The State of Hollow State Audio

Despite the bald-faced references to bootlegs in the title, this is a totally legit four-CD box set release of live 1967-1970 Doors from numerous shows, all of it previously unissued…

TOY have announced details of their new album, Happy In The Hollow, which is released on Friday January 25th 2019. Their fourth album, and their first for Tough Love, is unquestionably their most direct and propulsive album to date.

The first studio album of Band originals since 1971's Cahoot – in many respects, Northern Lights-Southern Cross was viewed as a comeback. It also can be seen as a swan song, in that its recording marked the last time the five members would work together in the studio as a permanent group, with a commitment to making a record they would tour behind and build on as a working band. The album was also, ironically enough, the Band's finest since their self-titled sophomore effort, even outdoing Stage Fright. It was spawned after a series of battery-recharging events – the move of all five members out of Woodstock, New York and to Malibu, California, into a new, state-of-the-art 24-track studio that not only felt right but offered them (especially Garth Hudson, working with Moog synthesizers and other new instruments, as well as brass and reeds) a bigger creative and sonic canvas than they'd ever known before…

The Grateful Dead were literally at a crossroads when they took the stage at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY, on February 19, 1971. The previous night, the first of six shows at the venue would, for a number of reasons, be the last for drummer Mickey Hart for more than three years (a primary reason being that Lenny Hart, Mickey's father and the band's manager in 1969-1970, had absconded with a large chunk of their bank account). Suddenly, for the first time since late 1967 when Hart joined, the Grateful Dead were back to their original five-piece lineup: Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir (guitars), Phil Lesh (bass), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (organ and harmonica), and Bill Kreutzmann (the other drummer). They had already shed a second keyboardist, Tom Constanten, in early 1970 and now this new downsizing allowed the Dead to return to the harder, more primal rocking sound of their acidic early days…