The reviews that came in from the press on the debut of Duke Ellington's planned magnum opus were mixed at best. The highbrow classical music critics were less than impressed. Even the jazz critics skirted around the question of how much delight they took in the evening's signature piece, "Black, Brown, and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro." The night, January 23, 1943 could not have provided a more well-articulated juncture between two worlds, the European-dominated "serious" classical music and the jazz sensibilities emerging from the dance floor with an entirely new set of aesthetics. Click to Read More...

Jan Berry, the mastermind behind Jan & Dean, was never an easy guy to lionize. He was the opposite of Brian Wilson, the shy mastermind behind the Beach Boys. Jan was ruthlessly ambitious, brash, outgoing high school jock, even bullying at times. He certainly enjoyed his share of white privilege, right up until he plowed his Vette into the back of a parked truck. And while The Beach Boys have become an institution of popular music, and even a part of the California mythos itself, Jan & Dean never could make the transition to more serious, sophisticated pop music. The fame of Jan & Dean took some weirdly dark turns, before shrinking unceremoniously from public view in the late 1960s. Click to Read More...

Fifty years ago this month, Patti Smith read her poetry for the first time in public, at St. Mark's Church New York City (near Astor Place), inviting friend and record store clerk Lenny Kaye to add some biting guitar. Thus was born the Patti Smith Band and, to a certain extent, punk rock itself. Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepherd, Allen Ginsberg, Todd Rundgren, Lou Reed, Sandy Pearlman and others attended. This 50th anniversary virtual show kept the low key intimacy of a poetry reading, honoring those in attendance that night who have since passed, but also offering hope for the future: we will live again, we will live. It was a powerful performance for a challenging time. Click to Read More...

So my friend Steve had this freakishly good idea of bringing a blow-up couch to the Dark Star Orchestra Halloween show at the Frederick (MD) fairground. Keeping with social distancing guidelines for the pandemic, the organizations sold tickets by the car. Each car got two spaces in a field facing the stage, the second of which the car's group occupy in some form. In addition to the couch, Steve also brought a fold-up table, an LED lamp and a $30 rug from Amazon to tie it all together. I can not explain how surreal it felt watching the show from this vantage. Click to Read More...

In the doc "Who is Harry Nilsson and Why Is Everyone Talking About Him?", 1970s superstar-producer Richard Perry bemoaned that he never got to produce more than one album for Harry Nilsson. 1971's "Nilsson Schmilsson" turned out to be Harry's most successful, in fact. Had Nilsson not let his demons overtake him shortly thereafter, Perry argued, he would have been up there right alongside Elton John or James Taylor.

I think Perry is wrong in his assessment of Nilsson as a lost cause, though. Nilsson's talents were quirkier than could be easily contained within the top 40 format, even though his songs could be pop music at its most sublime. Click to Read More...

Notes: I started a music diary. TF else am I going to do these days? This week! I discovered, about 40 years too late, about Buffy Sainte-Marie's incredible run in music. I learned that Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour, like Stevie Nicks, is quite popular amongst the younger set for some mysterious reason, and, by accident, how drummer Nick Mason drove that band. I took umbrage (again) at the player of the green tambourine. My friend Enne has a new single! Also, below is an in-car tribute to how WFMU is getting me through this bleak pandemic. I'm not crying; it's just raining. Click to Read More...

It was a very cold Saturday night, the weekend that the first U.S. death from COVID-19 was reported: No one was going to be touching anyone else that night. I was at the Knockdown Center, a new-ish arts space just across the Brooklyn border in Queens, to see John Maus play. Turned out, it was not so much John Maus "playing" the show as much as playing his favorite tracks for us in some basement while humming, screaming, and cavorting along in inarticulate primal ecstasy to songs indistinctly echoing of 80s gothpop, and synthpop. Even the light show was devoid of specifics, directing attention anywhere but to Maus himself. Click to Read More...

"Fortune favours the brave" Wire bassist-co-vocalist Graham Lewis promised the virus-wary audience in NYC's Music Hall of Williamsburg, March 11, 2020, days before the city would formally go into lockdown for COVID-19. The show reminded me that this English band was post-punk pretty much from the beginning of punk rock itself. Click to Read More...

