Category Vinyl
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY: A Look Back At America’s Great Lost Band
Nothing quite makes you appreciate the timelessness and immortality of great music as the mortality of its makers. Only yesterday I was saying how fantastic and fresh the Remains’ self-titled 1966 debut LP sounds even now, nearly 50 years after its release. The Boston band made only one record during its original run before calling it quits […]
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.
A BIG STAR SHINES THROUGH THE GOLDEN SMOG: Jody Stephens On Belonging Again
We all know how dreamily handsome Jody Stephens, the once and future drummer for Big Star, has always been (damn, check out Jody in his to-die-for patchwork leather jacket on the back cover of “Radio City”; with that feathered hair and jawline, the dude made Keith Partridge look like Ernest Borgnine). But he also stands as […]
THE THICK, FREAKY GREATNESS OF THE BLACK KEYS
There once was this ferocious blues-rock duo, and they were really good. Nope, I’m not talking about the White Stripes (who were also really good) or Boston heroines Mr. Airplane Man (again, really good). I’m referring to the Black Keys, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing and writing about for The Boston Globe back […]
STILL A BEAUTIFUL BUZZ: Strolling Down Exile On Main Street
Coinciding with the deluxe reissue a few years back of the Rolling Stones’ “Exile On Main St.”, I pitched a piece to The Boston Globe on what that blearily beautiful sprawling double album meant to me growing up amid corporate FM radio of the late 1970s and early ’80s, and how it (and the Stones) helped […]
Yesterday & Today: Waxing Rhapsodic About The Vinyl Revival
When you’re unabashedly old school analog, it’s admittedly hard to be ahead of the curve on the latest, newest, trendiest technology. But sometimes, being a Luddite pays off. To mark the annual (or bi-annual)recent phenomenon known as ‘Record Store Day,’ when limited edition vinyl releases and special editions pop up in record stores around the […]
