add to the fund. The P.E.M. leaders’ next goal is to see Daltrey and Townshend perform in Cincinnati for the first time since the deadly concert. In the AP interview, Townshend said the band plans to return to Cincinnati.

An announcement is expected Tuesday night, after a 40th anniversary documentary featuring interviews with Daltrey and Townshend airs on WCPO-TV in Cincinnati.

Alleson Arnold, 18, among the latest scholarship winners, moved to Finneytown several years ago and soon learned about the pain the community has felt. She said she is “very grateful” for the fund that will help her study fashion and design.

“It’s heartbreaking to know that I’m the same age as many of them,” she said. “I get to do the things that I want to be doing, but all that was taken away from them.”

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Associated Press writer John Carucci contributed from New York.

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Follow Dan Sewell at https://www.twitter.com/dansewell

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

• By Michael Christopher rockmusicmenu@gmail com
• Nov 21, 2019
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Motley Crue is planning to head back out on the road. 

There is new vinyl out from Gary Numan.

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Another week, another reunion for 2020. This time though, hard core fans of the reunified band aren’t as happy as one might expect. Los Angeles sleaze rockers Mötley Crüe have decided to come back, and there’s a major issue with the situation; their much hyped “Final Tour” came to a close less than four years ago.

Back in 2014, the foursome went over the top theatrical to declare they had signed a legally binding “cessation of touring” agreement, preventing any of them from hitting the road under the Crüe name. At a press conference to announce their “Final Tour,” they signed the documents and assured fans and gathered media that it was going to be the last time ever to hear songs like “Kickstart My Heart,” “Wild Side” and “Home Sweet Home” ever again.

“Legally, we can’t play again,” bassist and de facto leader of the Crüe Nikki Sixx told Rolling Stone in 2014. “The only loophole is if all four band members agreed to do it, we could override our own contract. But we know that will never happen. There are people in this band who will refuse to ever do it again, and you’re talking to one of them. There is no amount of money that would ever make me do it again because I have such pride in how we’re ending it.”

A deeper dive into the alleged legal documents was never possible, because the band’s representatives never made them available to the media. There have been two speculated lines of thought about the contract. One, of course, is that it was all for show and a rather unique way to sell tickets. The other is that there actually was a contract, but its primary function was to ensure none of the members could use the group’s name to tour under, an increasingly common practice these days, especially by the acts that came up on the Sunset Strip in the ’80s. The “cessation of touring” would prevent the world from ever seeing “Tommy Lee’s Mötley Crüe” come to town, and that the only way the band could use it is if all of them agreed to go out again.

That brings us to the announcement this week, promoted with a video of the “cessation of touring” agreement on a desk in an office that exploded, along with the rest of the furniture. Narrated by rapper and actor Machine Gun Kelly, the clip claims that due to unprecedented demand by the public due to the mega-successful Netflix biopic “The Dirt” this year, the band was blowing up the contract and coming back for the fans.

Many of those fans shelled out thousands upon thousands of dollars just a few years ago for pricey meet-and-greets and multiple shows to say farewell to the Crüe on “The Final Tour.” Regionally, the band performed in Camden, Atlantic City, Hershey and at the Wells Fargo Center before closing out with a three-night stand at the Staples Center in Los Angeles that ended on New Year’s Eve 2015.

While there’s no arguing the run was wildly popular, it didn’t sell out everywhere – including in Philadelphia – and now the big rumor is the Crüe has their sights set on stadiums next summer. How they plan to pull that off is by bringing Def Leppard and Poison along for the ride. And with ’80s nostalgia in full-swing, they might just be able to make it happen if the fans forgive them for hoodwinking them in the first place.

Mötley Crüe joins a rapidly growing list of reunited bands set to hit the road in 2020 which includes Rage Against the Machine, My Chemical Romance and The Black Crowes.

HIDE CAPTIONSoundgarden, performing in 2015 at Big Music Fest in Canada. [Tribune News Service]

By Michael Rietmulder, The Seattle TimesPosted at 1:56 PMUpdated at 1:56 PM   

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has been good to Seattle. In the last few years, we’ve seen the induction of still-roaring ’70s rockers Heart and grunge titans Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The trio of vaunted hometown rock bands bolstered a Western Washington contingent that already included prolific instrumental surf-rockers The Ventures and music icons Quincy Jones, Ray Charles and The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

The Rock Hall’s class of 2020 has a chance to add another set of local stars in first-time nominees Soundgarden and Dave Matthews Band.

