Otis Redding didn't simply "play concerts." The soul giant was a human Mount Vesuvius: He erupted. Redding was at the height of his fame in March 1967, when he played these two brief shows in London and Paris. (He would die in a plane crash in December that year.) And the audience's reaction is ecstatic — it's a fair bet that few of these Europeans had ever witnessed a spectacle quite like Redding and the all-star Stax house band, Booker T. and the MG's and the Mar-Key horns, tearing into...

"Facing all kinda time/But smile like I'm fine," T.I. crows on "No Matter What." The Atlanta rapper recorded his sixth album while under house arrest for weapons possessions charges, and he faces a year-long prison sentence beginning in 2009. But as the plodding "existential" concept album T.I. vs T.I.P. (2007) showed, he is a far better braggart than brooder — smiling like he's fine is good for business. On Paper Trail, T.I. mostly dispenses with the Tupac-wannabe gangsta-confessor...

"How do you write about breaking up with Joni Mitchell?" asks Graham Nash in the liner notes to his first solo album. Good question. His 1970 split with the willowy Canadian singer-songwriter was the seed of this modest 33-minute solo debut, which proves the cliché that unfortunate events can generate excellent art. The stripped-down piano ballads "Better Days" and "Simple Man" ("I just want to hold you/I don't want to hold you down") and the majestic "I Used to Be a King," spangled with Jerry...

After years of dwindling sales, Johnny Cash walked into California's Folsom Prison on January 13th, 1968, and reinvigorated his career: At Folsom Prison, the live album he cut that day, went platinum and shored up Cash's outlaw image with jailbird anthems that vividly evoked prison life with a country-folk sound that became roughly as enduring as the Bible. This two-CD, one-DVD reissue includes the set that followed the original recording, plus songs from openers Carl Perkins and the Statler...

In late 1982, the greatest punk band of all time was in the midst of a swift, sad decline: Though the Clash had just released their most commercially successful album, Combat Rock, they had also just booted longtime drummer and then-smack addict Topper Headon — a move that, according to late, great frontman Joe Strummer, sent the band "limping to its death." The following year would see the departure of singer-guitarist Mick Jones, and the classic Clash lineup would never cut another...

Old Crow Medicine Show aren't revivalists. They're anachronists. On their fourth full-length, produced by Don Was, the Nashville quartet mash up a well-nigh 19th-century sound — hopped-up folk, bluegrass, country and gospel — with lyrics that are firmly planted in the 21st century. "Huff paint, cocaine, playing chicken with a train/Smack dab, meth lab, mellow out, rehab," hoots Ketch Secor in "Alabama High-Test." Several songs cast a journalistic eye on hard partying, from the countr...