Gregg Allman "I'm No Angel: Live On Stage" Available on December 11

On December 11, Cherry Red Records will release Gregg Allman "I'm No Angel: Live On Stage" in North America via MVD Entertainment Group. The DVD features a full length concert from Gregg Allman and his band at The Cannery, Nashville, USA in November 1988. Amongst the songs featured are Billboard chart hit single 'I'm No Angel' and a version of Blind Willie McTell's 'Statesboro Blues' (a famous part of The Allman Brothers Band's live sets). Tracklist: 1. Don't Want You No More 2. It's My Cross To Bear 3. Sweet Feeling 4. Just Before The Bullets Fly 5. Fear Of Falling 6. Demons 7. I'm No Angel 8. Statesboro' Blues 9. Slip Away 10. One Way Out  Gregg Allman is one of the most celebrated rock musicians of all time. He first came to prominence with his brother Duane as The Allman Brothers Band in the early 1970's. As lead singer and keyboard player, Gregg was a vital part of the band's huge success on albums such as "Idlewild South" and "At Fillmore East". After Duane Allman's death in 1971, Gregg continued with The Allman Brothers Band in its various guises - scoring four US top ten albums, and also launched his own solo career. Allman continues to record and play live to present day, both solo and as part of The Allman Brothers Band, who were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1995 and were given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.  Preorder:  http://www.seeofsound.com/p.php?s=CRDVD182  Cover Art: http://mvdb2b.com/i/300dpi/CRDVD182.jpg       #  #  #

TO CELEBRATE RECORD STORE DAY’S BACK TO BLACK FRIDAY EVENT (NOVEMBER 23) OMNIVORE RECORDINGS READIES FOUR TEN-INCH VINYL DISCS BY WANDA JACKSON, GEORGE JONES, MERLE HAGGARD AND BUCK OWENS

Also from Omnivore, Jellyfish’s two-CD set Stack-a-Tracks offers rare glimpse of band in an instrumental mode

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Record Store Day comes but once a year, but its Back to Black Friday event in November brings the focus back to independent record stores during the biggest shopping day of the year. And for Omnivore Recordings, it’s an important and fun event. 

“Everyone at Omnivore is a fan and a collector, most of us have worked at a record store at some point in our career, and as a label, Back to Black Friday gives us an opportunity to make something that we might not otherwise get the chance to make,” says the label’s Cheryl Pawelski. “We love supporting record stores because we all grew up in them and feel that they are an important part of how people learn about music.”

In order to celebrate Back to Black Friday (November 23, 2012), Omnivore has prepared four ten-inch vinyl EPs by country legends Merle Haggard, Wanda Jackson, George Jones and Buck Owens, with much of the material making its vinyl debut. At another end of the musical spectrum, Jellyfish’s Stack-a-Tracks presents never-before-heard instrumental mixes of the band’s two studio albums in a limited-edition, numbered, first edition digipak.

On November 23, 2012, Omnivore will release these ten-inch discs, which will preview full albums due in 2013: George Jones’ United Artists Rarities; Wanda Jackson’s Capitol Rarities; Merle Haggard’s Capitol Rarities; and Buck Owens’ Buck Sings Eagles. Jellyfish’s Stack-a-Tracks also hits the racks on the same day.

According to Pawelski, “Our very first Omnivore release, the Big Star — Third [Test Pressing Edition, released on Record Store Day 2011] is an example of being a little extra creative for Record Store Day. It was an expensive release to make, and without the event that is RSD, we probably couldn’t have pulled it off. It gave us that extra latitude to be able to push the creative limits as far as we could go and justify it.”

The November 2012 Record Store Day releases:

• George Jones – United Artists Rarities: As Jones prepares for his farewell tour in 2013, Omnivore is planning the release of The Complete United Artists Solo Singles. Jones had two label homes prior to signing to UA in 1962, and while his tenure there was short (four years), it produced hits like “She Thinks I Still Care” and “The Race Is On.” The United Artists Rarities ten-inch vinyl EP in a beautiful picture sleeve presents four alternate versions of UA recordings plus two previously unissued duets with Melba Montgomery  (“There Will Never Be Another” and “Alabama”).

