Category Cult Records
KING SIZE TALENT: Charlie Chesterman, Scruffy Sweetheart of The Rodeo
Besides his exuberant rock & roll music — and he made a lot of it, thankfully for us, over the years — his easy laugh is what I most identified with Charlie Chesterman. The Iowa transplant who moved to Boston and made his mark as one of the city’s most beloved singer-songwriters, first with the essential local ’80s outfit Scruffy […]
GUIDED BY BOB: A Salty Salute to GBV’s Robert Pollard Who Turns 56 (which is less birthday candles than he’s made records)
A very Happy 56th Birthday to Robert Pollard of the long-running Dayton, Ohio rock band, Guided By Voices. Pollard is, at this point, one of the few indie-rock artists who’s always made me feel young. Not because he’s even that old, or his music or sensibility is old, mind you. Naw, it’s just that, when you’re […]
WAITING FOR THE MAN NO MORE: The Velvet Vision Of Lou Reed (1942-2013)
With a deadpan monotone rimmed with a barbed and thorny edge of sarcasm, an air of jaded self-loathing, and disaffected resignation, Reed’s voice was ideally suited to chronicle his drug-and-drag noir tales (both lived and imagined), of shadowy protagonists slinking down shadowed hallways, darkened alleys, or penthouse crash pads, in search of sin, salvation, or both at the end of a needle.
ELVES & ELEPHANTS FLY IN AN AEROPLANE OVER THE SEA: Neutral Milk Hotel Soars Again
The recent news that members of the once-vaunted Elephant Six musical collective — Neutral Milk Hotel and Elf Power, chief among them — are reuniting for a series of U.S. and international tour dates that will take them into 2014, brings back wonderful memories of the time when their alternately sun-splashed and dusk-toned hues of […]
THIS POST’S FOR YOU: Neil Young’s Notes For Blue (ain’t singin’ for Coke, and no ‘Heart of Gold’ neither)
In keeping with what’s turned into a CSN&Y-inspired, David Crosby Birthday Boy theme party this past week, here’s my brand new review of a new and unofficially released (or officially unreleased, such as the case may be) Neil Young title, just published at the live and rare music specialty blog/website Collectors Music Reviews (www.collectorsmusicreviews.com), where I […]
DAYS OF DESERT DREAMS: Steve Wynn’s Syndicate of Sound
How do you live up to — or down, such as the case may be — a uniformly, universally recognized classic debut album that becomes the artistic barometer for everything you write, record, and release from that moment on? (The easy answer is, you don’t). Singer-songwriter Steve Wynn has had this unenviable task for more […]
Paul Weller’s Ever-Changing Moods: The Modfather Talks
Paul Weller’s music has always been as stylish and sharply tailored as his suits. Whether as the singer-songwriter for The Jam, a seminal outfit that helped define the British Punk movement of the mid-1970s, or his subsequent group, neo-soul romantics The Style Council, or his substantial solo career, Weller has always followed his own muse and blazed […]
MAYBE IN A BETTER WORLD: Alex Chilton Comes Clean
Alex Chilton still doesn’t get what all the fuss is about. Well, most of the fuss, anyway. Chilton concedes that his celebrated band, Big Star, had “a *few* good songs”, but he also makes a distinction between what he calls “good music and good songs.” The pair of albums the band recorded during its lifetime, […]
HEY 19: Memphis’s Second-Favorite Son Flips The Box Tops and Flies Free Again
To put a cap on the starry sparklers of our July 4 weekend tribute to Big Star, here’s my review of Alex Chilton’s “1970,” an album that was a eureka moment for me when I first heard it. To me, it offered a gaze through a kaleidoscopic looking glass; a peek through the window of transition between Alex’s stint as […]
His Band Opened For Badfinger: A Q&A with Big Star’s Jody Stephens
A Q&A with Jody Stephens/Rolling Stone.com Even if Jody Stephens had never picked up a pair of drumsticks after 1974, he’d still have secured an immortal place in pop history as the drummer for Big Star — one of the most talked about and belatedly beloved American rock & roll bands ever. And although they […]
RPM: Jonathan Perry's Life in Analog 