If you’re a fan of Fleetwood Mac, then you no doubt got more than a little bit giddy at the tail end of 2008 when the band - still holding strong with the fab foursome of Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie - announced that they’d be touring in 2009. Word on the street is that things have been going swimmingly thus far, and the tour will continue to roll on into June; you can check out the current dates rather easily, as they’re right on the homepage of FleetwoodMac.com.

In the meantime, however, if you’re on the fence about whether to go see them or not, take a gander at this clip of Lindsey Buckingham - recorded during a solo performance at Bass Performance Hall, which is available as a CD/DVD combo - as he takes “Big Love” and either makes you wish you could play guitar or makes you never want to pick one up again because you’ll never, ever be able to play it as well as he can.

At age 66, Macca’s more prolific than ever, releasing new records on a regular basis, coming clean with his guise of the Fireman and still touring consistently. So it’s not enough that he should make the compulsory Grammy showing; he can also appear at a more intimate venue that’s generally reserved for up-and-comers. Consequently, this four song set, recorded live in 2007 at the Amoeba record store in L.A., reminds us he’s still a mere mortal, capable of rocking a small crowd with offerings both old and new. Vibrant versions of “That Was Me” and “Only Mama Knows” from his then-current album, Memory Almost Full, cast aside doubts about Paul’s present ability to deliver on a memorable melody. “I Saw Her Standing There” provides the inevitable nod to nostalgia with a rollicking rendition would have us believe that indeed, 45 years have passed in the blink of an eye. The sound quality, which veers towards bootleg variety, makes for a minor complaint, but the choice to include “C Moon,” one of McCartney’s lamer attempts, ought to cause greater ire. On the other hand, the fact that Ringo was in the house and wasn’t asked to join in seems the biggest bummer of all. (Hear Music)

Paul McCartney website

This is going to make a small group of people very happy. Taken from the last of the original Isle of Wight Festivals before its resurrection 22 years later – the crowd that attended was estimated to be over 600,000 – the 1970 concert was videotaped for posterity, and now, nearly three decades later, comes an audio recording of the set from Moody Blues, who were as big as any band in England at the time. It’s a fascinating listen, both from a sonic perspective and a historical one. “Minstrel’s Song” explains the origins of half of the Stone Roses’ debut album, and it’s fun to hear a band known for its pristine studio recordings let rip on songs like “Tuesday Afternoon” (where singer Justin Hayward forgets the words) and “Question.” In retrospect, the Moodys weren’t much different from their harder-rocking peers when it came to playing live. As for the overall sound quality, well, it’s 1970 and it’s live, which means it’s really, really tinny. It’s a sweet dose of nostalgia, but for completists only. (Eagle)

Click to buy The Moody Blues: Live at the Isle of Wight Festival on Amazon

The Barenaked Ladies thought they were being funny when, on their 1992 debut, Gordon, they sang these lines: “Maybe it’s a lack of inspiration that makes me stoop, or maybe it’s a lack of remuneration – I can’t recoup – but if you want it, folks, you got it: it’s all right here in my box set.” While the song, “Box Set,” might keep BNL from releasing a multi-disc career-spanning collection (mostly because they would never, ever hear the end of it), plenty of other artists have dipped into the vaults and put together compilations which mix their best-known material with heretofore-unheard tracks. In some cases, however, artists dispense of previously-released material altogether, cull together all the rarities they can find, and make it an affair strictly for the fans. All told, there are so many such releases in existence that we here at Bullz-Eye didn’t even try to do a formal “Best Ever Box Sets” list. Instead, the writers put together lists of their personal favorites, and we separated out the various-artists collections into their own separate list, just to make it a little less confusing. The musical genres are decidedly across the board, but with the holidays coming up, if you’ve got a friend or family member who’s a full-fledged music geek, we might just have a few ideas for you to consider as gifts.

Here’s an example…

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Live/1975-1985 (Columbia) “Ladies and gentlemen…Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,” the calm voice of a faceless PA announcer breathes, as the opening piano notes of “Thunder Road” begin the incredible retrospective journey that is Live/1975-85. From intimate clubs like The Roxy in 1975, where Springsteen plays “Thunder Road” solo on a piano, to Meadowlands Arena in 1981 for a full-on band assault of “Cadillac Ranch” and “Candy’s Room” to the mega Born In The U.S.A. tour in 1985 and nearly every hit finding the LA Coliseum stage that year, Jon Landau mastered a beauty here. The Boss tells stories (“Growin’ Up”), opens his diary (“Because the Night”), and simply rocks out with the force of 100 men (“Born to Run”), all to wild applause of fans from coast to coast over a decade of non-stop touring. It’s a box set like no other: all live, all real, and with all albums (up to the release date) well represented. Covers of Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” are impeccably-done, if unexpected, nuggets that sound as fresh as any original. This was the perfect Christmas gift for a pimply-faced kid in working class America back in 1986 who would have otherwise had to work two weeks for enough money to buy a 3-album set, and it remains indispensable in 2007. – Red Rocker

…and here’s the rest of the piece.