• Wanda Jackson – Capitol Rarities: 2012 was a big year for the Queen of Rockabilly on the heels of career-reinvigorating new albums produced by Jack White and Justin Townes Earle. While Omnivore puts the crowning touches on its 2013 release The Best of the Classic Capitol Singles, the six-song vinyl EP Capitol Rarities sets the stage. Included are previously unissued versions of songs recorded between 1956-62 including “Step by Step” “In the Middle of a Heartache,” “The Wrong Kind of Girl” and three more.

• Merle Haggard – Capitol Rarities: One of the pioneers of the Bakersfield sound, Haggard toured with Buck Owens in the early ’60s and in 1965 was signed to Capitol Records (already home to Buck) by producer Ken Nelson. Omnivore is planning a full-length CD The Complete Capitol ’60s Singles for 2013 release, to which the Capitol Rarities ten-inch vinyl EP sets the stage. The EP contains songs never released back in the day, and alternate versions of well-known tunes. All six songs emanate from unique Nashville and Hollywood recording sessions, making this EP a very cool, collectible piece.

• Buck Owens – Buck Sings Eagles: If Buck Owens, Father of the Bakersfield sound, wasn’t already a household name by 1968, the advent of the hit TV series Hee Haw cemented his fame. Music for the show was recorded in Buck’s studio and then played back on the show with live-to-track vocals. Omnivore will issue these previously unissued made-for-TV recordings as Honky Tonk Man: Buck Owens Sings Country Classics in 2013. Among these recordings were four previously unissued cover songs by the California country-rock torch-carriers the Eagles that comprise the ten-inch vinyl EP.

• Jellyfish: Stack-a-Tracks: While recording their two pivotal studio albums, 1990’s Bellybutton and 1993’s Spilt Milk, “instrumental” mixes of each record were created by Jellyfish and their producers. Unheard and untouched for decades, these recordings will finally see the light of day on Omnivore Recordings’ Jellyfish – Stack-a-Tracks. This is not a “re-imagining” of what these records “might” sound like as instrumentals. They’re the real deal, transferred from the original 1/4-inch masters. With an individually numbered edition of 2,500 units, housed in a digipak for the limited first edition with new illustrated artwork (created for the release by artist Mike McCarthy), this two-CD set is destined to become the newest gem in the collection of power-pop fans everywhere.

About Omnivore Recordings:

Founded in 2010 by longtime, highly respected industry veterans Cheryl Pawelski, Greg Allen, Dutch Cramblitt, and Brad Rosenberger, Omnivore Recordings preserves the legacies and music created by historical, heritage, and catalog artists while also releasing previously unissued, newly found “lost” recordings and making them available for music-loving audiences to discover. Omnivore Recordings is distributed by EMI.

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For more information on Omnivore Recordings, please contact Conqueroo:

Cary Baker • (323) 656-1600 • cary@conqueroo.com

AUSTIN-BASED DUSTIN WELCH EXPLORES THEMES SACRED AND PROFANE ON SELF-RELEASED SECOND ALBUM, TIJUANA BIBLE, DUE OUT FEB. 12

Son of songwriter’s songwriter Kevin Welch continues to chart his own adventurous path following twisted sonic roadmap of his dreams 

AUSTIN, Texas — Building on the thrilling strengths of his fearsomely original 2009 debut, Whisky Priest (which LoneStarMusic magazine deemed “one of the most compelling albums to come out of Texas in the past year”), Austin-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Dustin Welch is set to release his second album, Tijuana Bible, on Feb. 12 via his own Super Rooster Records.

