Celebrating Community
The Stooges set at the 1970 Goose Lake Festiival has gone down in their rarified corner of rock history as a turning point for the band, maybe even the beginning of the end. According to legend, bassist Dave Alexander—out of his mind on whatever he was out of his mind on—stood on the stage without playing and was promptly fired […]
From the gruesome to the humane, George Romero’s posthumous novel goes places his movies couldn’t The coronoavirus pandemic of 2020 would have been a goldmine for George Romero, a milder mirror of the world he explored over the course of nine magnificent and gruesome movies. People with COVID-19 are far from animated corpses, of course, but the unwillingness of so […]
It’s easy to think of Lonnie Holley as a bluesman. He fits the type: rural, Southern, self-educated, quick with folksy wisdom and deep, dark truth. But Holley is a philosopher poet, more like Son House when he put his guitar down, more like Van Morrison casting ruminations over flowing, nebulous music. Van Morrison had his blues, too, of course. The […]
Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, too The flowers are dyin’ like all things do Follow me close, I’m going to Bally-Na-Lee I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me I fuss with my hair, and I fight blood feuds I contain multitudes So go the first lines of Bob Dylan’s first album of new songs in eight years. He […]
Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of drone metal pilgrim Dylan Carlson’s first release under the name Earth. In that time, countless bands from all corners of the world have emerged into the new freedom, among them iconic innovators and black copycats. The best of what we might call the New Wave of Experimental Heavy Metal relies, in a […]
The mysterious multi-media project known as “The Residents” has long been big on reinvention. In the 1980s—already a decade and a half into the anonymous collective’s shared career—the outfit released albums reinterpreting the music of James Brown, George Gershwin, John Philip Sousa and Hank Williams, turning masters of American music into catchy, ugly, digital ditties. They’ve also been big on […]
Prince was never lacking for fans. Years after he was getting regular radio play, his albums were still charting and his concerts selling out. While existing largely outside the music industry (or within the micro-industry he built), Prince maintained a substantial and remarkably faithful fan base. There aren’t many musicians who can play Madison Square Garden without a record contract. […]
X broke the mold of what a punk band should be. Amid 1970s West Coast zealot savants like Flipper and Germs, X was a talented band versed in multiple styles and with a passion for vocal harmonies. They were also as committed to the cause as any of their upstart peers and through five essential albums held fast to the […]
“Nobro” means just what you think it means, and what you maybe hope it doesn’t. The all-female (no bros) Montreal four-piece might be breaking a logical implication of the Bechdel test – a band without dudes shouldn’t have to talk about them – but that’s already committing too much thought to it. So OK, stop, back up. Nobro rocks […]
The blues, according to B.B. King, is about survival, and if there’s a list of people who know about both the blues and survival, King’s got to be near the top. The blues, we learn from King, isn’t about being beaten down, it’s about getting back up again. Singer Vienna Carroll knows about blues and survival, too. And she knows […]