JEFFREY MORGAN’S MEDIA BLACKOUT #556.187!

Pink – Funhouse (LaFace) :: What a stooge.

Love – Out Here (Collectors’ Choice) :: Well it’s 1969, OK? And Arthur Lee is conducting a cosmic clinic that easily outstrips what passes for progressive rock today—especially on the exhaustive “Doggone,” which abruptly shifts gears at the three-minute mark from a melodious ballad into an inna-gadda-be-kidding mode for the remaining nine minutes. Oop-ip-ip oop-ip-ip, yeah!

Three Dog Night – Greatest Hits Live (Shout! Factory) :: This previously unreleased barn-burner from 1973 just decimates their two earlier live offerings. Bonus points for injecting “Mama Told Me (Not To Come)” with this ad-lib: “The radio is blastin’, someone’s knockin’ on the door. I’m lookin’ at my girlfriend, she’s O.D.’d on the floor!”

Marty Robbins & Tammy Wynette – Legendary Performances (Shout! Factory) :: These two DVDs contain 30 recitals filmed between 1957 to 1981 and are a veritable golden age country music goldmine. Don’t miss the bonus footage of Tammy’s wedding which, alas, isn’t scored to her singing “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

Frankie Valli – Heaven Above Me (Collectors’ Choice) :: CC has just reissued eight of the Joisey Boy’s albums from 1967 to 1980, but the one to get is this delirious disco disc that dares to devolve Gershwin’s “An American In Paris” into a 135-bpm snow job. Oscar Levant wept.

SIZZLING PLATTER OF THE WEEK: Tom Snyder – The Tomorrow Show: John, Paul, Tom & Ringo (Shout! Factory) :: The greatest interviewer in talk show history raps with three Beatles in archival footage that displays his uncanny ability to disarm his guests and get them to open up—as witnessed when Ringo, sitting in Neil Bogart’s house, candidly confesses to being called a fag at school. And you wonder why he wanted to open a chain of women’s hairdressing salons.

George Harrison – Playboy Interview (February 1965) :: “Ringo and I are gettin’ married to each other. But that’s a thing you better keep a secret. People would probably think we’re queers.”

Be seeing you!