Vinyl Junkie

A&M Records Highlights: Carpenters

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Like so many other platinum acts from A&M Records’s pre-rock catalog, the Carpenters struck me even from a single-digit age as featherlight schlock, inescapably omnipresent (especially in the ‘70s) but instantly dismissed by Gen X’ers (I’m one) who had yet to grow out of ironic hipster attitudes toward everything straight-laced and square.

Some of you surely remember as fondly as I do how that outlook changed dramatically for the better via the 1994 compilation ‘If I Were a Carpenter.’ At the height of grunge, here was an earnestly sincere salute to all this sterling popcraft we’d never properly appreciated.

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A&M Records Highlights: Sergio Mendes

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Because I’m not a boomer who came of age in the ‘60s, I neither fell for these cross-pollinated charmers as a swingin’ sophisticate nor first became aware of Brazilian music via the global smash — Stan Getz & João Gilberto’s ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ with aloofly dreamy vocals from the late Astrud Gilberto — that put the beguiling sound of bossa nova on a wider musical map.

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Christine McVie Deep Dive: ‘Rumours – Live’

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Those kindly following my sporadic deep dive into Christine McVie’s legacy will recall I pressed pause on that series a month ago, after revisiting Rumours and its alternate edition. Chronologically speaking, it made a lot of sense to wait on this just-released 2LP memento, captured during the first of three nights in August ‘77 at the then-Fabulous Forum, a sort of homecoming for the gone-platinum group.

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A&M Records Highlights: Burt Bacharach

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Like so many other milestones from the early A&M Records catalog, these records were always a reach away in my pre-digital childhood home — yet rarely were they played. I’ve always put their neglect down to the instant antiquity of ever-changing styles.

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A&M Records Highlights

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Music moguls have rarely been as monumentally influential as Jerry Moss was. Last week’s loss of the M half of A&M Records — Herb Alpert, the A, is still kicking at 88, the same age his partner reached — rises to a level of recognition reserved for legendary scene-shapers such as Mo Ostin at Warner/Reprise or Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic. Like those fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, Moss was a crucial titan with a decades-deep effect on careers and stylistic shifts.

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Christine McVie Deep Dive: ‘Live from the Record Plant’

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I did say at the close of my last post in this chronicle of the career of Christine McVie that the most beloved version of Fleetwood Mac was just about to emerge.

But not quite yet. First there needed to be a tour behind Heroes Are Hard to Find, their best-charting LP thus far in the States yet still a marginal success they view with some disappointment. All four members — Mick, the McVies and Bob Welch — sense an imminent shakeup.

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Christine McVie Deep Dive: ‘Penguin’

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Figured it out, right? After days of needless deliberation over this week’s #superfriendssunday theme — select an album turning 50 in 2023 — it occurred to me the simplest solution would be to spotlight Penguin, the first of two Fleetwood Mac LPs from ‘73, seen here with an equally flightless metronome and a Funko Pop of Chilly Willy.

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