The Rolling Stones: Rock & Roll Circus (DVD)

“Rock and Roll Circus” was long one of the most elusive of rock artifacts. Shot Dec. 11-12, 1968, and planned as a BBC-TV special and theatrical release, the 65-minute picture mated the aerialists, fire-eaters and acrobats of Robert Fosset’s Circus with the day’s top rock talent.

Highlights include the Who blasting through the mini-opera “A Quick One While He’s Away” and John Lennon — backed by an ad hoc supergroup that included Eric Clapton, the Stones’ Keith Richards (on bass) and Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell — making his first solo flight outside the Beatles. Yoko Ono, Jethro Tull, Taj Mahal and Marianne Faithfull rounded out the lineup.

The Rolling Stones headlined, playing a six-song set that climaxed with singer Mick Jagger writhing like a man possessed through “Sympathy For the Devil.” But the band, exhausted by the daylong shoot, was unhappy with the results.

Thus, “Rock and Roll Circus” remained in the vaults for nearly three decades. However, in 1996, the feature was screened at the New York Film Festival to coincide with its first videocassette release.

In 2004, “Rock and Roll Circus” was released on DVD, remastered in 5.1 surround sound, with additional footage; new commentaries by Jagger, Richards, Ono, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, ex-Stones bassist Bill Wyman, and others; and a film interview with the Who’s Pete Townshend.

Singles 1965-1967 Vol. 2

The second installment in ABKCO’s series of box sets containing CD replicas of the Rolling Stones’ singles and EPs, Singles 1965-1967 covers the classic period between “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “In Another Land,” the time when the Stones started to reach beyond their hard blues base, and created some of their most indelible music. Like the previous box, Singles 1963-1965, each of the group’s British and American singles and EPs are represented, reproduced in paper sleeves and pressed on all-black CDs designed to look like a 45.

The Animals: Retrospective

The Animals Retrospective offers 22 hit tracks including “House of The Rising Sun,” “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” “San Franciscan Nights,” “Sky Pilot,” “Spill The Wine” and the original U.S. version of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” that has not been available for more than a decade. This compendium is the most comprehensive single disc retrospective of Burdon’s work as a member of the Animals, as leader of Eric Burdon and The Animals and as the centerpiece of Eric Burdon and War. This collection features no fewer than ten top 15 chart singles.

Singles 1963-1965 Vol. 1

First of 3 box sets collecting the band’s US & UK singles & EP’s on Decca from 1963 to 1971. Discs are coloured black on the underside and have grooves and a label on the top to make them appear more like vinyl. Box also includes a booklet & 3 prints.

Portrait Of A Legend 1951-1964

From Sam Cooke’s teenage debut as a full fledged member of the legendary Soul Stirrers in 1951 through his career as a rhythm and blues phenomenon thanks to the recordings for
which he is acknowledged as the progenitor of soul music. His hit songs, most of which he wrote, went on to become pop standards, enduring to this day. Sam Cooke’s amazing body of work is now encapsulated in Sam Cooke: Portrait of A Legend:1951-1964. It includes 30 tracks and is part of ABKCO’s Sam Cooke Remastered Collection, an initiative to offer state of the art editions of restored and remastered Sam Cooke albums on dual layer (hybrid) CD/SACD discs, compatible with any standard CD player as well as Super Audio players.

A diligent quality assurance program coupled with painstaking research and the most advanced digital-to-analog transfer and mastering technologies were employed in producing
this collection. Extensive analysis was carried out to determine the best mastering sources and first generation masters were utilized throughout the assembly of the album’s track lineup. The result is nothing less than extraordinarily authentic with the shadings and nuance last experienced in the studio years ago. “The sound quality is, arguably, as close
to what Sam Cooke and his fellow musicians heard when the engineer pressed the ‘playback’ button for the first time after those original sessions,” notes Jody Klein, restoration producer for The Sam Cooke Remastered Collection.

With a running time of one hour and twenty minutes, Sam Cooke: Portrait Of A Legend includes all of his essential hits and provides a major overview of a career that has left an
ever lasting mark on American music that remains indelible today almost forty years after Cooke’s untimely death. ABKCO presents tracks from Cooke’s gospel and early R&B career
as well as his pop/soul hits from the Specialty and RCA labels and has combined them with the cream of the masters that are part of his own company, Tracey Records. He was one
of the first recording stars, black or white, to command this kind of artistic control, the most noteworthy other example at the time being Frank Sinatra.

Sam Cooke: Portrait of a Legend:1951 – 1964 highlights Cooke’s astounding command of the gospel idiom when, at age 19, he joined the world renowned Soul Stirrers. With Cooke singing lead, the veteran group recorded “Jesus Gave Me Water,” on March 1, 1951 at a session for Specialty Records; Sam Cooke’s professional career had begun. More than a half century later, that same song closes this collection that starts with another Soul Stirrers song, “Touch The Hem Of His Garment,” that was written by Cooke. After his decision to sing secular music as a solo artist, Cooke began to dominate the charts, starting with “You Send Me,” released by Keen Records in 1957. A simultaneous Pop and R&B #1 smash hit, the career making song is included in this new retrospective.