The hard-rock heroes and jam-pop troubadour join a roster of 16 nominees, including Whitney Houston, The Notorious B.I.G., Depeche Mode, The Doobie Brothers, Judas Priest and Nine Inch Nails.

Each year, a voting body of roughly 1,000 industry personnel and rock historians elects a handful of inductees; fans will also have a say via an online vote, open through Jan. 10 at rockhall.com. Later in January, we’ll learn whether or not Soundgarden and DMB will be among the Rock Hall’s class of 2020.

The Cleveland institution has faced criticism for its secretive nomination process, and at times seems to relish fans’ endless cries over perceived snubs. And really, arguing over the Rock Hall’s picks — or even the legitimacy of the organization — is half the fun. In that quarrelsome spirit, this week and next, we’ll take a look at the arguments for and against our local nominees, and we’ll offer our predictions for their Rock Hall bids. This week, we look at Soundgarden.

THE CASE FOR SOUNDGARDEN

The Rock Hall offers loose criteria for inductees, and the biggest argument for Soundgarden’s inclusion is the band’s impact on “the development, evolution and preservation of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Using building blocks carved by the likes of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and The Stooges, Soundgarden helped build a new breed of metallic, punk-infused rock ‘n’ roll, echoes of which still ring through rock radio. While hardly the first band to meld elements from once-disparate genres (see: fellow nominees Motorhead), Soundgarden did so in a way that transcended underground heroism and infiltrated the mainstream. Credit archetypal frontman Chris Cornell howling like a demonic Robert Plant over Kim Thayil’s menacing, drop-D guitar tuning — and odd time signatures, which pulled Soundgarden up from the underground by the dog tags.

From grunge’s ground floor, Soundgarden was instrumental in laying the foundation for the unlikely movement that radically altered the course of rock history, killing metal’s big-hair era and paving the way for “alternative” rock to become a dominant force in pop culture. Though Nirvana’s and Pearl Jam’s stars brightened faster in the ’90s, Soundgarden became the first grunge band to release a major-label album. And the band earned a Grammy nomination before Nirvana broke out, before Eddie Vedder and the boys had even cut their debut.

Soundgarden wouldn’t reach its commercial zenith until 1994?s chart-topping “Superunknown,” which featured Grammy-winning singles “Black Hole Sun” and “Spoonman” — MTV staples now synonymous with a generation of rock music.

THE CASE AGAINST SOUNDGARDEN

Devil’s advocacy here: Despite its pioneering role in grunge’s explosion, Soundgarden was never quite as big as previous inductees Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Will voters feel the Hall’s grunge bases are already covered? (Alice in Chains, too, has not yet received a nom, though it makes sense the Hall would first consider Soundgarden, which has been eligible longer.)

Grunge’s mainstream incursion officially took hold with the 1991 releases of Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” Pearl Jam’s “Ten” and Soundgarden’s “Badmotorfinger.” Easily the heaviest of the three, “Badmotorfinger” eventually went double platinum, but the album didn’t make the same impact on the charts during that initial blastoff period, peaking at No. 39 on the Billboard 200. It wasn’t until grunge’s later years that Soundgarden would land its only No. 1 album with “Superunknown.” (The follow-up, 1996?s “Down on the Upside,” topped out at No. 2).

For all its success, the band cracked Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart just once (barely, at No. 96) with “Black Rain” — a reworked holdover from the “Badmotorfinger” sessions that was released on the band’s “Telephantasm” compilation and a Guitar Hero video-game soundtrack in 2010. The track earned a Grammy nomination; will that be enough to sway a voting bloc that at times seems to favor commercial success over cultural influence, despite it not being an explicit criterion?

OUR PREDICTION

At the risk of sounding callous, Cornell’s untimely death in 2017 has prompted a wave of reflection from fans and critics on Soundgarden’s legacy and place in the rock canon.

The Rock Hall has a long history of uneven treatment toward heavier bands, which could be a bit of a wild card for Soundgarden, but our gut says they’re in. It can’t hurt that Cornell’s Audioslave bandmate, Tom Morello, is a member of the nomination committee and has waged a crusade to bolster the hall’s hard-rocking ranks — efforts reflected in 2020 nominees like Judas Priest, Motorhead and MC5, a favorite of Thayil’s.

