Happy New Year!  Welcome to another year of collectable CDs on keithhirsch.com! Let’s get started! Some years ago, a six-part series appeared here entitled, “The many faces of Phonogram CDs”.  These posts featured early “painted” label designs used for CDs on Phonogram labels that were pressed in West Germany.  The last such post and links to […]

Joe Cocker, the famous British rocker with an unmistakable deep and forceful voice, passed away on December 22nd.  He was 70.  A huge loss, given Cocker’s contributions to the world of the music over the past six decades. What follows is a brief overview of his brilliant musical career.  Admittedly, it does not begin to […]

It’s the holiday season yet again, so that means it’s time to feature a seasonal CD at keithhirsch.com.  We’ve been doing that since 2007, but never has a Target CD been the target.  Well, here’s one.  It’s a West German pressing of a six-person a capella group, The Western Wind, and the album is titled Caroling […]

2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the British Invasion.  Of course, most people immediately gravitate to that group from Liverpool, but we will not do that here.  Here we consider The Kinks, formed by brothers Ray and Dave Davies out of Muswell Hill, London.  Ray Davies was the frontman and songwriter, handling vocals, rhythm guitar, […]

Heavy metal doesn’t often grace the front page of keithhirsch.com, but it has happened here and there.  If you look around, you will see posts on early pressings of Iron Maiden Powerslave and Ozzy Osbourne Bark at the Moon.  Here’s another one.  In the 1980s, heavy metal got heavier and heavier — more guitars, more drums, […]

Collecting early CD pressings for some 12 years now, I have learned a lot.  Particularly interesting was learning about first issues of popular albums I had no idea existed due to their rarity.  At the start, I, like many people I have come across, believed that the first U.S. CD issue of Miles Davis’s 1959 classic […]

As a new audio format, the compact disc in the early days was targeted primarily for audiophiles, those who wanted uncompromised sound (“Perfect Sound Forever”, no snap, crackle, pop).  (Whether the CD delivered that can be debated until the cows come home and will not be debated here.)  Many record labels focused their efforts around the fledgling […]

After nearly a decade of success as one half of Hall & Oates, Daryl Hall embarked on a periodic solo career with 1980’s Sacred Songs.  It has been “periodic” in that Hall’s solo albums have been separated by additional charting offerings by the famous duo.  Hall’s second solo effort came in 1986 on RCA as […]