Category Influential Albums
CHRIS BELL’S PURE POP COSMOS: Big Star’s Other Bright Light
Speaking (as I so often do here) about great musicians and music, I’d like to take a moment to remember and honor Christopher Bell, the co-founding singer-songwriter of the seminal 1970s outfit Big Star. Although in the years since the band’s initial demise and subsequent discovery by new generations of listeners, much of the credit and attention […]
REVOLUTION AND STREET FIGHTING MEN: The Beatles, Stones, and The (Myth) Making Of Rock’s Greatest Rivalry
Happy accidents of timing and circumstance can produce exquisite results. Just like a sleep walking Keith Richards waking up one night in 1965, picking up his guitar, and tape recording a half-dreamt nocturnal idea – a little riff that would turn into “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” – my plan to interview John McMillian, historian and author of […]
BEFORE TOMMY WAS BORN: The Who’s Sell Out From A Band That Never Did
Right up front, I would concede, in point of fact, that my headline for this post may be debatable given “The Who”‘s activities of the past decade or so. Following the substance-and-alcohol-related deaths of drummer Keith Moon in 1978, and more recently, bassist John Entwistle in 2002, the surviving twosome of guitarist and principal songwriter […]
The Faces From Mod To Rod To Nod: As Good As A Wink To A Blind-Drunk Horse
It’s hard to believe that four decades — 42 years ago this weekend to be exact — have passed since the boozy British blooze-rock band The Faces released what many (including me) consider to be the finest album of their relatively brief (1969-1975) career. “A Nod Is As Good As A Wink … To A Blind […]
LONG MAY YOU RUN: A Happy Birthday To Neil Young (And a Record Review)
“Neil Young, who has been making music for five decades now, is a timeless but always timely marvel; a man for all seasons, styles, genres, and moods …”
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 […]
STILL REIGNING, STILL DREAMING: Jimi Hendrix Producer Eddie Kramer On The Making Of A Legend
“Jimi was so shy,” Kramer says. “He never said a word in the beginning. He was very polite, very reserved, but once he plugged in and started playing I realized, ‘this is pretty special’. I had heard a couple of singles he had done, but hearing him playing right there in the same room was a whole different ball game. But very quickly, once I established the sound that he liked, we got on extremely well and we could communicate – even though he would describe sounds to me as colors, like, ‘Man, I want it to sound kinda purple, you know what I mean, man?’ And I would come up with a sound that was purple. We inspired each other …”
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 […]
RPM: Jonathan Perry's Life in Analog 