Having been eligible since 2011, and with Nirvana and Pearl Jam already enshrined, it feels like Soundgarden’s time. Come January, we should be one step closer to completing Mount Grungemore in Cleveland.

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November 24, 2019 8 CommentsFacebookTwitterPinterestRedditMore222

Danko Jones — the guitarist/vocalist of the Canadian hard rock trio DANKO JONES — recently spoke with Loud TV. The full conversation can be seen below. A few excerpts follow (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On the band’s current trajectory:

Danko: “Feedback [for] the last two albums has been pretty good, pretty positive. Everybody seems to be digging in. These albums that we’ve done with Rich Knox on drums, I think they’ve been our best albums. I think they’re just getting better and better. ‘Fire Music’ was out in 2015 [and] was our best album to date, and then I think ‘Wild Cat’ in 2017 bested it, and now ‘A Rock Supreme’ bests both. We started working with Garth Richardson on this album, and we had a great time. The last two albums were with Eric Ratz. We had a blast with Eric as well. We’ve been lucky that we’ve worked with some really cool producers.”

On the title of their latest album, which nods to John Coltrane‘s “A Love Supreme”:

Danko: “We just ripped off his album title, and we did that for ‘Fire Music’ too, but nobody knew that. It’s an Archie Shepp record, but you don’t have to know this stuff. We just do it. ‘A Love Supreme’ is more obvious than ‘Fire Music’ — it’s arguably top three most popular, most successful jazz albums that were ever released. It’s pretty top-shelf. It was just a joke. We were throwing out album titles to each other, and Rich came up with ‘A Rock Supreme’ just as a joke. We thought it was pretty sacrilegious to do that to ‘A Love Supreme’, so that made it cool for us, because it would piss off a lot of jazz purists.”

On his relationship with GUNS N’ ROSES bassist Duff McKagan:

Danko: “We toured with him for a lot of 2013 with different bands. We toured with his band LOADED in Australia, and we toured with his other band WALKING PAPERS in America, both in the same year. We spent a lot of time with Duff, and I put out a book last year called ‘I’ve Got Something To Say’, and Duff wrote the foreword, something he promised me he would do in 2013. It was really nice of him that he did it, even though when I asked him for his piece, that was, like, a week before GUNS N’ ROSES announced they were getting back together, so his world was really busy and he still found the time to write it for me. I thought that was really very cool of him. He’s a punk rocker, and I think a background in punk rock really grounds a person and makes them… There’s a lot of vetting that goes on in punk rock scenes to the point where there’s no place for ego. No one can stand it. It’s one of the tenets, I think, of punk rock. You definitely can tell when someone comes from punk rock and someone who doesn’t. [He’s] a really grounded guy.”

On the continued influence of Lemmy Kilmister:

Danko: “We spent a lot of time with MOTÖRHEAD and we played one-off shows with them numerous times. He was very nice to us. He was very kind to our band — all of them were, including the crew. Mikkey [Dee] and Phil [Campbell] and Lemmy and all the MOTÖRHEAD crew were very kind to us. We learned a lot from them, learned what to do, and also got to sing with the band over a dozen times over the years.”

On choosing cover songs:

Danko: “We have a problem in our band trying to decide what covers to do. It’s really hard for us to decide. We’ve been around for 23 years, but we only have a handful of covers that we’ve ever done. We just put out a single called ‘Fists Up High’. It’s the newest single off ‘A Rock Supreme’, and the b-side of that is a PEACHES cover. We can all agree on PEACHES. We’ve done MISFITS covers, so we can all agree on the MISFITS.”

On VOLBEAT:

Danko: “We [first] toured with VOLBEAT in 2013. They’re definitely unique in the sense that they’re from Denmark and they’re the band that became the number one band in the scene, but it makes sense. They’ve got the best elements and they’ve put it together in the best possible way, and their songs are very catchy and very heavy. Why wouldn’t a kid get into that? If they like the MISFITS and they like SOCIAL [DISTORTION] and they like Johnny Cash and they like METALLICA, it’s elements of all of that in a rock format. It makes total sense.”

