Phil Spector Presents the Philles Album Collection (Sony Legacy): Those who know Phil Spector-produced artists by their singles and hope to find pirate treasure in their album tracks will be disappointed by this seven-disc box set. There are some great finds here, most notably the electrifying version of Jackie DeShannon‘s “I Shook the World” by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, but since the Crystals, the Ronettes and others in the Spector stable were singles artists, the albums were thin. Still, for me they’re thin in interesting ways. It’s hard to imagine I’ll ever listen again to Bob B. Soxx’s Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, with Spectorized versions of “This Land is Your Land,” “The White Cliffs of Dover” and the title track, but the Crystals’ Twist Uptown is consistently entertaining, and the filler’s performed better than such average ideas merit. The disc I’ve listened to the most is Phil’s Flipsides, a collection of instrumental tracks that feature the Wrecking Crew at their go-go finest.

The Smiths Complete by the Smiths (Rhino): The Smiths are one of those bands that eluded me in their time. When their debut album came out in 1984, I liked harder music. After I heard “How Soon is Now,” I was frustrated and gave up when I couldn’t find anything else by them that sounded like that. Most subsequent efforts ended with the realization that I was probably too late to the dance with them, and that I was past the age when Morrissey’s powermope would speak to me. When the complete Smiths was released, I committed myself to making it through the studio albums but skipped the live Rank (no reason) and two greatest hits collections (redundant) and was glad I did. At first, I found Morrissey impossibly fey, but the barbs and kicks in his songs slowly emerged once I grew accustomed to his anxious loneliness as a baseline state of being. I still like the muscle in the BBC recordings on Hatful of Hollow, and even at the point when Johnny Marr and Morrissey were on the outs, the songs don’t show the stress. It’s hard to know who something like The Smiths Complete is for – Smith fans have it, and it’s hard recommend a band’s library as a starting point  - but they affected the music that followed them to such a degree that ’90s Britpop makes a lot more sense to me now.

Young Man with the Big Beat by Elvis Presley (Sony Legacy): This attractive box set packaged to resemble a multi-album vinyl set captures Elvis in 1956 when almost everything worked for him. That year, he cut “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Love Me,” “Trying to Get to You,” ” Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,”  ”Love Me Tender” and more, and you can hear the confidence in the tracks. He sings with the assurance that it’s all going to work because it has so far. The set includes a live show from Shreveport as well as songs from his one setback that year, a stint in Las Vegas that didn’t speak to the swells at the casinos. You don’t notice any timidity in his performance of “Long Tall Sally” in Vegas until you hear what he comes up with when the Shreveport audience egging him on. Box sets are the coffee table books of the music world, but The Young Man with the Big Beat is an attractive document of a rare moment in anyone’s life when everything was coming up Elvis.

Oil and Water by Steve Duin and Shannon Wheeler: This graphic novel tells the story of a group from Portland visiting Louisiana to “bear witness” to the BP oil disaster, and the strength of the story is Duin’s attention to important ironies. One of the Portlandites, for instance, speaks of learning “essential lessons in history and humility” while filling five panels with speechifying before artist Shannon Wheeler draws his words fading away. The short chapters read well and get the disaster down to human scale – how did it and the movement of people as a result of it affect those living here? As a whole, though, it’s not as effective because Duin’s characters aren’t that distinctive and Wheeler’s art doesn’t help. They seem stuck between “bearing witness” themselves and telling a story, leaving Oil and Water somewhere in between.

Dummy by RJ Wheaton: This book on Portishead’s debut album is one of the longer entries in Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series, and it’s fascinating more because it feels like there are few of Wheaton’s musical interests that don’t find expression on Dummy than because the book itself is compelling. For me, the most engaging parts of the book are those that deal with the way hip-hop and DJ culture manifested themselves in England. Portishead’s Geoff Barrow was such a vinyl obsessive that the band would record parts, press them on vinyl, scuff and mar the vinyl, then sample that worn vinyl record to capture the texture and warmth of a needle in a groove. The book’s sprawl wore me out, and I suspect it still would have had I cared more about Portishead, but fans may well have a higher tolerance for exploring the worlds the album inhabits than I do.

The Stooges: Head On – A Journey Through the Michigan Underground by Brett Callwood: As a Stooges fan, I hoped for good things from Head On, but the book reads more like liner notes by a dedicated fan more than the product of a biographer. Callwood quotes extensively, dropping giant chunks of quotation in his narrative when they could and should be more judiciously edited and employed. As such, the story gets out, but it’s not crafted in a way that gives us a sense of the Stooges as people. You don’t feel any sense of tragedy or outrage or waste at the way the band’s career goes, but at least you know what happened. If anything, the long, loose quotations from the band members and their circle create a general air of slackness that might not be off base as you’re left wondering if the energy spent in the Stooges’ music was the only place their energy materialized.

