RADIO CITY’S TRANSMISSIONS AT 50 AND BEYOND: A chat with Big Star’s co-founder/drummer Jody Stephens
In the more than half a century since their inception, demise, and rebirth, the Memphis-bred rock band Big Star have been revered as everything from anachronistic power pop avatars to iconoclastic cult legends making introverted music in an extroverted era. So iconoclastic were they, in fact, that Big Star actually had to break up to […]
There was was something essential and intrinsic to Robert Redford’s being that lent his characters a magnetic, down-to-earth humanity; a knowing, watchful intelligence that imbued them with a kind of innate self-possession that offset the undeniably bright wattage of that Redford grin.
Friday marked the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ seismic, game-changing appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, on February 9, 1964. I wasn’t old enough to have seen or remembered it, being just two months old at the time. But on second thought, maybe my parents did watch the Sullivan show that evening with me in […]
I was driving home early one Friday morning through the back roads of Pennsylvania, listening to rock ‘n’ roll music on the niche-specific Sirius radio station, when a voice came on and said, “I hear the sweet sounds of heaven …” Which, to my ears, was akin in spirit to “You know, you always have […]
Originally posted on RPM: Jonathan Perry's Life in Analog:
“Charlie’s good tonight in’nit he?” — Mick Jagger, Madison Square Garden, 1969. Charlie Watts’s drum kit was a pitch-perfect reflection of the man who sat behind it for The Rolling Stones for nearly 60 years: modest yet essential. Charlie famously eschewed rock drum solos as…
Apologies if the original post of this piece contained text and/or formatting glitches that made it difficult/impossible to read, er, cleanly. Here is the (hopefully) corrected version. Aside from a title tweak, I’ve decided to forego replacing or replicating the video bells and whistles of the original post and present the text straight-up as a companion to the faulty original. I invite you to give it another go with my thanks. Again, sorry the HAL 3000 has decided to get drunk and insubordinate. Now, where the hell is the plug and outlet to that bleary red eye of his?
This is a preface, and a piece, I never thought I’d share. Here’s the press kit band bio I was commissioned to write by Wheat’s short-lived Rhode Island-based label Shorebird — more on them in a minute — back in 2014. It was an undertaking that was to coincide with both the label’s reissue of […]
How many people can boast about having Bono (a rock star so famous he only needs one name) attend their retirement party? For Boston Globe scribe Steve Morse, a music critic at least as legendary as a few of the star-powered folks he wrote about over the course of five decades, that kind of happenstance […]
To my “RPM: Life In Analog” subscribers, frequent or occasional readers of my writing, or anyone who may have stumbled upon this page and decided to have a look around, I’m delighted to report that my memoir piece, “The Calm Hiss of Bided Time,” has been published in the new issue of the literary journal, […]
I was saddened to hear of the passing this week of the writer, blues historian, political activist, and marijuana advocate John Sinclair, at the age of 82. I had the pleasure of interviewing Sinclair, who decades earlier managed the seminal Detroit rock ‘n’ roll combo the MC5 and founded the anti-racist White Panther Party, back […]
When my wife and I watched the superb 2022 Sinead O’Connor documentary, “Nothing Compares,” a month or so ago, my ultimate takeaway — besides being struck, again, by Sinead’s singularly arresting voice, artistic fearlessness, and political courage in speaking truth to power — was this: She was right about pretty much everything she spoke out […]
RPM: Jonathan Perry's Life in Analog 