I did not know this but guitarist Dave Navarro moonlights with a sort of all-star cover band, Royal Machines, to play corporate events and whatnot. As it happened, I caught Royal Machines at a NetApp user conference in Las Vegas in October 2019. I dunno if I would pay to see Red Hot Chili Peppers but I would certainly move to front of the bar to watch Navarro rip thru some hard rock and punk nuggets. The fucker is still spry as fuck, and plays the electric guitar as if it were a natural extension of his self. Even at this late date, he remains the embodiment of rock and roll. Click to Read More...

Hank Williams was a naturally gifted entertainer. Even with only modest singing skills, he had songwriting chops, confidence and stage presence to spare. Winning over an audience was not a problem for ole Hank. Everything else was the problem. Through the late 1940s, and early 1950s, Williams charted dozens of top 10 songs on the country chart. He did this without sacrificing his country persona, crafting simple three-chord songs that celebrated "God, beer, a good woman and a blessed break from loneliness." The ideas culled from comic books or his own troublesome marriages. "He was hard to deify him during his lifetime, so proudly unrefined was he," Mark Ribowsky wrote. Click to Read More...

I saw a mess of good live music in 2019, but the biggest surprise for me was Sleepy Creek Harfest, with a bill of fine bands I had not heard before, who played on a old hippie campground in mountainous and scenic West Virginia nowhere. Click to Read More...

My summer kicked off with prog-rockers Yes playing a lonely Atlantic City casino and ended with current country music queen Miranda Lambert holding court before a rowdy throng at the Allentown Pennsylvania Fairgrounds. In between, Bruce Springsteen popped in on the Southside Johnny iconic 4th of July Asbury Park NJ show, Willie Nelson serenaded a soupy Merriweather Post Pavilion crowd, and I went back into the hometown woods some deep, deep country Lynyrd jams. Click to Read More...

Ray Wylie Hubbard has got to be one of the great second acts in country music -- maybe for all popular music, an art form overwhelmingly favoring the energy of the young. He briefly made a name for himself with the outlaw country classic "Up Against The Wall, Redneck Mother" in 1978, though only in the last few decades or so has he started truly refining his distinctive -- and highly-addicting -- country blues swamp shuffle, with each successive album stronger, more defiantly individual than the previous. His slim yet bountiful 2015 autobiography shares two secrets for this late blooming success: Sobriety and the E chord without the third. Click to Read More...

With his relentless touring schedule and full discography, saxophonist Maceo Parker picked up more than a little of the obsessive work-ethic from his one-time mentor James Brown, not to his taste for the hottest musicians. After a time as right-hand man for the Godfather of Soul, Parker joined Parliament Funkadelic just in time to land the Mothership. Decades later, he helped Prince through a 21-night stand in L.A. Today, he is the keeper of the OG funk, the South Carolina variety, similar but leaner than New Orleans. He also does a pretty mean Ray Charles cosplay. Click to Read More...

The recent release of a new album of outtakes from J.J. Cale (who passed in 2013) reminds me of the cruel promise of these posthumous releases. I buy these collections because I like the music of the artist -- here,a wizened drawl over a chill shuffle. I always subconsciously calculate an album of outtakes would possess even more of these addicting qualities. But it never works out that way. Almost always, the previously-deemed inferior tunes are mostly the sound of the artist trying to get to that essence. It is less pure, not more, weirdly enough. Click to Read More...

The problem with the idea of admitting The Monkees to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame is who, exactly, who would they induct? Show creator Robert Rafelson? Really, he is a Hollywood guy (He used the windfall from The Monkees to finance his next project, the 1969 movie Easy Rider). The four actors? Though they brought considerable personality to the project, they were not at the center of it... Read on for a review of The Monkees at Beacon Theater, NYC, 2019-03-09. Click to Read More...

Hottake: John Lennon legit fucked up the voice of Harry Nilsson. But being a good friend of Nilsson, Lennon tricked RCA into paying for it, by way of talking the record company into a sizable advance for what was then already a fading career. Fame did Harry no favors -- nor did his refusal to tour, leaving him with a lot of free time to party. It would be easy to see his life as a tragedy, or at least as a series of missed opportunities, but he left a remarkable body of work that, at its best, rivaled the Beatles. Click to Read More...