On the current state of rock n’ roll:

Danko: “This ridiculous, viral pull-quote from Gene Simmons saying that rock is dead… This follows me in almost every interview I do. They ask me, ‘Oh, do you think rock is dead?’ It’s from what Gene Simmons said. It was uttered by a man who lives in an ivory tower. There’s now way Gene Simmons is connected to the rock scene down below, where all us cretins live. If he was connected to it, he’d know that there’s bands like VOLBEAT. There’s our band. I can name you 20 other new, exciting, original bands who have, like, two or three albums under their belts that are amazing… VOLBEAT are at the top of that heap, and look what they’re doing — they’re playing arenas. There is definitely a place for rock music today. The people who say rock is dead weren’t listening to it to begin with. I will agree that there’s no rock scene anymore. There’s a metal scene and a punk rock scene, but the rock scene, it’s not as connected. I think bands like us and VOLBEAT, we try to make connections with bands because we come from that place of punk rock and metal where we’re all connected by labels and by scenes. There’s just more of a connection.”

“A Rock Supreme” was released on April 26 via M-Theory Audio (U.S.), Rise Above (UK), Indica (Canada, AU, NZ) and AFM (rest of the world). The album was produced by Garth Richardson (RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS) and features cover artwork by Ulf Linden (GRAVEYARD, EUROPE). The band is currently in the midst of an extensive European with VOLBEAT and BARONESS.

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Joel Selvin November 29, 2019 Updated: November 29, 2019, 12:09 pm

The Fyre Festival earned its bad reputation honestly.

Thousands of Millennials stranded on a Bahamas island with pathetic provisions and no accommodations may have seemed like the height of disastrous music festivals, a landmark in ambition and overreach. As the subsequent documentaries about the 2017 festival made clear, the Fyre Festival was indeed a morass of bad planning, preposterous promotional schemes, utter incompetence and even criminal intent by the producers.

But it was hardly unprecedented.

In the pop music world, true originality is a rare commodity. When it comes to pop music festivals gone horribly wrong, it would be hard to top the original rock disaster: the free concert by the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway about 60 miles east of San Francisco, between Livermore and Tracy, that took place 50 years ago this Dec. 6, a golden anniversary unlikely to be widely celebrated.

The Stones have always been one of rock’s great originators, and when they did Altamont, they set standards for catastrophe in pop music that stand to this day. And although Altamont went down at the time as one of rock’s darkest days, the public has been largely spared the grimy, gory details and the true dimensions of how wrong everything went and how bad everything truly was. At least at the Fyre Festival, nobody died.

A toxic combination of greed and innocence, the Altamont concert was born of hippie ideology posed by the Grateful Dead, who originally planned to present the Stones as surprise guests on a Jefferson Airplane/Dead bill in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and the brutish ambitions of the Rolling Stones, who invaded America in November 1969 to plunder much needed cash for their depleted coffers. Altamont came to represent the dark side of the counterculture’s dream of peace and love, but the forces of ego and power that drove the event to its disastrous conclusion were decidedly old-fashioned.

Woodstock had taken place only four months before, and its intoxicating illusion was still in the air. The myth of three days of peace and music had already been established, but that never held up under scrutiny. The Woodstock crowd, after all, broke down the fences and turned the ticketed festival into a free concert. They recklessly blocked an Interstate highway. They burned down the concession stand to protest the high price of hot dogs. If Gov. Nelson Rockefeller had sent in the National Guard — and he had to be persuaded not to — it would have been an entirely different story. Yet the festival remains so celebrated in popular culture that the U.S. Postal Service in August released a commemorative stamp on the occasion of that golden anniversary. “Three days of peace and music,” the stamp says.

Myths die hard.

If Woodstock wasn’t exactly the Eden it was portrayed, Altamont was even more hell on Earth than commonly thought: Held on a hillside beside a near-abandoned motor raceway miles from civilization. There was no food or water and only 100 Port-a-Potties for a crowd of nearly 300,000. And four people died — five, if you count Jim “Mac” McDonald of Santa Cruz, who arrived in the emergency room from the festival with his vital signs flatlined, although doctors were able to revive him.

One of the victims was an 18-year-old African American named Meredith Hunter, who brought his blond, white girlfriend to the event and was stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. He joins a long, shameful list of famous black victims of violent white racism, even if his killer was acquitted of murder charges in a subsequent trial.

