Soul Surfer

“Leo Fender’s contribution to the sound of modern music is immeasurable. The pop music explosion of the 1950s and 60s would not have happened without the electric guitar and, perhaps more importantly, the electric bass.”
So begins Martin Kelly’s notes for the CD of his book about Fender guitars. A book about music of course lacks the medium that it describes, so Martin came to Ace with a proposal to produce an accompanying CD that would make his pages even more vibrant. We were more than happy to celebrate the great sounds that Leo Fender helped conceive through his inspirational instruments.

With nineteen other albums under his belt, Gary Hoey is doing his thing again this time with "Dust and Bones". A true blues triumph, it’s where Gary belongs. This Veteran has taken his Strat, and paid his homage to the blues gods, and they are pleased. The album throws us into a Robert Johnson-esque song with a modern twist of course, called “Boxcar Blues”. Hoey is clear to display his influences especially with the next track, “Steamroller,” which is a tribute to the legendary Johnny Winter. This is followed with a power ballad, “Coming Home,” featuring Lita Ford that really stokes the coals of this smoldering hot album. The longing for home, not just the place, but the people, especially that special someone that the life of a traveling musician knows all too well.

Recovering from a hip replacement operation, and suffering from a mid-life crisis, Iain Gately sets out to catch a tube. This is no London underground train, but rather that evanescent space, beneath the lip of a breaking wave, that every surfer yearns to visit. In all his years of surfing, Iain Gately has never caught one. He realises it is now or never.

Unlike other labels subjected to exhaustive multi-disc retrospectives like this whopping ten-disc Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records – The First Fifty Years, Warner Brothers never embodied a scene or sound: they've always embodied what a major label should be – a dominant force that chronicles and dictates the sound of the mainstream. Coming out at the tail-end of 2008, when the influence of major labels is on a slow steady decline, Revolutions in Sound can be seen as a portrait of a time that's beginning to recede into the past: a time when there was such a thing as mass entertainment, when the pop audience all shared a common bond of hit records they either loved or rallied against. Perhaps the greatest things about this monumental box set is that it captures that colossus while also illustrating that for a while, majors did take risks. Of course, Warner was the riskiest of all the majors, never held back by an anti-rock & roll sourpuss like Mitch Miller, who struggled to keep CBS out of the tumult of the '60s (this with no less than Bob Dylan as the label's flagship rock artist). Instead, Warner embraced the underground, recording some of the strangest to shake out of the '60s, and that adventure fits a label that turned to rock & roll to help establish themselves as a real player at the turn of the '60s.

Its title might lead one to think this was a compilation, but it wasn't rather, More Hits by the Supremes is merely a valid presumption of its worth. It was also the original group's third highest charting album of their five years on Motown, and came not a moment too soon. The Supremes were doing incredibly well as a singles act, but not since Where Did Our Love Go had any of their LPs done particularly well on the pop charts; even a well-intentioned Sam Cooke-tribute album recorded early in 1965, which ought to have done better, had only reached number 75 (though it had gotten to number five on the R&B LP charts).

60 original hits by the original artists. Includes tracks by the Teddy Randazzo, Gene McDaniels, The Pentagons, Les Baxter, Nelson Riddle, Jo Ann Campbell, Billy Duke, Bruce Johnston, Karl Hammel Jr., Martin Denny, Acker Bilk, and more.