After the Stooges’ break-up, Callwood glosses over Iggy’s career. That’s probably an omission as much due to not having contacts or cooperation from Iggy’s camp as it is the sense that it’s been covered, but it is nice to have a book that pays prolonged attention to the Asheton brothers and the rock ‘n’ roll Lego set that Detroit/Ann Arbor bands became as members of the Stooges and the MC5 formed new projects, played some gigs, then broke up and formed another one to make a few bucks. It’s all ripe stuff for a better book with more dramatic weight, but since we don’t have that book and may not now that Ron’s passed away, this may have to do.

Bob and Ray, SCTV and The Simpsons all echo a comedic world view, that people are fundamentally good-natured but inept. The world won’t die by evil design but because someone had an oopsy. These thoughts come to mind while watching the Barry Richards TV Collection Vol. 1, a DVD/CD collection of segments from disc jockey Barry Richards‘ various television shows throughout the years. Richards started his career as a disc jockey in the 1960s in Washington, D.C., and though he worked around the Northeast, it’s the market he’s most associated with.

Richards used his radio fame to transition into television, first Groove-In, a teen-oriented show, here memorably captured with a student reviewing 2001: A Space Odyssey and a panel of students interviewing Cliff Nobles after he did a great dance while his band lip-synced to “The Horse.” Starting in 1970, he did late night, “free form” television, mixing episodes of Flash Gordon serials with music spots, and those provide the bulk of the clips on this compilation. The musical highlights are bands you’ve likely never heard of (I hadn’t): The Flavor and Jamul, the former being a perfectly credible garage rock band while the latter stomped out a heavy blues-rock version of “Tobacco Road.” A band called Zephyr with pre-Deep Purple Tommy Bolin on guitar perform an almost unrecognizable version of “St. James Infirmary” with a female vocalist Janis-ing all over it while a soprano sax adds a gently jazz-like dimension.

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The draw, though, is footage of Little Richard, Bob Seger, Humble Pie and Fats Domino, though each is less impressive than it sounds. Domino is backed by the Byrds, which promises to be interesting but while Fats sounds and plays great—not lip-syncing—the only thing Byrds-like about their backing is the sight of Roger McGuinn playing the Ric 12-string. Little Richard had just signed to Reprise Records and was clearly doing anything to promote his continued existence, but sharing screen time with Richards and a George Carlin-lite Uncle Dirty (just add jokes!) sapped his irrepressability. Until he goes to the electric piano to play “Good Golly Miss Molly” backed by Jamul, he’s almost morose on camera.

He likely knew how low-rent everything about the show was as he was interviewed by Richards while sitting on swings hung from the ceiling in the studio. Alice Cooper met a similar fate when he performed very heavy versions of “Eighteen” and “Black Juju.” When shot with three distant cameras while playing on a three-inch riser with 20 or so people in the crowd sitting cross-legged in front of him, Alice ended up looking foolish and odd.

It’s hard to imagine that Richards and his shows weren’t an inspiration for Rick Moranis’ Gerry Todd on SCTV, as time and again, his and the show’s straight-faced attempts to be a part of a youth culture moment are woefully, obliviously at odds with the results, making everything on the disc entertaining, if not in the way Richards hoped. When interviewing Humble Pie, he asked Peter Frampton what instrument he played, evidently not noticing the Les Paul he had strapped on.

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I haven’t got to the CD yet, but it includes interviews with the Beatles, and talk and performances by Little Richard and Dr. John.

Richards would go on to host Video Disco and Studio 78 when disco was hot, and as corny as that sounds, I understand a guy doing what he had to to stay in a youth-oriented business that had already pink-slipped or marginalized many of his peers. While trying to find out more about him, I found a clip of Richards as a wrestling announcer and discovered that he made a stop in New Orleans, where he was a DJ on WAIL, hosted Live at the Famous from the Famous Disco, and Video Trax in the early 1980s on WDSU. Here are two episodes of the show minus the videos. By this time he’d graduated to Cosby sweaters, but the fast-talking hipster DJ spouting nonsense handles is the same guy who’s all over this fascinating collection.

Bruce Springsteen’s new album, Wrecking Ball, is due out March 6, and he’ll perform at this year’s Jazz Fest on Sunday, April 29. Springsteen was last at Jazz Fest in 2006 when he played with his Seeger Sessions Band; this time, he’ll play with the E Street Band as part of a tour that starts March 18 in Atlanta.

Springsteen is the second high-profile addition to Jazz Fest announced in the last 36 hours; yesterday, Eddie Vedder and his ukelele was added as a solo act.

The day-by-day breakdowns are online now. Friday, April 27, the Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary, Bon Iver, Steel Pulse, Buckwheat Zydeco, GIVERS, Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 and the Texas Tornadoes top the bill. On Saturday, April 28, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Jill Scott, Feist, Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, Bobby Rush and Dave Koz are among the performers. On Sunday, April 29, the first weekend concludes with Springsteen, Al Green, John Mayer, Dr. John and the Lower 911, Jonelle Monae, Pete Fountain and Yolanda Adams among others.