If, for some reason, you should find yourself in the country late at night -- maybe a weekend vacation rental perhaps -- and also in possession of a good powerful set of speakers, then aim them outside, into the forest, and fill these speakers with Led Zeppelin(first three albums recommended) and/or Black Sabbath (same). Let the guitar of Jimmy Page thunder through the land or the wicked bellow of Ozzy shiver the trees. Let their maul pour into the valley below, echoing a sound fuller, deeper and darker than any you will experience on headphones. Click to Read More...

The Mercury Lounge in New York City celebrated its 25th birthday with a series of shows by a number of bands who got their starts there, back in the day. One of those acts (Tuesday, February 4) was singer/songwriter Amy Rigby and her crew. But I did not know any of this. I just saw Amy Rigby was playing at Mercury, an early show between 8 - 9, so I walked over and paid my $12, just like it was 1994 all over again. Click to Read More...

I guess by now, most Pink Floyd tribute bands are probably better than Pink Floyd itself. Except for the light show, which can be recreated on a phone. Sort of. Also: Ace of Cups, the greatest late-1960s psychedelic all-female proto-punk band you have never heard of... Click to Read More...

James McBride's "Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul" is not the definitive biography of James Brown, nor was it intended that way. But McBride makes a good argument here that the definitive James Brown biography perhaps could never be written, so rich was Brown's legacy, but also so maligned his public persona, so opportunistic his handlers, and so profound (and largely undocumented) his influence on America as a whole from the late 1960s.

For this book, McBride focuses in on a handful interviews from close personal and professional associates of Mr. Brown, each one telling their story illustrating a different aspect of JB - his hardscrabble Georgia upbringing, his relentlessly touring band, his family, his - sometimes quirky - affairs with money. Click to Read More...

Like so many artifacts of the 1970s, progressive rock was something that seemed perfectly normal at the time, but in hindsight was pretty much another batshit crazy relic of that era, alongside leisure suits, shag carpeting, and waterbeds. Dave Weigel's "The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock" does an excellent job of capturing both the madness and the occasional shimmers of brilliance from this curious genre of music. Click to Read More...

Patsy Cline, in today's parlance, gave zero fucks.

I feel a certain kinship to Cline, if only because I attended the same school she did, Gore Elementary, 12 miles west of Winchester, Virginia (though I attended 30 years after she did). Back up against the Blue Ridge Mountains, Gore is a tiny unincorporated town, mostly a few buildings coalescing around a single road breaking off Route 50.

Many of the refined folk in the nearby metropolis of sorts, Winchester, had looked down on Patsy Cline, as being from the wrong side of the tracks, even after she became famous. Click to Read More...

A few months back, a country radio consultant remarked that "If you want to make ratings in country radio, take females out." The comment ignited a brief wave of indignation. This is 2015, after all! But the comment was just the latest example of how country music marginalizes women, a tradition as old as the genre itself, and one that singers from Kitty Wells to Miranda Lambert have fought against through song and their presence, I've learned. Click to Read More...

In honor of Record Store Day 2015 , which was, umm, yesterday, I dusted off an old player, complete with tiny built-in speakers, and spun some Bo Diddley platters. The booming voice of Bo Diddley sounded so solid on these tiny, crappy speakers. In fact, Bo probably sounds better on cheap record players, than on any of the other, supposedly superior, formats that followed--cassette, CD, MP3. Click to Read More...

Something that I can (probably) safely cop to, now that I'm on the senior side of 50, is getting my drink on and listening to Bob Dylan. I mean, I've never been a Dylanologist, per se. But the man's music has been with me for pretty much my entire life, in one form or another. Some of it is pleasant; A lot of it is crap. I can't really defend Dylan to anyone otherwise uninclined. He's creaky, cranky and makes a snarled racket. That said, at three distinct times a Dylan song has crashed into my life speaking to me directly with a lucidity I never thought possible from a pop song. These times, and from these times alone, I see why Dylan could be one of those rare artists of an Olympian stature. Click to Read More...

