Category ’90’s Rock/Music
TIME CAPSULE: On Matthew Sweet (But Not His ‘Girlfriend’) Hitting The Half-Century Mark
Cueing up Matthew Sweet on the ole turntable in honor of his birthday this week got me thinking about time (but then, doesn’t everything?). The notion of time speeding up and (thankfully) slowing down, and how it defines and marks us, after all, is precisely the effect certain music and albums have on our lives. In the case […]
SOUNDS OF THE CITY: 50 Years & 80 Bands Mark ‘Pipeline!’ Radio Turning 25
Back in the 1950’s, skeptics, cynics, and general party poopers predicted that this new-fangled “jungle” music called rock & roll was a fad that might last a few months, maybe a year. And then it would be done and everybody would go back to swiveling their hula-hoops, playing games of Parcheesi, and wearing their “I Like Ike” […]
WHEN RECORDS ARE PEOPLE: Markers Of A Life Amid A Museum of Wax
Chances are, the illness I describe below only afflicts those such as myself, for whom prolonged, protracted exposure to dusty bins, racks, or rows of vinyl can cause a psychologically discombobulating, mildly hallucinatory condition — a disorder where occasional bouts of grandiose euphoria are mistaken for finely honed revelations of clarity. This is known as […]
NEW WAVES, OLD TRICKS, AND GETTING LUBED: A Rolling Stone Convo With GBV’s Bob Pollard
Happy 20th Anniversary to one of my best-loved albums of, well, the past twenty years: “Bee Thousand,” by the Dayton, Ohio indie-rock band Guided By Voices. Like my first mad crush, I remember hearing this 1994 cracked masterpiece soon after it was released on June 21, 1994, as if it were only yesterday. I had […]
TAILGATE BIRTHDAY SONGS: Wheat’s Raised Ranch Revolution Returns
“And suddenly after all this time, of waiting and wondering when and if they would return with their soft sparkle and gentle glamour intact, Wheat are back among us.” It is with much fuzzy-hearted happiness, optimism and okay, maybe even a dash of nostalgia, that I can report the following about one of my all-time favorite […]
10,000 Hits Of Anything Has GOT To Be Good For You! (A Special Thank You Message To Subscribers)
Hello all of you lucky and loyal subscribers, My favorite words today are “ten thousand.” As in, 10,000 spins of a favorite record on the turntable. As in, Land of 10,000 Dances. If you do anything 10,000 times, it’s gotta be good, right? With that number and what it means in mind, today I’ve got 10,000 reasons […]
LIFE AFTER DEATH (THEN & NOW): The Sad and Beautiful World of Sparklehorse
To mark the supremely sad occasion this week four years ago (March 6, 2010 to be exact) when we lost Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous to suicide — he had battled depression and other serious health problems over the years leading up to his death — here’s the full-length “Director’s Cut” of a feature profile I wrote on […]
RPM: Jonathan Perry's Life in Analog 