Like Whisky Priest before it, Tijuana Bible finds the Nashville-born Welch playing the part of a wickedly mysterious carnival barker, bouncing strains of Americana, rock, and folk music off of each other like a hall of funhouse mirrors. His lyrics are similarly multifaceted, reflecting literary influences ranging from American gothic to gritty pulp fiction and themes both sacred and profane. Welch calls Whisky Priest and Tijuana Bible (named after the hand-drawn pornographic pamphlets that were passed around in Depression-era work camps) the first two parts of a projected trilogy. Although the songs are neither overtly religious nor linked to each other as part of a conceptual story, many of them do share a sense of desperation-hardened fortitude — along with hints of mono-mythic mysticism. Welch, a voracious reader who home-schooled his way out of high school and now cites authors like Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, has read his share of Joseph Campbell, too.

“I’ve thought a lot about [Campbell’s writings on] myth and storytelling, because it’s so much a part of our fabric, and there’s a lot of that kind of mysticism in it,” Welch says. “I think a lot of these songs have a kind of glimmer of hope to them. They’re about these folks who are going through really hard times, but there’s that little bit of hope that keeps them going. Which, again, is a lot like the heroes that Joseph Campbell talked about. That’s the kind of state they’re in; I just drag these characters through all hell, but they’re holding on against all odds for this once chance of redemption.”

As for the music, well, Welch will swear on a bible — Tijuana, King James, whatever you’ve got on hand — that he dreamt it all up. And not just a song, à la Keith Richards and “Satisfaction,” but a whole damn sound. It came to him as a vision — so loud and clear he could see it like a moving picture in his mind, the notes and colors and shapes coming into sharp relief just as he was drifting off to sleep. The melody was strange and complex, a beautiful cacophony of disparate styles clashing together all at once: Celtic and Appalachian folk music set to driving rock and dexterous jazz rhythms, with big harmonies sung in a “gritty and raw,” “archaic” sounding language. “It was profound,” he recalls. “It felt like horses running wild. And I’d never heard anything like it.”

That was half his life ago, but that sound still resonates within him. And through him, because that music Welch first heard in a dream some 15 years ago is now very much his own sound, still wild and untamed but corralled into the digital grooves of Tijuana Bible, which he recorded in Austin at the home studio of producer/drummer Eldridge Goins. In addition to writing or co-writing all 11 songs, Welch plays banjo and acoustic and gut-string guitar on the album; other players include electric guitarist Jeremy Nail, violinist Trisha Keefer, pianist Scotty Bucklin, and bassist Steve Bernal, among others.

“We ended up doing some overdubs, but mostly we recorded everything live in the same room in three different sessions in three days,” says Welch, who made himself right at home on Austin’s celebrated live music scene upon moving to town just a few years ago. “This group of guys, they’re all really sophisticated musicians, and it’s funny because a lot of real sophisticated musicians like that, really all they want to do deep down is rock.”

Listen to Welch snarl, stomp, and tear his way through the songs on Tijuana Bible, or watch him ratchet up the intensity even higher onstage (even when playing solo acoustic!), and you’d naturally assume the guy was born wanting to rock himself. Fact is, he was a bit of a late bloomer, at least to that side of his musical personality. As happens when your father is a renowned songwriter (Kevin Welch) with a Nashville publishing deal and you grow up around some of the most gifted writers and hottest pickers in Music City, U.S.A., Welch was born and raised surrounded by music and displayed a natural affinity for any instrument he could get his hands on practically from the time he was in diapers. But as a teenager, most of the music other kids his age were into just didn’t speak to him. He avoided MTV and VH1. “I remember the first time I heard Nirvana’s Nevermind, I thought was the worst shit I’d ever heard,” he admits with a laugh. (Jimi Hendrix didn’t impress him much at the time, either — though he’s quick to note that he’s since learned to appreciate both.)

