Eyeballin': Dee Dee Ramone's History on My Arms
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Upstairs, Downstairs: Drive-By Truckers, "The Living Bubba" and the Steep Price of Radioactive Ice Water
Eyeballin': The Black Crowes' Warpaint Live
Eyeballin: Bruce Springsteen: Road Trip - 40 Years of the Boss
Eyeballin': John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band Live in Toronto '69
Eyeballin': The Moody Blues at the Isle of Wight Festival
Eyeballin': Bob Dylan 1978-1989: Both Ends of the Rainbow
Eyeballin': Charles Mingus' Epitaph
After Mingus's death, more than 20 individual pieces and 500 pages of score -- written over more than a 20-year-period -- were discovered. Many were smudged and barely legible, but they formed the parts of Mingus's never-finished magnum opus. After a painstaking effort spearheaded by collector Andrew Homzy, Mingus's widow Sue, and conductor Gunther Schuller to piece together, edit, reconstruct and even fill in some parts, Schuller led a 30-piece orchestra to present the work, the longest and largest written for a jazz orchestra.
Mostly Metal: The Mighty Anvil, In Their Own Words
| Craig Hlavaty |
Eyeballin': Muddy Waters Live at ChicagoFest
Eyeballin': Vanilla Fudge, Live: When Two Worlds Collide
Eyeballin': NOFX's Backstage Passport
Eyeballin': Black Label Society's Skullage
Skulls are very big in the world of Black Label Society. A jawboneless half-skull serves as the L.A. power-metal quartet's logo, and lead singer/guitarist Zakk Wylde's mic stand is a skull-topped length of chain. One can only imagine Wylde, also Ozzy Osbourne's lead guitarist, chose skulls becase his riffing is the definition of "face-melting." He's the sort of fellow who starts a song by yelling "Incoming!" and ends it by announcing "Limp Bizkit can suck our big motherfuckin' fat cocks." It's hard not to love the guy.
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The DVD component of Skullage (the CD is the decade-old band's best-of) is split into three parts: live footage of BLS grinding it out in Europe and Detroit, and an acoustic concert in Pennsylvania, dubbed "Slightly Amped," that highlights Wylde's bluesy debt to Southern noodlers like Duane Allman and the Lynyrd Skynyrd boys. There's also five videos that use every metal cliche in the book to hilarious effect. "Stillborn," with guest vocals from Ozzy, looks like it was shot on the same soundstage as any post-1994 Nine Inch Nails video and features Wylde flicking his tongue at the camera like a snake. (Mrs. Wylde must be a very lucky woman.)
Eyeballin': Rory Gallagher Live in Cork

By the time of his 1995 death at the age of 47 due to complications from liver transplant surgery, Rory Gallagher was already a giant blues-rock guitar hero - albeit in pretty much every country besides the U.S. And it's a shame that these shores never cottoned to the Irishman, who in his prime certainly could have gone toe-to-toe with Clapton, Allman, and Winter.
Live in Cork shows a clearly enthused--and still potent--latter-day Gallagher playing for an appreciative hometown in 1987, a smile breaking across the baby face for much of the show. It's easy to see why fans often feel that his prolific studio recordings (especially in the '70s) never quite matched his live output (many point to his live CD/movie Irish Tour '74 as the essential listening experience).
For this show, Gallagher's deep, expressive voice and frenetic-but-controlled playing make trademark numbers "Continental Op," "Tattoo'd Lady" and a hi-energy cover of Junior Wells' signature "Messin' with the Kid" highlights. There's also much to love in his amped-up rock originals like the fiery "Follow Me" and "Shadow Play."
Eyeballin': Love Train - The Sound of Philadelphia Live in Concert
Eyeballin': Paul Simon - Live from Philadelphia

The early '80s were an interesting time in the career of Paul Simon. The past glories of hits with Simon & Garfunkel - along with his sizable solo charting - were behind. And he had yet to reinvent himself as a world music maven with 1986's fine Graceland. His 1980 album One-Trick Pony had yielded a hit with "Late in the Evening," but the semi-autobiographical film of the same name, in which Simon showcased his acting chops, was widely panned.
So this 1980 concert at Philadelphia's Tower Theater (which has already been previously released on DVD) finds Paul at the precipice. And musically, it was a good, loose place to be.
The Whole Wide World: Ladysmith Black Mambazo's Live! DVD
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Live! (Heads Up)
Though international audiences did not discover this South African vocal group until it appeared on Paul Simon's landmark 1986 album Graceland, Ladysmith Black Mambazo has been active since the early '60s, when founder Joseph Shabalala started the a capella isicathamiya choir alongside friends and family back in his hometown of Ladysmith.
Since hitting the spotlight more than two decades ago, the Grammy-winning group went on to become South Africa's cultural ambassadors, touring relentlessly around the world eight months a year in addition to making new music, participating in other musicians' recordings while also being the face of the Mambazo Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization started by Shabalala in 1999.
Eyeballin': Down the Tracks: The Music That Influenced Led Zeppelin
Even the most naïve and surface Led Zeppelin listener tell you at least that they were influenced "by the blues." But this insightful and surprisingly solid documentary goes way further in delving into the sound and the performers which were in the minds (and on the home stereos) of Mssrs. Page and Plant, both in their youths and while recording some of the greatest rock music ever.
Even without the draw-you-in Zeppelin tag, Down the Tracks could serve just as well as a historical jaunt through the blues of Charley Patton and Son House through the electrifyin' of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, up to the English skiffle and folk booms. All of which took place well before the 1969 release of debut Led Zeppelin, where - according to one interviewee here - the band "pumped the blues with steroids."
Eyeballin': Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell
A shy and awkward Iowan prairie boy sits down in front of the camera somewhere in late 1970s New York, and out comes one of the most enigmatic and genre-confounding voices of our time. Recently released DVD Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell is less of a documentary and more of a deeply personal, posthumous tribute to Russell's life and work as one of the foremost unsung figures of '80s left-field, avant-garde pop and disco.
Russell's sound is full of soulful, strange, and faltering mantras, rhythmic and percussive electronic cello and exotic, funky beats. Filmmaker Matt Wolf introduces the viewer with an intimate portrayal of Russell's childhood by his parents, who are as instrumental to the film as featured artists Allen Ginsberg, Talking Heads, the Modern Lovers' Ernie Brooks, Philip Glass and giants of the '70s DJ and disco scene, including Larry Levan and Francois Kevorkian.
Eyeballin': A Technicolor Dream
This documentary, originally broadcast on BBC television, traces the coalition of the "underground" movement in swinging '60s London. Beginning with a groundbreaking 1965 gathering/reading of the Beat poets at the Royal Albert Hall and following with the opening of the Indica bookstore and gallery, the London Free School, the revival of the Notting Hill Carnival, and publication of the first issues of the newspaper International Times, it all culminated in "The 14-hour Technicolor Dream."
The actual happening - much more than just a concert - took place on April 29, 1967 at the Alexandra Palace, and featured scores of bands and other performers including The Pretty Things, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Pete Townshend, the Soft Machine, the Move, Alex Harvey and a pre-John Yoko Ono. Sort-of headlining was the original Pink Floyd, whose cosmic cacophony led by Syd Barrett blared from the stage just as the sun rose about 5 a.m.





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