Robert Baird

Perhaps the greatest strength left in the music business these days, and the major labels in particular, is their catalogs of recordings and on the reissue side of the business, no one has been better at exploiting a catalog and actually creating new releases of older unreleased music than Sony Legacy.

Being a Scene means that people will come no matter who or what is onstage, just to be a part of the…Scene.

His screams, rapid fire delivery, and end-of-line trills in tracks like “Lucille,” “Jenny Jenny” and of course, “Tutti Frutti,” every one recorded with an overloaded microphone, are impassioned in the extreme.

Perhaps the best attribute that older soul cats bring to a project like this is their knowledge of repertoire.

A fan of music and those who make it, he was one of the last labels heads to actually listen to music and care about musicians.

What keeps Waterfall, the band’s seventh album and the first in four years, from sinking into a kind of earnest, overly precious, 1970s lite rock muck is that James’s many influences are a mist and not a downpour.

While the mass ogling was in full swing and the sickly sweet aroma of jittery, prepubescent testosterone hung heavy in the classroom, I was equally interested in Miss Wagner’s musical selections.