Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#961 in the Series) is The  DB’s,  Falling Off the Sky The most difficult thing about listening to this brilliant “must-hear” album is to realize it has been 30 years since their last record together with this, their original line-up. Since then they’ve had a bunch of incredibly listenable songs in their heads and hearts. We are the beneficiaries of their immense talent to produce what really sounds like songs you have heard before even after just one listen. Pop hooks abound, you wonder why radio isn’t listening, but eventually you don’t care, you are just lucky enough to know about it, and now you do, go get it! Inevitably you have to...

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#960) is Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Live Rust If I read it one more time I’m going to hurl.  Now what would that be? Well that would be that Live Rust was recorded on Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s tour supporting Rust Never Sleeps. No, No a million times no! Most of Live Rust was recorded at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on October 22, 1978.  Rust Never Sleeps was released,  June, July  1979. Live Rust was released on Nov., 1979.  How wrong is the statement that Live Rust was recorded to support Rust Never Sleeps? Well, some of Rust Never Sleeps was recorded during the Live Rust tour. Live Rust was...

  Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#959 in the Series) is Sebastian Cabot, actor; Bob Dylan, poet. A Dramatic Reading with Music.  ..Like one of our favorite comedy troupes once proclaimed…”And Now For Something Completely Different.” You’d be hard pressed to find something as different as this. What I like about this album is the fact that it’s of course a novelty album, a “what the heck, why not album” yet it has a redeeming quality that makes me actually like it on a non-novelty level. It is just what the title says it is. It’s the late actor Sebastian Cabot giving a dramatic reading to Bob Dylan’s lyrics. Mr Cabot is probably best known at least here...

  Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#958 in the Series) is Burt Ward, The Boy Wonder Sessions Produced by Frank Zappa “Batman” actor Burt Ward was 21 when he recorded the song “The Teenage Bill of Rights.” It’s a surprisingly stirring number, which decried the second-class treatment of American teenagers and was composed at the height of the nation’s battle over civil rights. “I don’t suggest we march all day and picket every night,” Ward proclaims with the utmost conviction. “I just propose the following: a Teenage Bill of Rights.” The music swells behind Ward as he launches into the first amendment. “Nothing we do so go unnoticed, not even the smallest deed. And no one should even question...

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#959 in the Series) is Merle Haggard, I Am What I Am. I was REAL late coming to the Merle Haggard appreciation society.  I’ve loved traditional country for many years.  But for some reason Merle slid though the cracks for me. That changed due to his classic song, “Sing Me Back Home.”  About five years ago I started noticing all these artist I really respected had covered it. The Grateful Dead, Flying Burrito Brothers, Heartfield, Gram Parsons and Keith Richards together, The Everly Brothers, etc etc. I had to look in on it.  Then I started checking out all these old albums and wow.  I sure missed quite a bit. Instead of featuring...

  Today’s Cool Album of the Day is Johnny Cash, American Recordings V: A Hundred Highways The year was 1994, and it was not the best of times for Johnny Cash.  His health, starting to fail from a series of illnesses and decades of hard living, was seemingly bringing “The Man in Black” much closer to the end than he was ready to admit.  His latest major record label, Mercury Records had dropped him after one last commitment record, The Mystery of life, that was released in 1990 and included updated versions of “Hey Porter”, “Angel and the “Badman”, and “The Greatest Cowboy”, that were good simply because they are very good songs, but showed none of the outlaw grit...

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#957 in the Series) is Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms. Brothers in Arms was one of the first albums that was completely digitally recorded. It was released in May of 1985. Right about this time I was itching to get my first CD player.  They had just started to get to a price level that ‘cattle’ like myself could afford one.  I knew the day was coming soon where I would have a player, so I grabbed a couple CDs that I could bring when I went player searching. I needed two discs that I liked. I needed two discs that had a sound quality so good, that when I heard them blasting...

  Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#956 in the Series) is Shawn Colvin, A Few Small Repairs  A Few Small Repairs is one of those albums that takes love gone wrong and turns what could be a litany of heartbreak and “woe-is-me”  into an autobiographical  purging, and the listener goes along for the ride with some soaring beautiful melodies punctuated with  hard-knock lessons.  Colvin didn’t come to the making of this album without a lot of hard work, learning guitar in her childhood in South Dakota and performing in The King and I as a teen, then like most of us had some twists and turns which led to this release, her fourth, in 1996. The album opens...

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#955 in the Series) is Shadowfax, Watercourse Way When you look at a listing of the best bands Chicagoland has produced it better have Shadowfax included, if it doesn’t find a new list. Are you familiar with Shadowfax? If not, let me go back a ways. The origins of this eventual Grammy-winning band begin in the early 70s in south-suburban Crete, Illinois. That’s where the band lived in a farmhouse popularly known as “The Triple B Ranch.” It was there that these five young men crafted a sound that really could not be pigeonholed. It was jazz, it was rock, it was spacey. It was acoustic, it was plugged in. It was good....

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#954 in the series) is Steve Earle and the Dukes, Terraplane. Steve Earle’s new album Terraplane is being billed as his blues album. We’ll talk about that a bit more in a minute. More importantly I think – it’s a Steve Earle and the Dukes album, and a damn fine one at that.  Steve Earle has had many different personas and approaches in his career, Country rock and roller, hard core troubadour, singer songwriter, bluegrass musician, political activist, you name it  – but mostly I think the best name to fit him – if he even needs one – is a folk singer.  And if you don’t think folk singers can play or sing the blues then you...