Fricke’s Picks Radio: Volume 1, Episode 3

“I just want to be treated like a normal legend,” Rodriguez, the resurrection story of 2012, said in a low, firm voice, silencing a weirdly loving, disruptive audience during his April 10th concert at New York’s Town Hall. He certainly got a puzzled quiet while playing “Dead End Street,” a 1966 hit for the R&B singer Lou Rawls, now reverberating with Rodriguez’s love and anguish for his home city, Detroit. Here is Rawls’ dynamic original, along with a song from Eleanor Friedberger of Fiery Furnaces, who gamely opened the show with a solo set of acoustic guitar and acutely drawn, precarious romance.

Rodriguez: 10 Things You Don’t Know About the ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ Star

Also reflected here are current immersions in David Bowie‘s return to record, The Next Day (ISO/Columbia); the stark, commanding propulsion of Britain’s Savages, about to release their debut album, Silence Yourself (Matador); “You Lust,” the liquid-mercury centerpiece of the Flaming Lips’ electro-nightmare, The Terror (Warner Bros.); and the enduring white-soul invention of the Rascals, now playing a big chunk of their best-selling legacy on Broadway in the reunion production, The Rascals: Once Upon a Dream.

The Rascals Reunite on Broadway

The Pink Floyd finish, from the soundtrack of the 1970 film, Zabriskie Point, is for the album-cover designer Storm Thorgerson, who died on April 18th. I wanted to play “Remember a Day” from 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets, the first cover Thorgerson created for that band. But the Floyd don’t stream.

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