Tag Archives: music
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 […]
SEPARATING THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF: A Goodbye and a Reclamation
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 […]
Memories of Steve Morse (1948-2024): Hobnobbing with Bono, Saving the Stones (or, at least, my review), and House Party Heinekens
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 […]
FROM PANTHERS TO POT TO POETRY: John Sinclair’s Life In Song and Sentences
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 […]
IT WAS 60 YEARS AGO TODAY, THE BAND TAUGHT THE WORLD TO PLAY: Reflections on Getting The Beatles Bug A Decade After Feb. 9, 1964
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 […]
RPM: Jonathan Perry's Life in Analog 