Did we miss any of your favorites?

Road Warriors 36

While they are no doubt excited about opening for Bon Jovi next week, My Chemical Romance is playing an intimate show the night before at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. Tickets are $100 each for the small venue show, but all proceeds are going to charity according to the band’s website.

After pulling the plug on some shows with Jesus and Mary Chain, Soulsavers have just announced a slate of headlining US dates beginning in late November. The band’s It’s Not How Far You Fall, It’s The Way You Land album was just released this past Tuesday. Tour dates are:

11/27 New York, NY - Gramercy Theater
11/28 Philadelphia, PA - North Star Bar
11/29 Washington, DC - Black Cat
12/1 San Francisco, CA - The Independent
12/2 Los Angeles, CA - Troubadour

Florida rockers Yellowcard released their third album, Paper Walls, in July and continue to tour in support of it. They are currently out on the road with Blue October. Here are the remaining shows on the tour Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, that’s the headline you never saw for my chat with former Raspberries frontman Eric Carmen…and for good reason, as it’s quite awful.

There was a brief period during the 1970s when the funniest rock-related one-liner involved a teenager asking, “Hey, did you hear that Paul McCartney used to be in a band before Wings?” It’s a joke that isn’t nearly as funny today, what with Wings having been relegated to little more than footnote status in McCartney’s career timeline, but if you lived and died by the FM dial during the ’70s, you can still see the humor in it. In turn, you might also have been really amused in the late ’80s, when kids were thrilling to Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes” and “Make Me Lose Control” without having any inkling that, a decade and a half earlier, he had been fronting one of the definitive power pop bands of all time.

Carmen and his fellow ‘Berries — Wally Bryson, Jim Bonfanti and Dave Smalley — were staples of the Billboard singles chart from 1972 to 1974, but creative struggles led to line-up changes and the band’s eventual dissolution. The 21st century, however, has found the guys getting back together and doing some live dates, one of which – a performance at L.A.’s House of Blues on Oct. 21, 2005 – has recently been released on Rykodisc as Live on the Sunset Strip. After a few scheduling conflicts and one missed opportunity (which was totally this writer’s fault), Bullz-Eye had a chance to speak with Carmen recently, and we quizzed him about the legacy of The Raspberries, his solo career and its notable difference to the sound he’d helped forge with the band, and how he can’t help but empathize with Kelly Clarkson these days.

Check out the interview here.

If you’re an aficionado of the outlaws of country, you’re probably already psyched about the two Johnny Cash sets scheduled to come out between now and the 4th of July…but here’s another release to get you going: Atlantic Records is releasing a 3-CD box set of Willie Nelson’s work for the label.

First, there’s Shotgun Willie, which was recorded in Atlantic’s Broadway studio, in New York City and features Nelson’s legendary recording of “Whiskey River,” as well as two Bob Wills songs, “Stay All Night (Stay A Little Bit Longer)” and “Bubbles in My Beer.”

The follow-up, Phases and Stages, was knocked out in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, produced by Jerry Wexler, and it’s a classic Nelson concept album about the end of a marriage…half from the man’s point of view, half from the woman’s.

The third disc is a live album taken from performances recorded at the Texas Opry House; journalist Chet Flippo attended the shows in question, and he declares that “they remain probably the highlights of any Willie concert I have ever seen. The audience was raw and eager for whatever Willie could throw at them, and he did just that. He was at the absolute height of his powers and clearly savored his newfound sense of freedom, and he threw down song after song with defiance and total confidence.”

