Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#1054 in the Series and #38) is The New Barbarians, Buried Alive: Live in Maryland The band The New Barbarians was formed in 1979 as a means to promote Ron Wood’s most recent album Gimme Some Neck. The album was a minor success peaking at number 45 on the billboard charts and was the first to feature Wood’s own artwork on the album cover including a self-portrait. The band and the subsequent eighteen gig U.S. tour may have gone largely unnoticed were it not for the exceptional musicians that accompanied Wood on the tour. The stellar line-up included Ron Wood and Keith Richards on guitar, Stanley Clarke on bass, former Faces keyboardist Ian...

  Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#1053 in the Series) is Roxy Music, Manifesto The conventional wisdom surrounding Roxy Music seems to suggest that there are two distinct “periods” of the band’s initial existence.  The first phase, from the band’s inception through 1976’s Siren, was characterized by dual predilections for high-brow artiness and otherworldly glamour; and the second phase, from 1979’s Manifesto through 1982’s Avalon, signaled the band’s transition into a brooding, stylish, and literate pop hit machine, helmed by Bryan Ferry’s inimitable voice and buoyed up by a small army of studio technicians. However, while there are undeniably two sonic phases to Roxy’s chronology, Manifesto, often hailed as the first album of Roxy’s later period, really finds...

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#1051 in the Series) is Rave On Buddy Holly. Back in the early 90s I worked as a District Manager for a music distributor.  One of our accounts was Wal-Mart.  We would stock them with their music and make sure they were fixture properly etc.  (BTW, back then, they refused to stock AC/DC because their albums had parental warning stickers on them. Later there was a new AC/DC release and the ONLY place you can get it was Wal-Mart!) At one point, we were doing some major renovations that had to be done only at night after the stores closed.  I was the head of one of these projects.  I had to use...

  Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#1049 in the Series) is Styx, Styx II All I have to do is look at that Styx II album cover and I immediately feel a smile forming on my face as all these wonderful childhood memories return. I was raised in the far Southside neighborhood of Chicago called Roseland.  A place that while part of a huge metropolis, still felt like small town America to us. It was a small town that was made up of many immigrant families.  There was a Polish area, a Mexican area, a Lithuanian area (that gave us director Robert Zemeckis. Back to the Future, Forest Gump) an area called “Bum Town” (that gave us Elliot...

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#1048 in the Series) is Jeff Beck, Rock N’ Roll Party (Honoring Les Paul) Every Monday night for 12 years up until his death at age 94, Les Paul would hold court with his Les Paul Trio with a show at The Iridium Jazz Club in New York City.  The shows more often than not included guest musicians that happened to be in town at the time.  The club after his death, in keeping with this tradition, has renamed the room he would play, The Les Paul Room, and invites special musical guests to play with The Les Paul Trio each Monday to keep this time honored tradition alive.  To give you an...

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#1045 in the Series) is Paul Weller, Wild Wood Operating out of an office located deep in the recesses of Buckingham Palace is a covert organization of artistically minded individuals that govern and regulate the art, artists, and entertainment content that is released to the United States. This organization known as E.A.T.M.E (Englanders Against The Music Exportation) has been in existence since the 1960’s, and is considered to be the sole ruling body in determining which artists are released to the unsuspecting U.S. public. Their mission is to keep the good stuff within the realm and export the rest. The Beatles were a “canary in a coal mine” test project where they sent...

  Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#1043 in the Series) is Billy Joel, 52nd Street While 52nd Street is not Billy Joel’s most popular album, that honor goes to The Stranger with the mega-hits “Just the Way You Are”, “Scenes in an Italian Restaurant”, “Only the Good Die Young”, and the rest, or his most socially aware album, that would certainly be The Nylon Curtain with the brutally honest social commentary of “Allentown”, and “Goodbye Saigon”, and it was by far not the worst, clearly An Innocent Man gets that dubious honor, but it is in some circles, including mine, simply the best. In the interests of full disclosure, my view of this album may be somewhat influenced...

Today’s ‘Cool Album of the Day’ (#1040 in the Series) is Rockpile Live at  Montreux 1980 – In 1980, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Billy Bremner and Terry Williams, collectively known as Rockpile, released their only official album, Seconds of Pleasure.  On August 23rd, 2011, they released their second.  It’s called Live at Montreux 1980. Sure we know there were about four or five more albums that could have been called Rockpile, except Dave Edmunds was contracted to one label and Nick Lowe to another, so we never had a second Rockpile album. This one is a live album and features 16 tracks. You’ll find some goodies from all three “franchises, “there are some Rockpile tunes, some songs that were...

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#1038 in the series) is the self-titled debut from Novo Combo. This is yet another album of the day that you just can’t find any longer. Why more cut-outs aren’t on at least iTunes, I’ll never understand. I can see not printing any issues of some of these great nuggets, but at least toss the master up on a download site and let us buy away! “Novo Combo” was released in 1981. It was a combination power pop/new wave production. Besides some wonderful music, Novo Combo was mostly known for their drummer, former Santana member, Michael Shrieve. (Think Woodstock and Soul Survivor!) Pete Hewlett handled guitars and some vocals. He went on to do some...

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#1035 in the Series) is The Rave Ups, “Town and Country” When the Rave-Ups played Cabaret Metro (Chicago) in 1990, they introduced themselves by saying we’re The Rave Ups from Pittsburgh, PA. They then launched into their biggest hit “Positively Lost Me” which in the middle of they did a brief but melodic cover of The Stones “The Last Time” that not only worked but was a great example of their talents. Unfortunately, there were about the same number of people in the crowd that night as there was when they played that same song in a scene from the movie Pretty In Pink. These guys were an underground hit that came at...