Continuing their efforts to reward music fans who still patronize independent record stores, a coalition of small retailers will be offering exclusive releases on Nov. 26 from rock, pop, R&B and country artists including U2, Metallica, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix and many others.

The special releases are part of indie retailers' "Back to Black Friday" promotion for the day after Thanksgiving, typically the heaviest shopping day of the year.

Many are being released on vinyl, which gives rise to the "back to black" theme. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Cee-Lo, Iron & Wine and Drive-By Truckers are among the other acts participating.

"These exclusive pieces not only create nice sales, but a lasting memory and connection between the customer, the store, the employee and the artist, whose importance can't be overstated," Mike Batt, who owns Silver Platters, a Seattle indie music store, said in a statement Thursday.

The store owners also seek to increase awareness of existing retailers each spring with National Record Store Day, which also has become something of a cause celebre among pop and rock stars.

"Many of the great indies have disappeared in recent years, but Record Store Day is giving us yet another chance to show appreciation to this wonderful endangered slice of Americana," Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers said in the same statement.

Among exclusive high-profile reissues coming to the indie stores for the holiday season are a special edition of Harrison's 1970 solo triple-album "All Things Must Pass" and a Hendrix holiday EP, "Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year."

-- Randy Lewis

 
In addition to offering vintage performance footage of such classic artists as Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Leonard Cohen, the Doors, Jethro Tull, Emerson Lake & Palmer and the Moody Blues, the 2010 Mods & Rockers Film Festival will be highlighting one name more than any other: Murray Lerner.

He’s the filmmaker behind several of the documentaries in this year’s festival, which opens Thursday and runs through Sunday at theaters in Hollywood and Santa Monica.

Lerner’s name is best known in pop music circles for "Message to Love," his film that captured the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival in the U.K., where Hendrix, the Doors, Tull, ELP and numerous others drew more than 600,000 fans about a year after Woodstock.

The celebrated “Woodstock” film is what inspired Lerner to move forward with an alternative view of that era in pop culture, even though the festival sponsors who hired him to document their event went broke and never came through with the financing for a film he’d been promised.

In Michael Wadleigh’s film about the famous “three days of peace and music” in upstate New York, “They were making the point that everything was hunky-dory -- peace and love, obviously,” Lerner once said. “And I don't believe it.”

Atlanta rapper-actor Ludacris is back atop the national sales chart with his latest, “Battle of the Sexes,” his third No. 1 album and the first rap collection to make it to the top since Jay-Z’s “Blueprint” logged two weeks there in September.

It’s a rebound of sorts for the rhymer born Christopher Bridges, after his 2008 album, “Theater of the Mind,” made it only as high as No. 5. “Battle of the Sexes” had first-week sales of 137,000 copies, putting it just ahead of the new Gorillaz effort, “Plastic Beach,” opening at No. 2 on sales of 112,000 copies.

In a strong week for new releases, with five debuting in the Top 10, the posthumous Jimi Hendrix collection “Valleys of Neptune” enters the chart at No. 4, on sales of 95,000 copies. That’s one notch higher than the peak position of his landmark 1967 debut album, “Are You Experienced?,” and right behind 1968’s “Axis: Bold as Love” and 1971’s “The Cry of Love,” both of which peaked at No. 3. The rock guitar hero scored his only No. 1 album in 1968 with “Electric Ladyland.”

The other new entries to the chart this week are from Southland-reared country singer Gary Allan, who debuts at No. 5 on sales of 65,000 copies of “Get Off the Pain,” and  Broken Bells, the new group featuring producer Danger Mouse and Shins singer James Mercer. Their collaboration, also called “Broken Bells,” starts out at No. 7 with sales of 49,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Ludacris. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Fans will be fascinated by these bluesy riffs with the Experience, but this album of unreleased material from the archives doesn't convey much that was unknown.

