Led Zeppelin

A&M Records Highlights: Fairport Convention

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Shooting from the hip here, so feel free to kindly counter this claim in comments, but I suspect there was no more prolific group on either side of the Atlantic in 1969 than Fairport Convention, and only Led Zeppelin achieved more impactful strides within those 12 months.

FC is the subject of this installment of #TuesdaysWithJerry, my journey through A&M Records’s past, in tribute to that label’s late co-founder Jerry Moss. I’ll get to why you’re as likely to find UK editions on Island Records as stateside pressings.

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LCKDWN20: Chaos & Disorder

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Fellow armchair warriors, musical comrades, any and all in need of screaming relief:

Having spent the past two weeks devoted to very personal playlist pursuits — my admiration of the late producer (and covid victim) Hal Willner, followed by a subjective 5th-anniversary reconstruction of the Coachella at which Jessica and I met — I have amassed a stockpile of two highly volatile things: my fury over (parts of) our government’s stupefyingly inept response to this ongoing nightmare, and songs that express it.

Thus, I have put a soundtrack called Chaos & Disorder to that Charlie Brown version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” a T-shirt parody I once identified with enough to make my Facebook profile when I (mostly) abandoned that platform a presidential cycle ago.

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