Tom Wilson

Archive release from the rock/pop icon. Dion had an album ready for release at Columbia in 1965, but it never made it out of the gate until now! Recorded fifty-two years ago, it is as atom-smashing now as it was when Dion rolled tape with producer Tom Wilson at Columbia Studios in '65. Why was this album pulled from release and shelved? For that story, you'll have to consult Scott Kempner's illuminating liner notes here. Dion would be back on the Laurie label again a few years later, but this Columbia recording captures the doo-wop icon in a mid-'60s folk-rock state of mind, doing Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," "Farewell" and "Baby I'm in the Mood for You" plus Tom Paxton's "I Can't Help but Wonder Where I'm Bound" and the original songs "Kickin' Child" (co-written with Buddy Lucas and released as a single in '65), "Now" (featuring Al Kooper), "My Love," "Wake Up Baby," "Knowing I Won't Go Back There" and more (several of these songs were released on prior outtakes collections and retrospectives, some with different orchestrations). This is the first time that all these tracks are being issued together as the originally intended Dion album. A lost chapter in the epic story of this legendary rock 'n' roller from the Bronx finally surfaces, some 52 years later.

The Black Rider is the twelfth studio album by Tom Waits, released in 1993 on Island Records, featuring studio versions of songs Waits wrote for the play The Black Rider, directed by Robert Wilson and co-written by William S. Burroughs.

Fraternity Of Man is the band that forms the link between Frank Zappa & The Mothers, Lowell George & The Factory, Little Feat, and Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. In his short period of existence between these ancestors, relatives and descendants, the band managed to record two albums, "Fraternity Of Man" in 1968, and "Get It On" in 1969, before fragmenting…~From the liner notes.

Alice, once dubbed "the lost Tom Waits masterpiece" by the press, was originally done as an avant-garde opera directed by Robert Wilson for Hamburg's Thalia Theater in the winter of 1992. "Alice" was based loosely on Lewis Carroll's obsession with young Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired his Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. Working with wife and collaborator Kathleen Brennan, they wrote fifteen songs for the Wilson opera in the summer of 1992. The Thalia performed "Alice" for eighteen months, with an eclectic orchestra of Waits' design.

In the work of American songwriter Tom Waits, swampy blues, Beat poetry, West Coast jazz, Tin Pan Alley, country, 1930s-era cabaret, and post-Civil War parlor songs meet neon-lit carnival music and the wheezing, clattering, experimental rhythms (often played by makeshift musical instruments from car radios to metal pipes and tin cans, hence his love of Edgard Varese and Harry Partch) form a keenly individual musical universe. It has often been imitated but never replicated.

Soul shaker Wilson Pickett delivered one of his most versatile recordings in 1968 with the release of "The Midnight Mover". Produced by the legendary Tom Dowd, the album features Pickett’s signature growl and effortless blend of rock and soul. The album peaked in the Top 10 of Billboard’s Top R&B Albums. Included are the outstanding ballads, “It’s A Groove”, “Trust Me,” and “Down By The Sea”. Truly one of his funkiest releases, the album is a pivotal collection of astounding gems by the soul innovator.