Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Stuff I Like!

Ahh, Amazon, how you fulfill me... here are a few of the latest and greatest goodies to pass over the MV transom...

ROCKPILE: Live At The Rockpalast: An imported CD/DVD of an early 1980 show by the late, great Rockpile.  Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, Billy Bremner and Terry Williams owed my rock and roll world back in the day, and this concert is pretty much the boys at their best.  Think a dab of rockabilly combined with a dollop of 60's rock, amp it all up to 11 and there's Rockpile.  The band broke up WAY too soon, though the principles went on to storied solo careers.  But there are always archival releases like this to remind us of past glories...

DAVE EDMUNDS "Alive": Speaking of storied careers, this is the first new Edmunds material in years.  Unfortunately there are only five new tracks combined with some goodies from previous releases, but the old stuff is only old if you've heard it before, and most of the songs are from Edmunds' more obscure releases.  The new stuff shows he hasn't lost a step, and here's hoping for a full-on new CD soon...

STOP YELLIN': Ben Pivar And The Horror, Mystery and Action Adventure Films of His Universal B-Unit.  Well, the book's subtitle kind of says it all.  Pivar produced dozens of movies in the 30's and 40's, but is perhaps most remembered for his contributions to the Mummy series and "The Brute Man", one of the more disturbing movies to emerge from the 40's.  Not because of the subject matter, per se (standard serial killer stuff), but because the star was Rondo Hatton, a sadly deformed man who evidently piqued Universal's interest after he appeared in a Sherlock Holmes movie.  This 500+ page tome absolutely tells you everything you ever wanted to know about Ben Pivar, and since you probably didn't want to know anything, some might call all that overkill. Me, I found it a fascinating slice of life from the trenches of 40's filmmaking with some Barton Fink overtones.

SPRINGSTEEN Live: Well, he's finally doing it.  Evidently every show from Springsteen's upcoming tour is going to be released 48 hours post-concert to an eager Bruce-loving world.  That's the good news.  The slightly less advantageous news is that the concerts are being distributed (at first anyway) through a system where you have to buy a 2GB memory stick either at the concert or from Springsteen's site for $40, which will them allow you to download Mp3 medium-resolution concerts from the internet.  Want more concerts, you gotta buy more memory sticks. Want higher resolution flac files, forget it (for now).  Look, I'm not gonna bite the hand that's finally giving fans what they've been clamoring after for decades, but here's hoping a non-memory stick, high quality downloadable version is hot on the heels of this initial effort!

ADDITIONAL INFO HOT OFF THE PRESSES!  Turns out Springsteen is also offering Mp3s and flac files from his website for $9.99 and $14.99 respectively.  FANTASTIC.  Now I wish I hadn't jumped in and bought a wristband already (*sob*). 

2 comments:

Muldfeld said...

You know what show I'm really enjoying that I had a chance to check out due to a sale? HBO's "Girls"; the characters are nearly as scummy, but I really enjoy the complexity of the characters. I even find myself sometimes wishing I could express myself in as comedic a fashion as the main character Hannah and I'm a guy!

But what did you think of "Man of Steel"?

Mark Verheiden said...

Sadly I haven't caught up to Girls or Man Of Steel yet. In terms of Superman, after, what, three or four origin movies, my interest in the latest iteration is admittedly limited...