Bloggerhythms

By 1977, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash had not released a studio album as a threesome since their eponymous debut in 1969 or together with Neil Young since Deja Vu in 1970. When they finally issued CSN during the Jimmy Carter Administration it became a major hit even though it's never been held in as high esteem as their two earlier LPs. However, it was good enough to prove there was still a demand for the kind of music they made almost a decade earlier. CSN , with the smiling trio on the cover masking their ever present behind the scenes turmoil, was the last album for seventeen years that would show them to be a functioning, self-contained unit. So, it's amazing that with just three LPs from their golden era (nothing they ever did together after this album would come close to matching the artistic achievements or popularity of these three) that this band became legendary as one of the greatest in rock history. Why? Because the trio is so supremely tal...

Drummer Thomas Hamlin & Larry Kirwan One of America’s truly influential Celtic-rock bands, Black 47, has called it quits after a long and distinguished career. In September 2013 the band released this statement. "In early November 2014, exactly 25 years after our first gig, Black 47 will disband. There are no fights, differences over musical policy, or general skullduggery, we remain as good friends as when we first played together. We just have a simple wish to finish up at the top our game after 25 years of relentless touring and, as always, on our own terms." As a result they played their last Philadelphia gig at World Café Live last Thursday evening. As the New Yorkers neared the finish line last week they remained a loyal and stable group. The sextet could boast that they still had four original members and a fifth one who had been with them for almost a decade and a half. As always, leader and group spokesman, Larry Kirwan, regaled us with stories that...

If you haven't heard of Trigger Hippy yet you need to take this opportunity to make themselves known to you now. This (almost) supergroup brings together five people who already have good reputations in the music industry even if they are unknown to you. Joan Osborne ("One of Us") and Jackie Greene are excellent singers and the main composers of this fine new band. You should already be familiar with Osborne and hopefully, Greene too. He's a singer-songwriter who plays guitar and keyboards and has made several very good solo albums over the course of the last decade with influences ranging from Bob Dylan to John Mellenkamp, to The Beatles (You've got to hear his hard-charging, live cover of "Taxman.") Rounding out the band are bassist Nick Grovnik, a well known session musician in Nashville, Tom Bukovic, a guitarist who also makes his living there, and Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman. Trigger Hippy is a boisterous, rock outfit with traces of ...

You would think a long time music junkie like me would have heard everything of importance by now but for some reason the work of the late Gram Parsons never became one of my musical experiences. I haven't been avoiding him, it's just that except for an occasional song or two on the radio, his music never crossed my path. However, last week at Princeton Record Exchange I hit the country-rock trifecta. The prices at the Exchange for Parsons' CDs were so good that it would have been criminal to pass them up. For $4.99 I grabbed the 1997 reissue of The Byrds' Sweetheart Of The Rodeo , originally released in 1968. It was Parsons one and only record with Roger McGuinn's famous band. For just a buck more I bought both of Parson's solo albums, GP (1973) and Grevious Angel (1974) together on one disc. That's a mere $10.98 for three classics! Now that I've heard all three albums here is the lowdown. Every musician, critic, and scholar who has prais...