Four New Liberation Hall Reissues, and Every One Is About Something That Almost Got Away

There is a kind of record label that treats the past as inventory, and a kind that treats it as a patient on the table. Liberation Hall is the second kind, and that is not an accident of taste. The label is run by refugees of the old Rhino Records, the outfit that basically invented the lovingly annotated reissue, and you can hear that bloodline in everything they touch. Their fall slate is four records that have nothing in common on the surface and everything in common underneath. Every one of them is about something that nearly slipped away for good.

Here is the batch, and then here is why it matters. Liberation Hall is putting out a Jackie DeShannon vinyl, a previously unreleased Mike Bloomfield concert, a compilation of half-forgotten surf instrumentals, and the shelved debut of a bluegrass supergroup. Line them up and a theme raises its hand whether anyone planned it or not. Lateness. Last nights. Last albums. Debuts that waited years for a door to open. Names nobody bothered to keep. This is catalog as triage, and I am here for all of it.

The one that stops me cold is Dark Road Blues: Santa Cruz 1981. On January 31, 1981, Mike Bloomfield played the Catalyst in Santa Cruz and somebody left a soundboard running. Two weeks later he was gone at 37. That tape is the last thing we have of one of the most gifted guitarists of his generation, the kid from Chicago who anchored the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, founded the Electric Flag, and stood next to Bob Dylan the night Dylan plugged in and split the folk world down the middle. What the soundboard caught is ten blues perennials, a man at the piano and the guitar with no idea it is the end, playing like it is any other Saturday. Music writer Chris Morris supplies a new liner essay. There is nothing morbid about it. It is a man doing the one job he was built for, one more time, preserved by pure luck. That is what a real reissue label is for. To make sure the luck gets kept.

Jackie DeShannon keeps it going

The Jackie DeShannon record runs a gentler version of the same play. When You Walk in the Room brings her final studio album back to vinyl on its 15th anniversary, 11 of her best-loved songs re-recorded acoustically, stripped to the bones. Here is what you need to know about DeShannon if you came in late. She is one of the great American songwriters who spent a career hiding inside other people’s hits. She wrote the title song. She co-wrote “Bette Davis Eyes” with Donna Weiss, the tune that became Kim Carnes’s signature and won DeShannon the Grammy for Song of the Year in 1982. She wrote “Put a Little Love in Your Heart.” Reducing songs like those to a voice and an acoustic guitar is not a nostalgia move. It is an argument that the song is the permanent thing and the production was always just weather. I happen to think she is right, and this reissue is her closing statement on it.

Then there is The Hillmen, which is my single favorite species of reissue, the great lost first record. Cut in 1963 and 1964, it sat on a shelf until 1970, by which point one of its members, a young Chris Hillman, had already wandered off to help invent folk rock as a founding Byrd. The lineup also held Vern and Rex Gosdin before they became country royalty, plus banjo ace Don Parmley. They played Dylan and Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and Maybelle Carter alongside their own Gosdin originals, and almost nobody heard a note of it in time. This first-ever reissue expands the original 11 tracks with six bonus cuts and recreates the jacket art by Dean Torrance of Jan and Dean. It was produced by Byrds manager Jim Dickson and mixed from the original three-track tapes by Dave Hassinger, the same engineer who ran the board for the Rolling Stones and the Jackson 5. A supergroup nobody knew was a supergroup, getting introduced about sixty years late.

The one pure party in the set is Surf-Age Nuggets: Trash and Twang Instrumentals, 14 rare big-wave cuts from 1959 to 1966 by bands with names like the Reekers, the Vaqueros, and the Runabouts. That word Nuggets is doing deliberate work. It plants a flag in the long tradition of digging up the obscure and insisting, loudly, that it mattered. Most of these groups never got a second single. Here they are anyway, pressed on blue marble vinyl, sounding like a Tuesday at the beach in 1962. It is the least heavy record on the slate and maybe the truest to the mission, because saving the unfamous is harder than saving the famous, and somebody sat down and did it.

Now the part you came for, quarantined here so you can find it fast. Dark Road Blues arrives on gray splatter vinyl on October 2, exclusive to participating RSD Essentials stores, with CD and download following October 9 at Amazon or Bandcamp, and the digital single “I Don’t Know” is already out. Surf-Age Nuggets lands the same October 2 date on Laguna Blue marble vinyl, also an RSD Essentials exclusive. The Jackie DeShannon vinyl reaches stores October 23, pre-orderable now at Amazon or Bandcamp, with the CD and digital versions already in the wild. The Hillmen is out already, on CD since July 24 and vinyl since August 14, available at Amazon. Full tracklists are at the bottom for the diggers among you.

If that Rhino bloodline rings a bell, it should. This is the same label whose Barnes and Barnes reissue I wrote up earlier this year, another Rhino-catalog oddity handed the full-dress treatment. Liberation Hall keeps doing the unglamorous work of leaving the vault door propped open.

I will say the obvious risk out loud. There is a version of the reissue business that is just strip-mining the dead for splatter-vinyl markup, and I am not naive about the margins on a limited pressing. But I keep circling back to that soundboard tape from Santa Cruz. Somebody held onto it for 45 years. Somebody remastered it, wrote the notes, cut the lacquer, and sealed a man’s last good night inside a sleeve so a stranger in 2026 can drop the needle and hear him alive. Call it commerce if you want. I will call it a rescue, and I will be first in line. Bring your turntable and your grief. Both belong here.

---

Tracklists

Jackie DeShannon, When You Walk in the Room (LP, LIB-2243)

1. When You Walk in the Room
2. Put a Little Love in Your Heart
3. Bette Davis Eyes
4. Heart in Hand
5. Come and Stay with Me
6. Don’t Doubt Yourself Babe
7. Needles & Pins
8. Breakaway
9. What the World Needs Now Is Love
10. Bad Water
11. Will You Stay in My Life

Mike Bloomfield, Dark Road Blues: Santa Cruz 1981 (LP, LIB-2241 | CD/DL, LIB-2240)

1. Dark Road Blues
2. Mean Mistreater Mama
3. I Don’t Know
4. Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out
5. Kansas City Blues
6. T.B. Blues
7. Country Mechanic
8. Frankie & Johnny
9. Fool for a Cigarette / Feelin’ Good
10. Come on in My Kitchen

Various Artists, Surf-Age Nuggets: Trash & Twang Instrumentals (LP, LIB-2227)

1. The Velvetones, “Doheny Run”
2. The Shan-Tones, “Sheba”
3. The Valiants, “Jack the Ripper”
4. The Vaqueros, “Echo”
5. The Ramrods, “Night Ride”
6. The Reekers, “Don’t Call Me Fly Face”
7. The Vibrants, “The Breeze & I”
8. The Vistas, “Moon Relay”
9. The Emeralds, “Earthquake”
10. 4 Of Us, “Batman (Freefalling)”
11. The Scouts, “Mr. Custer Stomp”
12. The Road Runners, “Quasimoto”
13. The Vaqueros, “80 Foot Wave”
14. The Runabouts, “Surfer’s Fright”

The Hillmen, The Hillmen (LP, LIB-2193 | CD, LIB-2194)

1. Fair and Tender Ladies
2. Winsborough Cotton Mill Blues
3. Wheel Hoss
4. Fare Thee Well
5. Goin’ Up
6. With These Chains
7. When the Ship Comes In
8. Roll On Muddy River
9. Blue Grass Chopper
10. Ranger’s Command
11. Prisoner’s Plea
12. Brown Mountain Light
13. Sangaree
14. Barbara Allen
15. Back Road Fever
16. Copper Kettle
17. Salt Creek