Robert Baird

The final utterance of a great band dissolving has completely stood the test of time.

Fitzgerald's influence on jazz vocals, celebrated in a flurry of reissues from Universal Music, is almost unimaginably vast.

We are all going to be buying "new" Beatles reissues for the rest of our time upon this mortal coil.

Are record stores who have the product in hand breaking ranks and selling on eBay to the highest bidders?

The Flying Burrito Brothers: The Gilded Palace of Sin
A&M/Intervention SP 4175 (LP). 1969/2017. Larry Marks, prod.; Henry Lewy, prod., eng.; Kevin Gray, remastering. AAA. TT: 35:24
Performance *****
Sonics ****½

The International Submarine Band, the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and finally, just Gram Parsons. He was a Snively on his mother's side, scion of a vast citrus-growing fortune. A trust-fund baby who, unlike most of the struggling musicians he hung out with, could go to a bank and withdraw large amounts of cash. When he was 12, two days before Christmas, his father killed himself. Seven years later, on the day he graduated from high school, his mother finally drank herself to death. He lasted one semester at Harvard before becoming a denizen of Los Angeles, and eventually a powerful force in the Sunset Strip music scene.

Is there such a thing as a bad Lightnin' Sam Hopkins record? No, but there are a lot of badly recorded Hopkins records. Happily, Goin' Away originally released in 1963 on the Bluesville label (an imprint of Prestige Records) isn't one of them. And the already good sonics have even been improved in yet another superb 180gram Analogue Productions LP reissue.

Put the expression "crate-diggers" into any sentence and it will catch my eye. The Warner Music Group has launched Run Out Groove, a new fan-driven, vinyl-only label that is going to let the public, or more accurately the crate-diggers among us, choose which records from the WMG trove of labels this new label will release.