Throughout the late 1950’s and until the time of his death, Cooke was one of the most popular vocalists in the world with a streak of Top 10 Billboard Pop Chart hits that, of
course, began with “You Send Me” and continued hrough “Chain Gang,” “Twistin’ The Night Away,” “Another Saturday Night” and “Shake,” all of which are on Sam Cooke: Portrait of a Legend. Three of these hits were also #1 Billboard R&B Chart singles; two peaked at #2. Seven other songs in the collection were also Top 10 R&B hits including “I’ll Come Running Back To You,” “Win Your Love For Me,” “Everybody Likes To Cha Cha Cha, “Wonderful
World,” “Bring It On Home to Me,” “Having A Party,” “Nothing Can Change This Love,” and “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

A bonus, hidden track entitled “Soul” is included in the album. The melody was extemporaneously brought forth by Cooke during an interview with famed DJ Magnificent Montague of “burn baby, burn” fame. He had asked Cooke to “hum ‘soul'” and this is an audio document of that moment in 1962.

The songs included in Sam Cooke: Portrait Of A Legend collectively logged 273 weeks or five years and three months on Billboard’s Pop Chart and a mind boggling 508 weeks (nine years and nine months) on the Pop and R&B charts, combined.

Comprehensive liner notes by author Peter Guralnick are provided in the Sam Cooke: Portrait Of A Legend package, as are detailed musician credits.

Keep Movin’ On

Click here to read an essay about this album by Peter Guralnick

Album Review by Bruce Eder, AllMusic.com
This 23-song CD stands in Sam Cooke’s output roughly where those four posthumous LPs (beginning with Dock Of The Bay) stand in Otis Reddings catalog, with the major difference that Cooke’s work included far fewer leftovers and sides that were justified simply by being available — he seemed to throw a special effort into almost everything that ever recorded, and that goes double for this disc’s content, which encompasses the final year of his recording career. This was a period in which he explored several promising musical directions and broke through both to an extraordinarily sophisticated synthesis of his gospel roots with topical songwriting within a pop context. Listeners won’t find his most popular songs — “You Send Me”, “Chain Gang”, “Only Sixteen”, etc. — here, a result of the split control of his catalog between RCA and ABKCO, but they will find his most important and influential songs. Cooke was inactive in the studio for a significant chunk of 1963, following the drowning death of his infant son, and when he resumed work late in the year it was under a new contract that was to ultimately give control and ownership of his recordings to him (or, as events worked out, his manager, Allen Klein). Represented here is his foray into a New Orleans sound, on “Basin Street Blues” etc., which he’d never explored before — and which he shaped his own way — as well as his poignant recording of “The Riddle Song”, which (according to Peter Guralnick’s notes) was a way of his coming to terms musically with the death of his son; and “Good Times”, the somber-toned party song of Cooke’s that the Rolling Stones chose to cover, and the equally pensive and compelling “Another Saturday Night”, a relic of the first half of 1963 that fits equally well with this later material. On any other r&b collection, all of those tracks would be perceived as extraordinarily fine records, but Cooke himself raised the bar so high during the final months of his career, that they pale next to the most important of his songs: “Shake”, which embodied a harder, more visceral soul sound than Cooke had ever embraced before; and “A Change Is Gonna Come”. The latter, written by Cooke in the wake of his hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind”, seemed to tie up his origins as a gospel singer with all that he had learned and experienced in the ensuing decade and, channeled through the topical subject of civil rights, became his greatest musical achievement — not his biggest hit, or his best known song even today, but his most accomplished piece of composition, singing, and recording. Cooke never had a chance to follow up either, and died before he could even assess the impact of either song — ironically, it was Otis Redding (who died almost three years later to the day) that took them into his repertory most successfully, and kept them out there, on record and, in the case of “Shake”, on stage as well; so this disc not only brings us to the final, magnificent phase of Cooke’s career, but also shows the door that he opened for Otis Redding et al. Keep Movin’ On should probably not be the only Sam Cooke compilation that a neophyte fan should buy, mostly because it covers only his late career and leaves out a lot of essential material, but it is an absolutely essential companion (along with the Harlem Square Club live disc) to the current RCA greatest hits disc or the 4-CD Man Who Invented Soul set, finishing the story that they start. Most of what’s here was never on CD before and hasn’t been available on vinyl in the US since the 1960’s, and even the tracks that have been out before are improved so significantly in the quality of their transfer to CD, that they’re like new releases, and they’re accompanied by superb annotation.

