Celebrating Ted Bluechel Jr. on his 82nd birthday. —Ed. The Association didn’t exactly win friends and influence hippies with their square-john antics in the mid- to late sixties; they may have been the first band to perform at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, but most of your smirking counter-culture types considered them about as authentic […]
Acid rock comes in two flavors—good trip and bad trip. The former evokes images of Woodstock, big day-glo flowers, beautiful naked people doing blissful, ecstatic dances in the wonders of nature. The latter evokes images of Altamont and the flowers of evil. As for the beautiful naked people they’re the Manson Family, and they’ve come […]
Celebrating Tina Weymouth on her 74th birthday. —Ed. How is it that sometimes, not always but just sometimes, the LP you swore your undying love for and allegiance to back in the day fails, after not having heard it for a long time, to set you on fire? It makes you feel like a turncoat. […]
The Northern Soul Scene was more than just one of the most fascinating “underground” musical subcultures to emerge from the UK in the mid-1960s—it was the Great Upside Down. The scene was centered in Northern England and the Midlands in clubs with names like The Twisted Wheel, Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca, and the Golden Torch, […]
Remembering Rod Price in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed. Here’s an interesting historical tidbit: I was the geezer wot gave Foghat their name. It happened like this: we were all (the band and I) totally pissed in Rod “The Bottle” Price’s bedsit in manky Manchester, when “Lonesome Dave” Peverett rolled a J the size […]
Moroccan vocalist and guimbri player Maalem Houssam Guinia is poised to make a huge splash with his third release Dead of Night; it’s available now on vinyl and digital from Hive Mind Records. Guinia specializes in Gnawa music, a dynamic style with a long history that can be traced back to the Royal Black Guard […]
Country music went through a seismic change beginning in the mid-to late-1960s, that culminated in the explosion of what was called the “outlaw” movement in the mid-1970s. The movement was primarily spearheaded by folks like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and others, even though many of them, Nelson and Jennings included, had been around for a […]
Formed in Cincinnati before migrating westward to San Fransisco, cLOUDDEAD emerged at the turn of the century to profoundly impact the sound of experimental hip hop. Comprised of lyricists Yoni Wolf (Why?) and Doseone (Adam Drucker) and producer Odd Nosdam (David P. Madson), cLOUDDEAD debuted with a series of six 10-inch EPs that were in […]
Celebrating Joe Correro on his 78th birthday. —Ed. Talk about your camouflage. On the surface Paul Revere & The Raiders were five smiling and well-groomed (at least by Fab Four mop top standards) young men tricked out in Revolutionary War garb complete with tricorn hats. They certainly didn’t look like long-haired sex fiends out to […]
Trumpeter-composer Richard Allen “Blue” Mitchell recorded steady as a leader and sideman from the early 1950 until his premature death from cancer in 1979. Along the way, Mitchell played rhythm and blues, funk, rock, and a whole lot of hard bop jazz, the style for which he is most renowned, if too often overlooked. His […]
Celebrating Graham Parker on his 74th birthday. —Ed. Some guys just can’t catch a break. Especially if their name is Graham Parker, who released four stellar albums from 1975 to 1979 and never came close to making the big time. Just how good was he in his prime? The English rocker’s first two LPs (1975’s […]
It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that if a band’s first six albums bore you or annoy you by turn, and you’d sooner contract food poisoning than listen to them, you’re not going to turn on number seven and say, “Wow, these guys make a swell din!” In fact it’s a pretty good rule […]
Celebrating Gary “Mani” Mounfield in advance of his 62nd birthday tomorrow. —Ed. As a famous man (I think it was Geoffrey Chaucer) once said, time waits for no man. And in the case of Manchester’s The Stone Roses, the five long years that passed between this, their massively popular 1989 debut, and 1994’s Second Coming […]
The Brian Jonestown Massacre are alive and well—relatively speaking. That they’re around at all may come as a surprise to anyone who’s watched the 2004 documentary Dig! It gave us a frontman, Anton Newcombe, at odds with the entire world. He brawled with his bandmates. He brawled with audiences. He brawled with record labels. He […]
Celebrating James “J.Y.” Young on his 75th birthday. —Ed. Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “Beware, for if you stare long enough into Styx’s The Grand Illusion, The Grand Illusion will stare back into you.” Nietzsche had good reason to be fearful, for not only did Styx’s masterpiece ultimately drive him mad, it also happens to be […]
