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The Doors - Topic

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Member	Item		Review/Comment
The Doors - Topic 2nd Apr 2020		CD Album The Association - Birthday	Deluxe Mono Edition/First Time On CD This deluxe mono edition features the original mono mix of the album, which has been out of print since its April 1968 release. Birthday was originally released in April 1968 as W-1733 (Mono) & WS-1733 (Stereo)
The Doors - Topic 2nd Jan 2020		Vinyl Album The Byrds - Turn! Turn! Turn!	Review The Byrds’ second album, Turn! Turn! Turn!, in many ways exceeds the expectations of their debut, Mr. Tambourine Man. While the formula had been established with their 12-string, harmony-laden version of the Dylan tune, the band still had plenty of variations to work over. This time, the title track is a Pete Seeger adaptation of Biblical verse given the Byrds’ trademarked electricity, while the traditional folk song, “He Was A Friend Of Mine,” is updated by Roger McGuinn to be a tribute to the late President Kennedy. As with Dylan (represented here with covers of “Lay Down You Weary Tune,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’”), the Byrds manage to effortlessly make it pop music without sacrificing the song’s artistic merit. But it’s the group’s original compositions that lead the charge. McGuinn’s “It Won’t Be Wrong,” Gene Clark’s “The World Turns All Around Her” and “If You’re Gone” are among the band’s most enduring tracks. A cover of the Porter Wagoner hit “Satisfied Mind” points towards bassist Chris Hillman’s interest in country music that would eventually take the group into a new direction. 4 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
The Doors - Topic 1st Jan 2020		Vinyl Album The Beatles - Help!	Review (This review was originally published by Apple Music) -- https://music.apple.com/us/album/help/1441164524 If A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles For Sale sounded like a band chafing at the confines of their own success, Help! was more like a meditation: four people seeking solace from inside a storm they’d never seen gather. Lennon, in particular, was miserable: drinking a lot, numbed out, riding the tail of a crumbling marriage for which he had plenty to atone from a 17-room mansion adjacent to a golf course over which he’d never imagined living—a stretch he later called his “Fat Elvis” period. Where Beatles For Sale had captured the vitality of angry young men, the songs on Help!—Lennon’s “Help!” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” McCartney’s “Yesterday” and “I’ve Just Seen a Face”—felt naked to the point of abstraction, the heat of the feelings stripped away to reveal something pining, innocent, planted on the ground but strangely displaced: alienation without angst. Cannabis, which the band had been smoking with heroic regularity, probably didn’t hurt: You had the sense that they were singing not from themselves, but about themselves, even to themselves, pieces on a great existential chessboard observed from a place of melancholic remove. (McCartney said the drug made him feel like he was thinking for the first time; Ringo, recalling the filming of the movie that accompanied this album, said—in charming Ringo fashion—that the crew got used to the fact that the band didn’t get much done after lunch.) Even Ringo’s “Act Naturally”—a lighthearted, Kinks-y country song—seemed tinted by a new, more ruminative frame of mind: The guy in the song is an actor playing himself. And while you could still hear the sweaty club band lurking underneath (“Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” “Help!”), most of the album tilted toward classical austerity: “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” was the band’s first fully acoustic arrangement (and featured the eternally un-rock sound of flutes); “Yesterday”—a song that seemed so comforting and eternal that McCartney was reportedly haunted by the feeling that it had somehow, somewhere already been written—had a string quartet (a move suggested to a hesitant McCartney by producer George Martin). Having spent their youth in extroversion, the Beatles were turning inward. About a week after the album came out, the band played a show to 56,000 screaming people at Shea Stadium, a scenario and scale so unprecedented that Vox had designed special amplifiers for the event. A week or so after that, they took a few much-needed days off at a rented house in Beverly Hills (featuring a moat and a drawbridge), only to be discovered by four teenage female fans. When security guards turned the girls away, they went home, opened the Yellow Pages, and rented a helicopter. Help!—that sounds right. 4 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
The Doors - Topic 1st Jan 2020		Vinyl Album The Beatles - Beatles For Sale	Review (This review was originally published by Apple Music) -- https://music.apple.com/us/album/beatles-for-sale/1441165005 By the end of 1964, The Beatles were exhausted. In June, they took their first world tour, traveling from Denmark to the Netherlands, then to Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand, often playing two shows a day to make good on the trip. Between mid-August and late September, they played more than 30 shows in two dozen US cities, getting an introduction to pot from Bob Dylan in New York and, a couple of weeks later, drunkenly confessing their mutual love for each other while waiting out a hurricane in Key West—a night later recalled by Paul McCartney on 1982’s John Lennon remembrance “Here Today.” Their fame was inarguable; their pace, unsupportable. So while attributing any real cynicism to the title Beatles For Sale is probably a stretch, it’s not out of the ballpark—they were, on some level, a commodity, and finally feeling the squeeze of being trafficked like one. Here’s the first time you get to hear The Beatles really yell, not once (the snarling middle section of Lennon’s “No Reply”) but twice (McCartney’s “What You’re Doing”). Lennon’s songs in particular—“I’m a Loser,” “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” (“I’ve had a drink or two and I don’t care”), the bleakly jealous “No Reply”—showed a writer giving himself over to his least marketable moods. Unable to balance the demands of writing with touring and general fame, they fell back on covers: Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love,” “Mr. Moonlight.” It was rock and R&B that stood in sharper contrast to their originals than on previous albums, but which—along with the album’s country inflections—helped extend the band's dialogue with distinctly American music. And they managed to brighten up enough to work in “Eight Days a Week.” 2 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
The Doors - Topic 1st Jan 2020		Vinyl Album The Beatles - Beatles For Sale	Review (This review was originally published by Apple Music) -- https://music.apple.com/us/album/beatles-for-sale/1441165005 By the end of 1964, The Beatles were exhausted. In June, they took their first world tour, traveling from Denmark to the Netherlands, then to Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand, often playing two shows a day to make good on the trip. Between mid-August and late September, they played more than 30 shows in two dozen US cities, getting an introduction to pot from Bob Dylan in New York and, a couple of weeks later, drunkenly confessing their mutual love for each other while waiting out a hurricane in Key West—a night later recalled by Paul McCartney on 1982’s John Lennon remembrance “Here Today.” Their fame was inarguable; their pace, unsupportable. So while attributing any real cynicism to the title Beatles For Sale is probably a stretch, it’s not out of the ballpark—they were, on some level, a commodity, and finally feeling the squeeze of being trafficked like one. Here’s the first time you get to hear The Beatles really yell, not once (the snarling middle section of Lennon’s “No Reply”) but twice (McCartney’s “What You’re Doing”). Lennon’s songs in particular—“I’m a Loser,” “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” (“I’ve had a drink or two and I don’t care”), the bleakly jealous “No Reply”—showed a writer giving himself over to his least marketable moods. Unable to balance the demands of writing with touring and general fame, they fell back on covers: Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love,” “Mr. Moonlight.” It was rock and R&B that stood in sharper contrast to their originals than on previous albums, but which—along with the album’s country inflections—helped extend the band's dialogue with distinctly American music. And they managed to brighten up enough to work in “Eight Days a Week.” 5 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?