"Beard oil," I thought when I first heard Sun Kil Moon. From a remove, it rang out at similarly rarefied level of attention, a fussy rough-hewn acoustic guitar traveling at a somber pace of introspection, accompanied by vocals of unrelenting gravitas. But while "Benji" comes in the husk of hipsterism, there's something much more going on here. I've never heard an album quite like this, an intensely personal musical novella where each song is a chapter that builds on the others, that, all totaled, offers an almost uncomfortable intimacy of one man's life at 50, both the wisdom and the warts. Click to Read More...

A friend of mine who lives in the hood, Zach, is just about to release a new album, called "Sun Songs" The name of his band is The Adventures of the Silver Spaceman. "Sun Songs" is actually his/their second release. Click to Read More...

The guy who sang Happy Together led a fascinating life. Howard Kaylan careened through rock n roll (& pop culture) history for four decades, making friends with Zappa, Hendrix, Lennon, Nilsson, Brian Jones, Steven Tyler & Joe Perry, Gene Simmons & Paul Stanley, Tom Jones, Ramones, Springsteen, The Psychedelic Furs and on and on. Click to Read More...

What is it with youngsters these days? They were throwing a house party all right, with DJs spinning and everything, but nobody was dancing. Most everyone--and there must have been 300 in this southwest Baltimore warehouse--were lounging on blankets and sleeping bags. Some even wore pajamas. They could barely see each other. It was almost dark, except for the slide and film projectors, the Christmas lights blinking, and the abstract colored shapes oozing on a television-like screen. Click to Read More...

1975 w as the Indian summer of progressive rock. Procol Harum and King Crimson released their respective swan songs. ELP, Yes, Pink Floyd and Genesis were still popular. Younger art rock upstarts like Kansas, 10CC, Supertramp, and Gentle Giant were weighing in with strong new releases. Crack the Sky, from a small steel town 30 minutes west of Pittsburgh, was then one of most promising of these young upshots. Click to Read More...

A few years back, I got a chance to talk with musician and producer Brian Eno, who was promoting his then-new album Nerve Net with a day of phone interviews w/ the press. I was writing for a small publication, New Route, which wanted a short profile on Eno. Sadly NR went out of business a few weeks after the phoner was completed, and the material was never published. Click to Read More...

I am sitting in Berthas in Baltimore one night, and strike up conversation with the thick-haired hardfaced mug beside me. Turns out he is in a prominent area band. He talks shop, mentioning some friends in the group Jawbox, who just signed with Atlantic. Previously, they released two albums and five singles on Dischord, but just received a generous advance from the major label. But instead of blowing it on drugs, leather and tattoos, the band, so says my newfound bar-stool buddy, is endeavoring to keep their expenses down. Click to Read More...

It has been a good 40 years since Pioneertown has been of any use, at least to the entertainment industry. You have seen its western storefronts as the backdrops of High Noon, Shootout At O.K. Corral, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and other westerns that Gene Autry and Roy Rogers rode through. But it is not a real wild west ghost town. Rather, Pioneertown is a movie set ghost town built by the industry in the 1940s as a backdrop for westerns. As westerns fell from popularity, the town fell into a state of disrepair. But its a perfect place to record an album. For Cracker, anyway. Click to Read More...

A 1993 interview with David Baker, founder and then-lead singer of Mercury Rev. This interview came some time after the band's debut album, Yerself is Steam, was released. In addition to Baker, the band at the time consisted of Jimmy Chambers (drums), Jonathan Donahue (guitar), Suzanne Thorpe (flute), Dave Freidman (bass) and Grasshopper (guitar). Click to Read More...

Individual Thought Patterns, the new album by Death, is a bottomless pit of twisted guitar lines, drum blasts and unreasonable bass, all swirling together in a dizzying war dance.

Embedded in this inferno is the coarse, inhumanly gruff voice of Chuck Schuldiner, the guitarist, vocalist and master of puppets for Death, probably the premier band in death metal. But if you set out to decipher the song lyrics you will find that they are not about decapitation, necromancy or even lust for blood.

No, the 10 songs are full of false prophets, corrupt leaders, the emotionally crippled, the mentally blind, the out-of-touch. Ten songs, 10 depraved characters, 10 moral lessons. Click to Read More...

Lungfish may be one of the most successful bands in Baltimore. With three albums on Dischord, they tour and sell records world wide. Yet their success is little heralded locally. Mitchell Feldstein is the drummer. John Chriest plays bass. Daniel Higgs is lead singer. Asa Osbourne is the guitarist. Here is their story, in their own words... Click to Read More...