After weeks of the Stones promising to play a free concert at the end of the band’s triumphant U.S. tour somewhere near San Francisco, the exact site was only announced the Tuesday before the Saturday concert and switched to an entirely different location on Thursday afternoon, 36 hours before the show was supposed to start. The stage and sound system were built in the dark overnight by hippie wood butchers high on every imaginable drug they could find.

Everything that could go wrong did. The documentary film that formed the strongest impressions of the ill-fated Altamont concert for most of the past 50 years, “Gimme Shelter,” was produced under the supervision and ownership of the Rolling Stones and is hardly as candid and forthright as it pretends. The heartstring-tugging final scene where an ashen Mick Jagger is shown watching the footage of Hunter’s killing on a Moviola is perhaps the film’s most obvious attempt to paint the Stones as victims, but the most egregious misrepresentation comes from one of its most powerful scenes: Hunter’s girlfriend, Patti Bredehoft, is shown sobbing and being comforted by a Red Cross worker as they roll his dead body past on a gurney. The film cuts to a shot of a helicopter taking off, strongly suggesting that Hunter’s body is onboard.

Actually, Hunter’s body spent several hours in the raceway office while the coroner’s office waited for traffic to die down before sending out their team. The doctor in charge backstage had been told the helicopter could not be used for Hunter because it was reserved for the Rolling Stones.

“It’s a very powerful shot,” said cinematographer Stephen Lighthill, past president of the American Cinematographers Association, who spent his first day on a film crew at Altamont, “until you realize that it’s a lie.”

My interest in this topic dates back to the weekend 50 years ago, when I declined an invitation from some college pals to join them at the racetrack, and continued through writing a 2016 book, “Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day.” Former MTV journalist Tabitha Soren will plumb my further observations onstage this Tuesday, Dec. 3, for the Commonwealth Club at the Mill Valley Community Center.

It is a popular canard that Altamont was the end of the ’60s — duh, it was December 1969 — although it is hard to see Altamont as the end of anything.

Watching Woodstock promoter Michael Lang — who played a small but crucially disastrous role in Altamont — just this past summer frantically running around, desperately trying to fund and stage his 50th anniversary Woodstock festival, changing venues, lineups, cities, states even, up until the last minute, it was obvious he would have staged his concert on a hill outside Tracy if he could have.

But, unlike Woodstock, there won’t be an Altamont stamp anytime soon.

• By Michael Christopher rockmusicmenu@gmail.com
• Nov 28, 2019
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Record Store Day pretty much has the market cornered when it comes to raising awareness about independent record stores in a world of big box outlets and online shopping with its marquee event held each April.

Two years after it kicked off in 2008, organizers introduced a November add-on in an effort to shift the focus of department store madness on Black Friday to the mom and pop places who keep the music alive year-round.

Record Store Day Black Friday, now entering its 10th year, isn’t nearly as large as the main affair in the spring, but there’s still plenty of exclusive titles, RSD firsts and small run vinyl nuggets to pick up for that music lover in your life. Below are 10 titles Rock Music Menu will be searching for at local record shops once this year’s turkey coma wears off.

PAUL MCCARTNEY – ‘HOME TONIGHT’/’IN A HURRY’ [7-INCH]

Paul McCartney recently released digitally two never-before-heard tracks in “Home Tonight” and “In A Hurry.” Now the songs are seeing a very limited Record Store Day exclusive double A-side 7-inch picture disc single hit shelves. Both “Home Tonight” and “In A Hurry” were recorded during the Greg Kurstin sessions for Macca’s chart-topping album ‘Egypt Station.’ The limited-edition vinyl picture disc will feature new and exclusively created artwork based upon the parlor game exquisite corpse along with a lyric insert.

ARCADE FIRE – ‘NEIGHBORHOOD #1 (TUNNELS)’ B/W ‘MY BUDDY’ [7-INCH]

Frequently cited as one of the most important alternative songs of the 2000s, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” – the opening track on Arcade Fire debut album ‘Funeral’ – was an early introduction to the band’s sound and encapsulates the essence of the music and themes on the LP. The B-side, “My Buddy,” by The Alvino Rey Orchestra, pays tribute to bandleaders Will and Win Butler’s late grandfather, the jazz musician Alvino Rey, whose passing during the early part of the group’s career would greatly influence ‘Funeral.’

