In 1984, a 45-year-old Tina Turner made one of the most amazing comebacks in the history of American popular music. A few years earlier, it was hard to imagine the veteran soul/rock belter reinventing herself and returning to the top of the pop charts, but she did exactly that with the outstanding Private Dancer. And Turner did so without sacrificing her musical integrity. To be sure, this pop/rock/R&B pearl is decidedly slicker than such raw, earthy, hard-edged Ike & Tina classics as "Proud Mary," "Sexy Ida," and "I Wanna Take You Higher." But she still has a tough, throaty, passionate delivery that serves her beautifully on everything from the melancholy, reggae-influenced "What's Love Got to Do with It" to the gutsy "Better Be Good to Me" to heartfelt remakes of the Beatles' "Help," Al Green's "Let's Stay Together," and David Bowie's "1984."
There's a good reason why the Move's eponymous 1968 debut album sounds like the work of two or three different bands – actually, befitting a band with multiple lead singers, there's more than one reason. First, there's that lead singer conundrum. Carl Wayne was the group's frontman, but Roy Wood wrote the band's original tunes and sometimes took the lead, and when the group covered a rock & roll class, they could have rhythm guitarist Trevor Burton sing (as they did on Eddie Cochran's "Weekend") or drummer Bev Bevan (as they did on the Coasters' "Zing Went the Strings of My Heart").
It's often unfair to compare the Rolling Stones to the Beatles but in the case of the group's mono mixes, it's instructive. Until the 2009 release of the box set The Beatles in Mono, all of the Fab Four's mono mixes were out of print. That's not the case with the Rolling Stones. Most of their '60s albums – released on Decca in the U.K., London in the U.S. – found mono mixes sneaking onto either the finished sequencing or various singles compilations, so the 2016 box The Rolling Stones in Mono only contains 56 heretofore unavailable mono mixes among its 186 tracks…
Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks has made several stabs at a solo career since 1978, writing and recording in various styles and occasionally under different group names. However, none of his attempts have been very commercially successful, a sore point for the man many deem responsible for a large portion of the Genesis sound…
Jürgen Krutszch formed TIBET in 1972, having been inspired by the Eastern experimentation of groups such as the BEATLES and THIRD EAR BAND. Krutszch had spent the latter part of the sixties in cover bands (FINE ART, NOSTRADAMUS), and was interested in putting together a group that played native Tibetan instruments such as the tabla, violin, zither, and flute…