In lieu of rock, Welch’s earliest musical influences just naturally skewed more towards jazz, classical, blues and country. In high school, he flirted with jammy hippie fare in a band called the Groundlings (featuring singer Cary Ann Hearst, now of the Americana duo Shovels and Rope), and he later spent his early 20s playing rootsy, old-timey country and blues in Nashville’s the Swindlers with fellow “Music Row brats” Justin Townes Earle, Travis Nicholson and Cory Younts (Old Crow Medicine Show, Jack White). But then fate came knocking via an offer to join a West Coast Celtic punk band called the Scotch Greens in need of a touring utility player. It wasn’t long before Welch was reveling in the rush of playing full-throttle punk rock (on banjo and Resonator slide guitar, no less) in front of moshing Warped Tour fans.

“I think it made a big impression on me the way that people reacted to that stuff, and just the energy of it,” he says. “I’d see 500 people in a crowd of 1,500 all singing along, pumping their fists in the air. I think music can really be something that the listener can participate in. It’s the same way with some speakers and preachers; their message might not be anything real profound, but the way they deliver it, that intensity just builds and builds until everybody is empowered and feels like making a difference in the world.

All that energy and intensity certainly made a difference in Welch’s own music, once he finished his time with the Scotch Greens and moved to Austin to begin his solo career in earnest. “It came through in both my writing and my delivery,” he says. “It gave me the confidence to just make things slightly more . . . exaggerated. Exaggerated rather than glorified, though, which is what you hear in a lot of more commercial music. When it’s over-glorified, I think it robs it of its soul. But I’ve really been getting pretty idealistic about how much music can change the world, and I think the more heartfelt communication we have, the better place the world can be.”

That’s not a belief he holds on blind faith, either; he’s witnessed it action. Welch has spent the better part of the past year and a half volunteering for the Texas chapter of the Soldier Songs & Voices program, a national organization he helped found that provides free music and songwriting lessons — and even guitars — to Armed Forces veterans. Twice a week, he meets with men and women who are finding through song a means to not only share their stories, but also cope with and make sense of their own journeys to hell and back again. “These guys we’re working with, they’re really getting their lives back, and I see it more and more every week,” Welch marvels. “And music can work that way across the board, with anybody, because it really is our common denominator. It’s the universal language, and it resonates with people on this subconscious, emotional way.”

And on Tijuana Bible, Welch uses that language to tell the trials and tribulations of a varied cast of battered and broken but not quite entirely beaten souls, ranging from the Vietnam vet of “Sparrows” to the fragile Hollywood China doll of “Party Girl” to the fire-starting whore’s son of the album’s chaotic closing title track. There are more sinners than saints here, and some of them are admittedly a lot farther off from redemption than others. As the protagonist in “St. Lucy’s Eyes” warns, “This life I lead, it’s not for the faint of heart.” But even at its darkest, Welch’s music still thunders with the exuberant spirit of horses running wild, indifferent to the line between fever dream and prophesy.

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             For more information about Dustin Welch, please contract Conqueroo:
                            Cary Baker • (323) 656-1600 • cary@conqueroo.com

