Archive for category: Medium Rare

R.E.M. "Murmur" quietly emerged April 12, 1983 and has never left my essential music list, along with its follow-up "Reckoning" forty years ago. Michael Stipe & Peter Buck are here In the Studio for "Reckoning" 40th anniversary. Songs include "Radio Free Europe","South Central Rain","Can't Get There from Here","Driver 8",  and an ultra-rare live acoustic performance of "Maps and Legends" from McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica.

Highly significant in their long, colorful history," Lynyrd Skynyrd 1991" was the band's sixth studio album but, more importantly, the first new studio album since 1977's fateful "Street Survivors"; their first since the tragic plane crash that year claimed the lives of three band members; their first to anoint original Lynyrd Skynyrd lead singer Ronnie Van Zant's youngest brother, Johnny, as their permanent singer; the return of original guitarist Ed King, And sadly, "Lynyrd Skynyrd 1991" would be the first album without original guitarist Allen Collins.

David Crosby of The Byrds has died at 81. The members of the original Byrds - singer/songwriter/electric 12-string guitar player Roger (Jim) McGuinn, singer/songwriter David Crosby, the talented but tortured late singer/songwriter Gene Clark, bass player Chris Hillman, & the late drummer Michael Clarke - were always unabashed in their acknowledgment of their influences, equal parts American folk singers, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. Yet instead of being hopelessly derivative, somehow they ended up being one of the greatest imprints on both the form and substance of rock and country music to this day.  McGuinn, Crosby, and Hillman join me in this ultra-rare classic rock interview covering the first four Byrds albums Mr Tambourine Man,  Turn Turn Turn, Fifth Dimension , and Younger Than Yesterday in February 1967. - Redbeard