PEARL JAM – ‘MTV UNPLUGGED’

Three days after completing their first American tour, Pearl Jam headed to New York to strip back songs from debut album ‘Ten,’ well on its way to becoming one of 1992’s top rock albums. For the first time on vinyl – and in fact ever, officially – all seven songs featured in the ‘MTV Unplugged’ broadcast see a long overdue release, including “Even Flow,” “Alive,” “Black” and “State of Love and Trust.”

 JEFF BUCKLEY – ‘LIVE ON KCRW: MORNING BECOMES ECLECTIC’

One of the most magical live performances by Jeff Buckley debuts on vinyl as part of the continuing celebration of the 25th anniversary of his debut studio album ‘Grace.’ The late singer/songwriter’s captivating appearance on KCRW-FM’s long-running ‘Morning Becomes Eclectic’ was accompanied by the core band with which he recorded the LP, and features favorites from the album including “Mojo Pin,” “So Real” and “Lover, You Should Have Come Over.”

 CHEAP TRICK – ‘ARE YOU READY? [LIVE 12/31/79]’

A sonic flashback to the closing night of the 1970s when Cheap Trick, riding high on the year’s ‘Cheap Trick at Budokan’ live album, rang in the ‘80s with their road-tested revelry at the Los Angeles Forum. Included in the set are the hits “I Want You to Want Me,” “Surrender,” “Dream Police” and many more. The two-LP set is being released for the first time officially, featuring previously unreleased mixes from the original multi-track masters.

JIMI HENDRIX – ‘MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR EP’ [12-INCH PICTURE DISC]

While rehearsing the upcoming Fillmore East shows in NYC as Christmas 1969 drew close, Jimi Hendrix, bassist Billy Cox, and drummer Buddy Miles decided to mark the occasion with special medley of holiday favorites to celebrate both the holiday and the dawning of a new decade. This medley of “Little Drummer Boy,” “Silent Night” and “Auld Lang Syne,” backed by “Three Little Bears,” itself a playful ‘Electric Ladyland’ outtake from 1968, makes its debut on picture disc, featuring the album artwork on one side and a photo of Hendrix dressed as Santa Claus on the other.

‘ELVIS PRESLEY – AMERICAN SOUND SESSIONS 1969’

Fresh from the success of the ‘’68 Comeback Special,’ a revitalized Elvis Presley headed to American Sound Studios with producer Chips Moman and a crack group of local session musicians. Out of these gatherings came ‘From Elvis In Memphis,’ one of the most beloved LPs of his career, plus the seminal hits “Suspicious Minds” and “In the Ghetto.” This two-LP set is available for the first time on vinyl and features rare and unreleased outtakes from those legendary sessions.

PRETENDERS – ‘UK SINGLES 1979 – 1981’

This year marks 40 years since the Pretenders’ debut single, a cover of the Kinks classic “Stop Your Sobbing” was released, and to celebrate a collection of their first eight 7-inch singles from their first two albums, ‘Pretenders’ and ‘Pretenders II.’ This 7-inch vinyl boxed set is limited to just 3,500 copies.

PATSY CLINE – ‘SWEET DREAMS: THE COMPLETE DECCA STUDIO MASTERS (1960-1963)’

Released for the first time on vinyl, ‘Sweet Dreams: The Complete Decca Studio Masters (1960 – 1963)’ is an absolute must for any country music fan. This beautiful collection gathers all 51 tracks that Cline recorded with Owen Bradley after she left a restrictive deal at 4 Star Records and joined on with Decca in 1960. Right off the bat, the new sessions struck gold with the classic “I Fall to Pieces,” her first country No. 1. The duo doubled-down on their successes, with sessions that produced chart-toppers “She’s Got You,” “Crazy” and “Sweet Dreams (of You).” The three-LP set contains a yellow, purple and red vinyl.

‘A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS’ [3-INCH]

The Vince Guaraldi Trio’s beloved jazz album ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ is now being made available as a 3-inch vinyl. The release is part of a new collaboration featuring a variety of 3-inch vinyl releases based on classic animations that span several generations and are to be played on the RSD3 mini-turntable made by Crosley. This particular “Blind Box” release comes in an outer box that reproduces the original 12-inch album art and includes one of four possible songs; “Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal),” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Linus and Lucy” and “Skating.” Each track comes with its own unique pull-out poster.

“Vinyl of the Week” will return next week.

To contact music columnist Michael Christopher, send an email to rockmusicmenu@gmail.com. Also, check out his blog at www.thechroniclesofmc.com