Dad's dig music. I'm a dad, and if I didn't work at THEE record store (and already have them), these'd be on my Father's Day list:

Booker T - Potato Hole

This album has it ALL. The funky soul of classic Booker T, rocking guitar of Neil Young and it grooves to the backing of the Drive-By Truckers, poignantly tying together the fact that Patterson Hood's father, as a Muscle Shoals studio musician, was an integral part of the southern soul sound, that Booker T. spawned.  See how this Father's Day gift has several levels to it?!

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This is an album of blues covers. I thought I never needed to hear some of these songs again (they'd been covered SO much!), but they've absolutely been made fresh by Jack's gut-bucket voice, the

musicianmanship of Van Dyke Parks and David Hidalgo (Los Lobos) and Joe Henry's production. From the liner notes of A Stranger Here, Henry writes: "I pitched the idea that he interpret country blues music from the Depression era of his birth... songs as dark, funny and strange as is he and the times that produced them, and also ones that still resonate in these turbulent days." It's amazing how someone nearly 80 years old can interpret these aged classics in such a contemporary manner. I guess that's why we call them "artists".

Nick Lowe - Quiet Please... The New Best of Nick Lowe

The deluxe edition contains an extra music CD and a DVD that's actually worth watching. Nick Lowe's wit is hard to match- I mean, the guy's first single was called "Bowi" in response to David Bowie's album, "Low"; One gets the impression Nick can drink us all under the table while being one of the few songwriters who can pull off songs with words like "mirth" in them.   Once Johnny Cash's son-in-law (married to Carlene Carter), Nick Lowe is a real Dad's guy.

Rodriguez - Coming From Reality

The 1971 follow-up to Cold Fact, Coming From Reality was recently unearthed by the ultra-hip Light In The Attic label folks. On this one, Sixto Rodriguez leaves Motown for England, where he some of the finest Brit studio cats of the era (Chris Spedding, Steve Rowland) played with him. They obviously knew something that the public didn't pick up on until 40 years later! This one's less psych-soul than Cold Fact, but the songs create the kind of conceptual "landscape" that Dads miss in this era of disposable songs.

If you wanna REALLY show your dad (in $$s) how much you love him, you can splurge on...

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One of our best customers gave me this fabulous synopsis after spending the weekend with the DVD box:

After much deliberation, here’s my take on the Neil Young Archives Volume 1:

1. If you are primarily looking for exclusive (unreleased) material and are happy with 16-bit sound, then buy the CDs. But be advised that only about a third of the selections are exclusive to this release, so if you bought any of the previous studio albums (Neil Young, Everybody Knows, After the Gold Rush and Harvest) or live CDs (Fillmore East, Massey Hall and Canterbury House) then you are buying them again, minus a few songs. Mostly, you will be getting the Squires (pre-Buffalo Springfield), early demos, Live at the Riverboat 1969, and a fair amount of outtakes from the albums up through Harvest.

2. If in addition to the above you also want to pore over thousands of pieces of media (previously unseen photos, scans of handwritten lyric and chord sheets, correspondence, radio interviews, stage banter, timelines, biographical essays, etc.) and want to have the movie Journey Through the Past and/or want to play the discs on your DVD-audio player at 24-bit resolution (they will also play on standard DVD players at 16-bit), then buy the DVDs. This edition also comes with downloadable MP3 files of all the audio and a very cool 236-page scrapbook.

3. If in addition to everything on the DVDs you want “a constant stream of updates” via downloads and already have the hardware, then buy the Blu-Ray edition.

The memorabilia is fun – like touring a Neil Young museum. I’m not sure how many times a person would return to the information overload contained there, but it is amusing the first time through. It’s an indulgence that goes well with a rainy weekend or even a sunny one in complete hibernation enjoying deep air-conditioning with some foil over the windows of your living room and plenty of your favorite libations.