the riley rock report Tim Riley

YOU FEEL FLATTERED watching Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film, and not just because you catch a contact high from her adoring audience. In a field of immaculate divas and country popsters, Swift creates her own rainbow fingernail category: rural Pennsylvania prom queen sets her diary to song with a charmed charisma and a singer’s dance moves. A lot of rivals now circle her career’s new gravity. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner put it in her New York Times Magazine profile, at a Swift concert “the night is sparkling and young love is amazing.”


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The master guitarist Ali Farka Touré died in 2006 at the age of 67, widely praised for developing an “African desert blues,” woven from his Malian roots. This Earthworks domestic debut rode the Graceland world music wave alongside Salif Keita. He probably made his highest-profile album with Talking Timbuktu in 1994 with Ry Cooder. This US debut lingers with more meditative swagger, and when this ran in the Boston Phoenix in 1989, I chanced upon him at the Jazz & Heritage Festival in New Orleans. The music’s intimacy cast a surreal spell. He would have turned 83 on October 31.


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Big fat media blip for the Replacements, a band with a casual brilliance that chafed hard against success. Make sure to read Bob Mehr’s pungent book (Trouble Boys) and crank up the Ed Stasium remaster. I caught a smashing Boston Opera House gig in 1988 when we were still scratching our heads about Bob Stinson’s replacement, but it remains a golden favorite, especially for “B******s of Young” and “Alex Chilton.” The next year they opened for Tom Petty as if to make his sturdy Heartbreakers sound shopworn. Track 10 from Disc 4 here features a “Strawberry Fields Forever” intro to “Mr. Whirly,” from a bleary set at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago that visits both “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Nowhere Man,” belying the band’s willful half-assery. Ironically Shook makes a better finale than the twilight shade of Don’t Tell A Soul. And in another groove-jumping move, drummer Chris Mars’s Horseshoes and Hand Grenades (Smash, 1992), not yet streaming, made for a whiplash coda.


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When Living Colour reached No 13 on the Billboard album chart with its fourth album, Stain, in 1993, a lot of seasoned observers talked about watching the Jimi Hendrix phenom play out all over again on a twenty-five year loop. Seeing this band in a small club remains a high point of writing for the Phoenix, and Greg Tate’s comments on Mick Jagger’s involvement sounds like prophecy. (By the way, did anyone else notice how the Stones may have dropped “Brown Sugar” from their live set, but not off their most recent and quite sparky, live album?) Of course, Reid went on to produce James Blood Ulmer, Salif Keita, B.B. King, and many others; his Zig-Zag Power Trio’s latest is called Woodstock Sessions Volume 9. This preview ran in advance of the band’s Orpheum show…


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To celebrate the anniversary of Help!, released this month in 1965, I talked with Steve Matteo. Matteo’s 33 1/3 title on Let It Be had a big influence on my 2011 Lennon biography, and his new book, Act Naturally, talks to fresh sources who worked on these projects. Turns out A Hard Day’s Night features the same cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, who had just finished filming Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. I started by asking Matteo why he chose the Let It Be album as his first book-length project…


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Kristin Hersh tours Europe in September after celebrating a birthday on August 7. So I went back to where I first tried to make sense of what made her Rhode Island band so compelling, and so fragile. just as they crested into alt-rock prominence. Sleater Kinney soon dominated the hipster crowd, but Hunkpapa holds up like a jangly oddity that makes sense of many other records.


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