Man oh man, I can’t wait to hear this stuff…

The bad boys from Boston are back in vintage fashion with a new concert CD and DVD (on the Sony dual disc format) called Rockin’ the Joint: Live at the Hard Rock Hotel. Performed in 2002, this show finds Aerosmith returning to their sweaty roots by blowing the dust off several old relics and laying them down in a small club setting like it was 1972 again. Breaking from their rehearsal schedule as the road vets prepare for a year-long world tour, original bass player Tom Hamilton afforded Bullz-Eye’s Red Rocker a few minutes recently to tout the strengths of Rockin’ the Joint, share his take on illegal downloads, and explain why his son might already be a better musician than he is.
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“Bullz-Eye: A record like this (Rockin’ the Joint) comes out and it just makes me want to go home and dig out Get Your Wings and Toys in the Attic. I had a cassette copy of Live Bootleg back in, what, ’78, ’79 when that thing came out…?

Tom Hamilton: (chuckling)

BE: I flat wore that thing out! So are you allowed to have a favorite Aerosmith album?

TH: Yeah, sure. Picking one is really hard. But I’ll say Rocks. Toys or Rocks, it’s pretty hard to nail down which was a favorite.

BE: I saw a quote from your website recently. It was Little Richard saying, “I looooove Aerosmith! They’re one of my favorite rock and roll bands. They’re full of filth and full of soul.” Why are you guys so strong and so vital 35 years later?

TH: I just think we were so drastically imprinted during the ‘60s. You know, when you’re a kid and you go see a really powerful rock band, it goes deep. At least for me it did. So the next thing is, “Man, I’d really like to do that. I wanna be on stage!” And you just always keep that point of view. We’ve managed to keep that point of view, wanting to spit out the kind of stuff that really inspired us when we were just learning how to play, and do it in a way that we really love.

BE: Looks like you guys are going to be touring now through the end of the year. What’s next for you guys? What does 2006 and 2007 hold for Aerosmith?

TH: Well, the rest of this year and next year we’re gonna be touring pretty much straight through, but we’re gonna try and get an album out.

BE: Of new material?

TH: Yeah.”

Read the rest of Red’s interview with Tom Hamilton here.

“If your exposure to the Dave Matthews Band consists of the 40,000 times your girlfriend forces you to listen to “Satellite,” you probably can’t stand them. That’s fine. But if you’ve gone to one DMB show, you know that Dave is anything but some lone crooner softly singing sweet nothings.

Dave’s a man possessed on stage. Every photograph of Dave in front of a microphone shows him either coiled like a snake at the ready, or the moment immediately after, where he’s literally attacking it, leaning into the crowd like a thrill seeker on a beach in a hurricane leaning into the wind, almost held upright by the energy of the crowd which leans in equal dependence forward onto him. He is an aggressive front man, shouting out his music as if to shout harder would kill him.

It’s in that spirit that Deep Cuts DMB features a lot of live recordings. There are some studio cuts…most notably from 2002’s Busted Stuff, regularly cited as DMB’s best studio album. But to appreciate DMB, you must listen to them live, on stage, creating an incredible place that is, to paraphrase Dave, “better than this” to find “the best of what’s around.”

Founded in 1991 in Charlottesville, VA, DMB takes its spiritual lead from Dave, born in South Africa, a musical influence evident throughout the music. The best musician in the band, by far, is drummer Carter Beauford, who is regularly named as one of the greatest drummers who have ever lived. A musician friend of mine, asked to compare Carter to guys like John Bonham, Keith Moon or Stewart Copeland, once said that Carter is capable of executing riffs that none of those guys ever even attempted. At one show, I watched in amazement as he blasted out a solo more complicated than I could imagine, all the while smiling like this was the most fun he’d ever had…oh, and he was also chewing on bubble gum, and blowing bubbles. With violinist Boyd Tinsley, bassist Stefan Lessard, keyboardist Peter Griesar, and saxman Leroi Moore, DMB creates a unique sound as identifiable as any rock band of our time.

So here are my DMB Deep Cuts. Be prepared: if you put all this on one CD (it’ll probably require two), you may be listening to it for months.
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“Don’t Drink the Water” – Concert at Central Park
DMB often starts shows with this rocker, and you can hear the awe in Dave’s voice at seeing Central Park filled with humanity as far as the eye can see. His vocals are a tour de force.

“#41″ / “Say Goodbye” – Crash
Two studio cuts to give you a breather after listening to “Don’t Drink the Water.” Rarely performed together on stage, but they work together incredibly well on Crash.

“You Never Know” – Busted Stuff
Not often played live. If you’re feeling down, listen to this cut. You’ll feel better. Dave has a way of making you feel better.”

Take a look at the rest of Tim Russo’s DMB Deep Cuts along with his Dave Matthews Band profile.