KINKY FRIEDMAN’S BIPOLAR TOUR GOES WEST BY MIDWEST

Fact-finding mission by Texas’ beloved singer-songwriter, author, cigar and tequila mogul, and animal rescuer AUSTIN, Texas — Is Kinky Friedman, self-proclaimed author, columnist, musician, beautician and Governor of the Heart of Texas, really bipolar? Though this is likely a question for a higher authority or licensed professional, Kinky will nonetheless reprise his super-successful BiPolar Tour in December. Beginning with dates at some of his favorite haunts in the Midwest (he starts in Kansas City on November 30), the tour will wind through the Rockies, before going coastal in California and Oregon. Kinky will perform solo with New Jersey artist Brian Molnar opening on most of the dates. In San Diego, he’ll reprise his smash co-bill with Mojo Nixon. The BiPolar World Tour is nothing if not a fact-finding mission, as Kinky calculates national political views, particularly toward the Kinkster himself. For Kinky is considering a second run for Texas governor. After a plethora of recent (and ongoing) gaffes by Texas’ Rick Perry, one of the nation’s least popular sitting governors, the Kinkster will bring a fresh view of Texas politics with him. Pollsters and the Kinky-ites believe he can win this time. Most Texans (and a whole lot of other Americans) already know who is the true governor of the heart of Texas. Aside from his pending political rebirth, Kinky is both energized and excited about all things Kinky, not least of which is his new book written with Willie Nelson, Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die. Kinky’s extensive forward and full-on collaboration with Willie has perked the ears of the publishing world, and the book promises to be one of the top sellers of the fall and winter seasons. Additionally, conversations have already begun with major publishers about a return of Kinky’s intrepid detective . . . himself, with a two-book deal in the offing. Kinky will be hawking a new live solo CD, Live From Woodstock, recorded on the first American leg of the BiPolar Tour and featuring some of his best work ever. He will also introduce Kinky Friedman’s Man in Black Tequila to Californians, with tastings at most venues and auctions in each city of three-bottle gift boxes. All profits from the auctions go to the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, Kinky’s favorite 501c3 charitable organization. Live From Woodstock is not the only CD about which Kinky is excited. Rising star roots performer Jesse Dayton has recorded an entire album of Kinky’s songs (Jesse Sings Kinky), and it’s getting major attention in Americana radio, especially at SiriusXM. Dayton has also been starring as Kinky in road productions of Becoming Kinky, by the prize-winning playwright Ted Swindley, who created the world smash Always — Patsy Cline. International productions will be heading across the pond in 2013. Also on tap in 2012- 2013: a Russian film based on Kinky’s non-detective novel, Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned. Filming has already begun. But this December it’s all about being with the people, performing for the people and listening to the people. BiPolar? It’s all relative. Let the villagers be the judge, and if they end up convincing Kinky to jump into politics again, Texans will rejoice, and so will the rest of America. Meanwhile, Kinky remains the Jewish Troubadour of our times, with a show for the ages. KINKY FRIEDMAN’S BIPOLAR TOUR — A FACT FINDING MISSION Fri., Nov 30  KANSAS CITY, MO  Knuckleheads Sat., Dec 1  ST. LOUIS, MO  Off Broadway Sun., Dec 2  OKLAHOMA CITY, OK  The Blue Door Mon., Dec 3  TULSA, OK  Oklahoma Jazz Hall Of Fame (The Jazz Depot) Tues., Dec 4  DENVER, CO Oriental Theater Thur., Dec 6  SALT LAKE CITY  The State Room Fri., Dec 7  LOS ANGELES (SANTA MONICA), CA  McCabe’s Guitar Store Sat., Dec 8  SANTA YNEZ, CA  Maverick Saloon Sun., Dec 9  VENTURA, CA  Zoey’s Cafe Mon., Dec 10 SOLANA BEACH, CA  The Belly Up w/Mojo Nixon Tues., Dec 11  BAKERSFIELD, CA  The Prime Cut Wed., Dec 12  MONTEREY, CA  The Mucky Duck Thur., Dec 13  SANTA CRUZ, CA  Private Party Fri., Dec 14  SEBASTOPOL, CA  Studio E Sat., Dec 15  WINTERS, CA  The Palms Playhouse Sun., Dec 16  SANTA CRUZ, CA  Moe’s Alley Mon., Dec 17 MODESTO, CA  St. Clair Theater Tues., Dec 18  SAN FRANCISCO, CA  Cafe Du Nord Wed., Dec 19  PORTLAND, OR  Aladdin Theater Thur., Dec 20  EUGENE, OR  WOW Hall  # # # For more information on Kinky Friedman and to set up interviews and appearances, please contact Conqueroo: Cary Baker • conqueroo • (323) 656-1600 • cary@conqueroo.com