Chris Dreja Passed Away

October 2, 2025

The great Chris Dreja died yesterday at the age of 79. Yes, he was a great musician, although a lot of people would dismiss such a definition, attributing the English performer’s claim to fame to his early stint with THE YARDBIRDS, a trend-setting ensemble Dreja helped cofound. Yet while Chris didn’t seem to demonstrate such strong personality as singer Keith Relf or the band’s main songwriters, bassist Paul Samwell-Smith and drummer Jim McCarty, it was his rhythm guitar that cemented their performances and anchored the legendary rave-ups on studio classics like the “Roger The Engineer” album and on stage.

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SPIRIT’s “Sea Dream” Gets A Concert Expansion

October 2, 2025

Mid- to late ’80s didn’t seem to be the best period in the life of SPIRIT. 1984’s “The Thirteenth Dream” saw the reunited ensemble cut afresh a batch of their classics with a few new numbers thrown in for good measure, and then, barren in creative terms, the band disintegrated, with Randy California focusing on a couple of solo albums. It wasn’t before 1989 that they returned with “Rapture In The Chambers” – only the guitarist’s original plan included the appearance of a different opus: “Sea Dream” which he’d been working on for about half a decade. This conceptual undertaking, laid down with the loyal Ed Cassidy and bassist Scott Monahan and built around the titular suite, saw the light of day in 2002, five years after California passed away, and found Randy’s fans relish what would become the collective’s final studio release – unavailable for a long time now but bound to get reissued soon.

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Bill Nelson’s Supergroup Prepare Concert Record

October 1, 2025

The fluctuating nature of Bill Nelson‘s ORCHESTRA FUTURA is a perfect reflection of this ensemble’s music that deliberately avoided pop-oriented structures of the guitarist’s previous experiments, with BE-BOP DELUXE and beyond. A trio whose ranks include acclaimed reedman Theo Travis and bassist Dave Sturt of GONG fame, the latter also handling electronic effect, excel in presenting epic improvisations, with arresting melodies created on the spot and this existing only in the moment, which is why no studio effort has ever been made to capture such immediacy.

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JUDAS PRIEST & Alice Cooper In Toronto

October 1, 2025

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense”: this phrase from a certain Disney film perfectly summarizes the gist of pairing JUDAS PRIEST and Alice Cooper, two purveyors of bitter pills and sweet riffs. The former always seemed to embody no-nonsense heavy metal while preparing fantasies frilly enough to make multitudes embrace the freewheel-burning philosophy; the latter welcomed millions into his dungeon of nightmares while regularly discarding absurdity in favor of reality-haunted truth. The last time the listeners enjoyed this coupling onstage during “Operation Rock & Roll Tour” back in 1991, but about three decades further on down the line, a lot of things changed – yet a lot stayed the same, too.

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The Muscle Shoals Story To Be Told In New Book

September 30, 2025

There are just a few recording studios in the world that changed that same world by determining the course of popular music, and two of those based in the States were Stax and Muscle Shoals, the latter a home not only to such classics by the likes of Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett as, respectively, “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)” and “Land Of A Thousand Dances” but also “Brown Sugar” by THE ROLLING STONES and “Sailing” by Rod Stewart. So it’s about time the Alabama haunt’s tale to be dug into and explored in detail.

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