It's 2010. What could we still want from Jimi Hendrix? He's been gone so long. Yet the master guitarist, Afro-futurist and ultimate psychedelic freak still generates an aura of possibility stronger than what many still-breathing pop stars can maintain. He's the lost rocker most strongly associated with the question "What if?" 

What if Hendrix had collaborated with Miles Davis, gotten into synthesizers, put together that big band he'd been planning at the time of his death? Would rock as we know it be different now? What would Hendrix have made of hip-hop? Would he have had a hand in inventing it? Something about his music points so strongly toward unimaginable next accomplishments that it's hard to consign him to the past. 

Hendrix's estate was a mess for years, and many shoddy reissues tugged his spirit into dingy corners. With the release of "Valley of Neptune," a new phase begins. This album of previously unreleased studio material is the first in a new campaign from Experience Hendrix, the company led by the artist's stepsister Janie. Deluxe reissues of the three sets Hendrix made with his band the Experience will be released on the same day, and Janie recently said that there's enough unheard stuff in the vault to make for a decade of new releases.

That's a lot of "What ifs." "Valleys of Neptune," however, doesn't add much to that particular conversation. Consisting of tracks recorded with the Experience and a few other players as Jimi was growing disenchanted with the power trio format and preparing to form something else, "Valleys of Neptune" reinforces what fans know well about Hendrix: that he loved the blues; that he was a technical wizard who gained energy from extended jams but always came back to the killer riff; that the foundation he created informed the work of every godlike ax dude who followed, from his peers Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton to Prince, the Edge, Jack White and John Mayer.

This is a longer version of a story that appears on the front page of today's Los Angeles Times.

With the exception of James Dean, who made only three films, there might be no pop-culture icon who has done more with less than the late Jimi Hendrix. The ultimate guitar hero released just three studio albums before his death in 1970, but new generations of music fans keep plugging into his amplified legacy.

The volume of Hendrix’s music is about get turned up. Today, the Hendrix estate and Sony Music Entertainment will announce the March 9 release of a “new” Hendrix album, “Valleys of Neptune,” which will feature a dozen unreleased recordings.

The late star’s sister, Janie Hendrix, calls the material a “major revelation” about her brother’s musical directions at the time of his death, but the project and Sony’s intense interest in it also reveal plenty about the modern music marketplace — namely that proven stars of the past, even the dead ones, are growing more important to an industry facing an uncertain future.

At last week’s massive 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sony chairman and chief executive Howard Stringer opened his company’s presentation by talking about Sony’s Legacy Recordings and its licensing agreement with Experience Hendrix, the Seattle-based company that acts as steward of the estate.

That partnership was first announced last summer, but today marks the real rollout of Sony’s venture into the Hendrix vault. The company also will re-release familiar Hendrix albums bundled with new DVD documentaries, take the star into the online sector in a more aggressive way and look for synergy opportunities with a 17-city tour of an all-star Hendrix tribute that begins March 4 in Santa Barbara.

“It’s an auspicious start in fulfilling a shared vision for the Jimi Hendrix catalog going forward,” Legacy general manager Adam Block said of the partnership.

Perhaps, but it also offers insight into the mind set at the major record labels. There was a major scramble among Sony’s rivals to land the Hendrix deal for the simple reason that icons of the past are viewed as a particularly good investment at a time when CD sales of new music are in continued decline and up-and-coming acts represent limited upside amid the shifting profit realities of the digital-download era.

In other words, the rewind button looks like a safer bet these days.

Warner Music Group has undertaken a major Frank Sinatra revival that is both archival — with the release of vintage recordings — and entrepreneurial with new ventures in advertising, film and perhaps a Las Vegas casino. Michael Jackson was the bestselling artist of last year (8.2 million albums sold in the U.S. alone), and the Beatles came in third (3.3 million); country crossover singer Taylor Swift finished between the two with music that was actually recorded in this century. The Fab Four also hit the video game market with their Rock Band game, the latest of their seemingly seasonal encores as a pop-culture force.

And now, Hendrix is warming up as a 21st century enterprise...