Legacy Management, Record Store Day Edition

Olivia Tremor Control, Johnny Bragg and other highlights from Black Friday

The topic was Record Store Day, the twice-yearly secular holiday devoted to music fandom and the pursuit of new recorded thrills. A friend who’d been shopping and was disappointed (the most recent RSD was Black Friday, his score was the above intimate club recording of Al Jarreau) wondered if this year’s crop of discoveries and special packages said anything profound about the state of archival music?

My response: Flat no.

There are always some rare titles and unusual discoveries on offer (a few are discussed below). But the event – which involves independent retailers worldwide, who order from a list of limited-run titles – aims to serve all flavors of music obsessives, even the ones who only care about U2. As a result, the list has grown vast: Some collectors want lavish packages and special colored vinyl editions; some want music that’s been out of print for decades; some want the elusive high-snob-appeal rarities; some want the hits.

The diversity makes it work. While I might not drop $40 on Live In Dallas 1991, from the (insert adjective here: glorious? lamentable?) Sammy Hagar era of Van Halen, I recognize there’s a market for it. Ditto with U2, whose archive-scraping bonbon this year, How To Re-Assemble an Atomic Bomb, offers what the band calls a “shadow album” of ten additional tracks recorded during sessions for the band’s 11^th studio set, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.

(Here's how ridiculous the packaging of these things has gotten: The actual RSD release is a red and black vinyl edition of How to Re-Assemble. But right alongside it is a remastered edition of the 2004 How to Dismantle, a digital version with both albums, an 8-LP deluxe vinyl box, a 5 CD deluxe version and even a limited-run Red & Black Cassette. A tip of the banker’s green eyeshade to U2 for tying the release of these high-dollar editions into the RSD marketing.)

As in years past, there was lots of significant – and, in a few cases, newsmaking – music in the Record Store Day stacks. A brief sampling:

The Olivia Tremor Control: “Garden of Light” and “The Same Place” on The Elephant 6 Recording Co. The long-awaited soundtrack to the 2023 documentary on the post-psychedelic indie collective is an RSD title. It features sparkling contributions from all the label’s mainstays (Neutral Milk Hotel, the Apples In Stereo, the Olivia Tremor Control) and offers a mixture of album cuts and rarities. In addition to astonishingly timeless and lushly orchestrated gems from the two albums by OTC are two songs the band was working on when guitarist (and label co-founder) Bill Doss died after an aneurysm in 2012. The label announced that these tracks, which gently extend the band’s opaque tonal signature, will be part of an entire album of unrelease OTC material that has involved many of the musicians in the band’s orbit. The news of this still-TBA release is bittersweet, however: On Friday, another of the band’s wizards, the multi-instrumentalist Will Cullen Hart, passed away. His credit on the transfixing new track “Garden of Light” reads like this: “delay puddles/percussion/whispers/vocals.”

Joni Mitchell: Hejira Demos. Sometimes RSD compilations are the best way to appreciate an artist at a specific crucial evolutionary moment. The material on this LP has been available since earlier this year (and discussed in this Echo Locator post) as a 4-disc set devoted to Mitchell’s mid-‘70s work. That set was crammed with sketches and experiments that preceded several studio albums, as well some of the most incandescent live performances of Mitchell’s career. This 9-track LP, limited to 5000 copies, just gathers the demos Mitchell recorded solo, on the path that eventually led to Hejira. A terrific, essential perspective on Mitchell’s process, this pairs well with Traveling, Ann Powers’ absorbing meditation on the singer/songwriter’s impact on popular music.

The Blasters: Over There: The Complete Concert. Here we encounter the feral barnstorming Blasters as they were meant to be heard: Live and rowdy. Captured on the band’s first international tour, in May of 1982, it is arguably the most important document in the band’s discography – the set that shows how irreverent, assured and intense this band could be. A few of the tracks from this London show were released in ’82 as an EP after the studio debut, American Music, began attracting attention. Listening to the full delirium, you wonder why Slash Records held anything back: Surveying R&B classics (“This Heart of Mine”) and zydeco-influenced romps (“Marie Marie”) and shoop-shooping swing (“Go Go Go”), on this magic night the Blasters made an undeniable case for American music as a wild, endlessly recombining, defiantly electric sound.

Johnny Bragg: Let Me Dream On. The story of Johnny Bragg, documented on this Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum title, underscores the idea that music can be an engine of personal transformation. While serving time on a rape charge at Tennessee State Penitentiary, Bragg assembled a singing group, the Prisionaires, and cowrote several songs, including “Just Walkin’ in the Rain.” As part of Governor Frank Clement’s prison-reform program, the group was invited to the recently opened Sun Studios in Memphis to record. The doleful “Just Walkin’ in the Rain,” captured there in rhapsodic detail, become a minor hit and then a bigger one when it was covered by Johnny Ray.

Of “Just Walkin’,” Presley biographer Peter Guralnick wrote: "It was the song that put Sun Records on the map, and very likely the item that captured the attention of Elvis Presley as he read about the studio.”

As this compilation makes clear, Bragg and the Prisonaires had multiple moves: There are tunes that conform to the doo-wop playbook, and deeply reverent gospel numbers in the style of the great quintets (The Five Blind Boys of Alabama, et. al.) and romantic R&B ballads that include multiple mentions of tears falling. The ensemble singing is polished and assured, but when Bragg enters, with his earnest delivery and carefully measured vibrato, the music elevates to unexpectedly sublime heights.