The second weekend starts on Thursday, May 3 with a lineup that includes Eddie Vedder, Florence and the Machine, Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, Ani DiFranco, Esperanza Spalding’s Radio Music Society and James Cotton’s “Superharp” Band. On Friday, May 4, the lineup includes the Zac Brown Band, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, Rodrigo y Gabriela and C.U.B.A., Bunny Wailer, Mystikal, Mavis Staples and Marcia Ball. On Saturday, May 5, the Eagles, My Morning Jacket, Ne-Yo, Irma Thomas, Herbie Hancock, Paulina Rubio, Steve Earle and the Levon Helm Band with Mavis Staples top the bill. On Sunday, May 6, Jazz Fest closes with the Foo Fighters, the Neville Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, Galactic, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s 50th Anniversary Jam and more.

Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes at One Eyed Jacks. Photo by Erika Goldring.

Even with an uncommonly early start time at One Eyed Jacks—9 p.m. for the headliner!—the Alabama Shakes packed the room to the point that those of us who arrived shortly before 9 p.m. bumped into an impenetrable wall of backs five or so feet inside the door. But the show was a reminder that soul is an attribute, not a genre. It’s a passion that singer Brittany Howard conveys, not an amp setting, chord progression or set of lyrical tropes. The great R&B records weren’t retro when they were made; they were contemporary music, and the Alabama Shakes make soulful rock ‘n’ roll that’s completely contemporary. From my spot at the back of the room, it was hard to break down song specifics, but only the slow songs left me cold (which could be a function of distance), and song after song had an element that supercharged the moment.

Just by luck, I ended up standing with Scott Bomar, bassist for Memphis R&B band the Bo-Keys, who thought they were “the least contrived band” he’s seen in a while.

Writer, musician and OffBeat contributor Ned Sublette recently sent an email commenting on Harry Belafonte’s autobiography, My Song, and its focus on Belafonte’s activism. Sublette writes:

For me, the book’s most compelling moment is Belafonte’s eyewitness account of the May 24, 1963 cocktail party arranged by James Baldwin for Attorney General Robert Kennedy to meet “some representative black voices.” It was thrown into turmoil by the young New Orleans CORE member and Freedom Rider Jerome Smith (now an elder in New Orleans, I had the privilege of interviewing him for The Year Before the Flood), who, inconveniently spoke truth to power.

As quoted by Belafonte (this is a selective excerpt; read the full account in the book, beginning on p. 267):

Finally the young man said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, listening to all this cocktail-party patter. What you’re asking us young black people to do is pick up guns against people in Asia while you have continued to deny us our rights here.” . . .

Bobby was stunned. The one thing he took for granted was that all Americans would be patriotic if confronted by a common enemy.

Jerome Smith

Trying to ease past the awkward moment, James Baldwin asked Jerome how he felt about picking up a gun to fight for America if it actually declared war. “Never!” Jerome cried. “These are poor people who did nothing to us. . . . “

“You will not fight for your country?” Bobby retorted. “How can you say that?”

Back and forth went the tense exchange, until Jerome said that being in this living room with Kennedy made him want to vomit. . . .

An account of the meeting was leaked to the New York Times, where a story ran the next day, and I’d barely finished the New York Times story the next morning when Martin called. He wanted every detail of the evening with Bobby. “Disaster,” I said with a sigh. But when I relayed Jerome Smith’s fighting words, Martin had a different view. “Maybe it’s just what Bobby needed to hear,” he said…

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Shorty is nominated for numerous Best of the Beat awards this year including Artist of the Year and Album of the Year. Voting closes Friday, so time to vote is running out. Tickets to the Best of the Beat at Generations Hall are on sale now for $25 until January 16, when the price goes up to $30. This year’s show features lifetime achievement honoree George Porter, Jr. and an expanded Runnin’ Pardners, the Soul Rebels, Glen David Andrews, GIVERS, Lost Bayou Ramblers, Big Freedia and Aurora Nealand and the Royal Roses.

The Allstate Fan Fest is set up in the Jax Brewery parking lot, and on Saturday at 6:15 p.m., it will present a free concert with the Neville Brothers. On Sunday, there will be an LSU pep rally at 2 p.m., an Alabama pep rally at 4, and a free concert with Cee Lo Green, Eric Benet and Ahsan at 6:15. Will Cee Lo sing “Forget You” or “Fuck You“? You’ll have to be there to find out.

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Here are a few bonus videos, other versions of “John the Revelator.”

Son House

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Gov’t Mule (but this is cheating – the Dirty Dozen joins them)

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Nick Cave

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The White Stripes (as part of a medley. Starts at 1:37.)

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Grandview High School Concert Choir (slow to start but worth it)

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