Sam Cooke’s SAR Records Story 1959-1965

Click here to read an essay about SAR Records

Album Review by Steve Huey, AllMusic.com:
Sam Cooke’s SAR Records Story is a double-disc set presenting material recorded for the legendary soul singer’s own SAR label from 1959-1965, much of it produced by Cooke himself and including a few of his rough, unreleased demos. The first disc covers the label’s religious side, with a multitude of cuts from Cooke’s former group the Soul Stirrers (now with Jimmie Outler on lead vocals), plus a generous helping of songs by R.H. Harris & His Gospel Paraders and the Womack Brothers. The second disc covers essentially the same gospel-derived soul territory but with a secular bent, featuring future stars Bobby Womack (with the Valentinos), Billy Preston, and Johnnie Taylor, plus L.C. Cooke, Johnnie Morisette, the Simms Twins, and Mel Carter. All in all, it’s an excellent look at a lesser-known portion of Cooke’s career, and there’s some great, underappreciated music to boot.

Complete Recordings of Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers

Album Review by Richie Unterberger, AllMusic.com:
They were known as the Soul Stirrers when they did the 1951-1957 recordings on this three-CD, 84-song collection. It’s billed to Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, though, as it’s the ultimate collection of sides he recorded as a member of the group for Specialty Records, along with seven tentative secular pop/rock sides he did for the label as a solo singer in 1956. Cooke doesn’t sing lead on all of the Soul Stirrers’ tracks, though there are plenty of his leads to hear throughout the set; he shares lead duties with Paul Foster, although by the end of his time in the outfit, Cooke was taking most of the solo leads. There’s also one cut, “All Right Now,” on which Cooke shares lead with Rev. Julius Cheeks (two alternate versions of the song are also on the set). Even if Cooke isn’t always the solo lead, however, he’s a big presence on all of these sides, which represent both an important summary of his career prior to achieving pop stardom and a major body of gospel music. While much of the material is traditional (with Cooke contributing some originals), the arrangements do evolve, including some drums, organ, piano, bass, and electric guitar at various points. The link between gospel, R&B, and rock & roll becomes evident to more secular-minded listeners, sometimes strikingly so in Cooke’s phrasing, which, even on songs as far back as 1953 (“I’d Give up All My Sins and Serve the Lord”), contained clear antecedents to his vocals on his first breakthrough pop hit, “You Send Me.” Naturally those antecedents are heard strongest on the seven 1956 solo cuts that represented his first pop ventures, and although these are on the innocuous side, they’re enjoyable foreshadowings of his rock & roll years. Numerous alternate takes and three 1955 live songs (with good sound) complete the most comprehensive portrait of Cooke’s gospel years. Note, though, that the version of “I’ll Come Running Back to You” — a Top 20 entry in the wake of “You Send Me” — lacks the overdub on the hit single.

The Man Who Invented Soul

Album Review by Bruce Eder, AllMusic.com
This set is near essential to fans of Sam Cooke, despite the fact that it contains none of his gospel recordings for Specialty Records or any of the work from the final year of his career (owned by ABKCO Records). Scattered every few minutes across this four-disc collection are reminders of just how far ahead of all existing musical forms Cooke was, creating sounds that stretched the definitions of song genres as they were understood and created completely new categories. Indeed, he was so successful that it’s easy to underestimate the impact and importance of many of his early triumphs. “You Send Me,” which opens this set, may seem today like the safest, tamest pop music, but in 1957 it was a genre-bending single, a new kind of R&B/pop music hybrid and one that quietly shook the foundations of the music business when it hit number one.

Disc one offers a fresh appreciation of the best of the early Keen Records sides, drawing on the best of nearly two years of singles and the strongest of Cooke’s LP tracks in the best account to date of his early career in popular music. Disc two begins Cooke’s RCA years, and the quality of his singles, which clearly and easily bridge the gap between genres, races, and generations, improves dramatically. The development of Cooke’s writing and singing and his growing confidence and range culminate with disc four, which encompasses the Night Beat album and Cooke’s live performance from the Harlem Square Club. The sound is extraordinary throughout, expansive, rich-textured, and vividly detailed; a choice earlier CD release, The Man and His Music, by comparison, sounds thin and tinny.

Sam Cooke: Greatest Hits

Album Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AllMusic.com:
Although it isn’t as sublime as the definitive The Man and His Music, Greatest Hits still does a good job of rounding up the majority of Sam Cooke’s biggest pop hits. Ironically, it doesn’t have enough gospel or R&B cuts, skipping over such essentials as “Touch the Hem of His Garment,” “Ain’t That Good News,” and “A Change Is Gonna Come” in favor of such pop hits as “Sugar Dumpling.” However, it has just enough songs that aren’t on The Man and His Music to make it worth exploring for fans who haven’t been able to hear some of this material before, since some of these songs had been out of print for years. Nevertheless, the curious and the novice should be aware that this is not a good introduction to Sam Cooke, because it doesn’t provide a full portrait of his career and it overlooks too many necessary songs.