• This coming Tuesday serves up a warm musical gumbo from the Big Easy, a healing album from an all-star collective of displaced musicians calling themselves The New Orleans Social Club. The new CD, Sing Me Back Home, was recorded in a week's time in Austin, Texas, just six weeks after Hurricane Katrina bore down on their home city.
• With more than a dozen titles in its "Classic Albums: The Making of" DVD series, Eagle Vision has created the ultimate behind-the-scenes experience with the musicians themselves, with producers and other flies on the studio wall dissecting, and illuminating, the journey that created iconic rock albums, from Lou Reed's Transformer to Cream's Disraeli Gears.
• While Led Zeppelin, the Doors and Pink Floyd eternally captivate new waves of fans as they pass through the fondue pot of college mind expansion, this week Akron, Ohio's Devo is aggressively zeroing in on the blooming third eye of pre-teens.
• The Pretenders get the box-set treatment in Pirate Radio next week with 81 songs spread over four CDs, packed with demos, live tracks, and covers. The Rhino Records anthology also features a bonus DVD featuring 19 video clips going back to 1979, culled from performances on the UK's Top of the Pops, The Old Grey Whistle Test, and Later with Jools Holland, as well as a run through "The Adultress" on the 1980s sketch-comedy show Fridays.
For Matt Oltman, the news that Chanticleer was auditioning singers didn't sound real. A friend told him about the opportunity when he was a master's student in England, he said, and his reaction was disbelief. "The Chicago Cubs are having open tryouts," he said by way of comparison.
Octane, the debut album from the Quad Cities' The One Night Standards, features a reverb-y guitar that calls no place home on the fret board, wandering place to place in search of the perfect combination of notes.
• Lock up your children! Al Jourgensen is back with a new incarnation of his Revolting Cocks side project, a crazy runaway locomotive loaded with a wild who's who of guest stars. Released this coming Tuesday on his artist-controlled imprint, 13th Planet Records, Cocked & Loaded kicks off with "Fire Engine," a long-lost song written with Iggy Pop in the early 1980s.
The story of Stanley Dural Jr. is the story of a kid who hated his father's music. His dad was an accordion player, and he would play the instrument in their Louisiana home before and after his job as an auto mechanic.
• What do you do when your former record label compiles a greatest-hits package without your blessing? David Lowery, Johnny Hickman, and their comrades in Cracker took the dispute head-on, re-recording 13 of their own personally selected "best of" tracks and releasing them on the same day with another label.

Tumatoe Catch-Up

For a guy with the blues, Duke Tumatoe is remarkably upbeat. In a recent phone interview, the musician observed, "Life is inherently taken too seriously," and he's spent most of his career - the last 20 years headlining Dr.

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