Electric Roller

Hollywood never learns. Hot on the heels of box-office failures Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Can't Stop the Music, comes the roller-skating Olivia Newton John in Xanadu. This soundtrack is fluff stuff to be sure, but some pearls float amongst the mire. Lead-off "Magic" remains a fine single…

WANTED! Guitarist and singer Rockin' Johnny Burginhangs his fedora in the Frisco Bay, and harpman and singer Quiqué Gomezhails from Madrid, Spain. Together and separately they have ridden many a dusty trail with some of the last of the great Chicago bluesmen. Today they are the feared gunslingers of the international blues scene In the winter of 2018 they partnered up, galloped through the Western Territories, and took dead aim on twelve originals and two blues classics. Rockin' Johnny Burgin and Quiqué Gomezare both internationally acclaimed as world class bluesmen Burgin has a storied history on Chicago's Delmark Records, and Gomez is a versatile jazz-influenced blues singer who also sings Frank Sinatra songs with a Spanish Big Band. They are currently on tour in support of their first collaborative album, hopefully the first of many.

Inattentive consumers picking up this album because they confuse it as being by the testicularly challenged American glam rockers will be in for quite a surprise. This is the Canadian band named Slaughter, and their lone 1987 album, Strappado (named after a medieval torture tactic that had victims suspended by their hands, while these were tied behind their backs), contained improbably raw blackened thrash reminiscent of the earliest works of Voivod or, say, Sepultura…

Like Dave Edmunds, guitarist/pianist/vocalist Mickey Jupp was a champion of traditional rock & roll during the late '70s, a time when it had been all but discarded. Unlike Edmunds, Jupp wrote the majority of his own material, which updated '50s rock & roll with a tongue-in-cheek irony.