The Old Man & The Gun

Bruce Springsteen’s fifth album gushes forth with the fury of a burst dam, delivering torrents of despair, inspiration, heartbreak, and joy. The Ties That Bind: The River Collection expands the original 20-song double album to a 4xCD set.

A dark, bitter commentary on modern American life cloaked in the form of a surrealist western, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man stars Johnny Depp as William Blake, a newly-orphaned accountant who leaves his home in Cleveland to accept a job in the frontier town of Machine. Upon his arrival, Blake is told by the factory owner Dickinson (Robert Mitchum) that the job has already been filled. Dejectedly, he enters a nearby tavern, ultimately spending the night with a former prostitute. A violent altercation with the woman's lover (Gabriel Byrne), also Dickinson's son, leaves Blake a murderer as well as mortally wounded, a bullet lodged dangerously close to his heart. He flees into the wilderness, where a Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer) mistakes Blake for the English poet William Blake and determines that he will be Blake's guide in his protracted passage into the spirit world.

Dr. Ebbetts specializes in releasing digital remasterings from long-deleted and hard-to-obtain vinyl records, particularly issues from the audiophile Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs (MFSL) label. Although the Ebbetts catalogue has many artists, it is most known for Beatles CDs transferred from the best quality MFSL releases, US releases and mono vinyl sources. While lables like Millenium, BEAT, Mirror Spock and Fabulous Sound Labs (FSL) also issue 'needle drops' of Beatles vinyl, Dr. Ebbetts is regarded by many audiophiles as being the highest quality. For those interested in the technical, one source close to the Dr says that Ebbetts says that he uses no noise reduction and that there's no magic formula…just a good ear and patience.