It was not the Breeders who the manager of the San Francisco studio remembered. Nor was it Dick Dale, who rode into the studio with his surf guitar two weeks prior. Kurt Cobain, who rolled in the previous week to record some tracks with the Melvins caused no stir. And those young dudes in Grant Lee Buffalo? Wonderful fellows.

But that band from Allentown, Pennsylvania. . .Who were they? Oh yeah, the Psyclone Rangers. He remembers them all right. Click to Read More...

It's hard to believe 10 years ago Motorhead gained the auspicious title of World's Loudest Band. These days, the band skirts respectability. Their songs have found a sizable audience between the curious metal mongers and gutsy progressive rockers. They were even nominated for a Grammy last year, for the album 1916. They're in LA. now, finishing up the band's next album. They'll start touring in July, supporting Ozzy Osbourne. By phone, I talked to the good-natured, but sleepy-eyed guitarist Wurzel just as he was waking up in his LA. hotel room. Click to Read More...

They were pictured on the cover of Alternative Press and the Washington Post Weekend Magazine. The Silver Spring Maryland band was recently profiled in Melody Maker, Rockpool, Spin, Musician and Rolling Stone. But now they're in Missoula, Montana. Guitarist Archie Moore, weary from a day of riding in the group's white Dodge Ram, walks across a Taco Bell parking lot toward a phone booth to call Rox for an interview. Moore wipes a bead of sweat from his brow, reaches into hits jeans and pulls out Sub Pop's calling card number. Velocity Girl are on tour, opening for Belly. Tomorrow they'll be in Vancouver, Canada. Yesterday they were in Boulder, Colorado."We really haven't had a day that wasn't devoted to driving," Moore tells me. Click to Read More...

Yow, wearing blue jeans and no shirt, cavorts his body as if his lyrics are possessing him. He hocks a loogie on the floor, sings, hocks a loggie on the ceiling, grabs his nipples, and stage-dives into the audience. He floats on a sea of hands, not missing a word. He glides about, steering himself with his boots against the ceiling (next time in you're in Max's check out the ceiling stage front--most of he boot marks there are Yow's). Click to Read More...

The Boo Radleys' new album, Everything's Alright Forever is pop's difficult spectre. Not one song falls into pat sentimentality, pat anger, pat love or pat anything. Rather it mars the environment with its blunt presence, like ugly furniture. Only when you pay close attention does Everything's subtle charms appear. Everything's Alright is simultaneously distant, with eerie guitars far off in the mix, and all too immediate. Click to Read More...

I ended up talking with Helmet guitarist Peter Mengede who, according to a recent Spin article, was the funny one. Indeed. Page Hamilton may be the leader, but Mengede gives you better copy. He is humorous, but thoughtful. Upstairs at the posh Michaels 8th Avenue (where Helmet was about to open for Faith No More), we sat down to do the interview at an elegantly prepared dining table. The lanky Mengede promptly grabbed one of those dainty saucers to use as an ashtray. He looks around and laughs, "I feel we should be doing Billy Idol songs, like 'White Wedding'," he said. Click to Read More...

The London publicity rep allotted me 30 minutes of telephone conversation with Cris. After about 20 minutes I ran out of questions, and so, with one finger on the stop button, I asked if he wanted to add anything. He did, about another 40 minutes worth. Click to Read More...

After finishing up their fourth LP, John Linnell, who plays accordion, and John Flansburgh, who plays guitar and wears glasses, were in a quandary for an album title. Flansburgh suggested Apollo 18, thinking of the Apollo 17 spacecraft., which successfully completed NASA's last moon mission in 1972. Click to Read More...

The All Mighty Senators learned their chops playing for the Maryland Institute College of Art crowd, playing at uptown bars, at houses and at the Institute itself. Though they have since progressed to venues like Hammerjacks, it was during those early gigs they learned to demolish the line between the crowd and the band. Click to Read More...

Lynyrd Skynryd is back. What? What kind of scam is this? What fools dare try to suckle from the memory of the might Skynyrd maul? And for this new album to be rendered with the same name that graced Gold and Platinum, well that's like filling an empty Jack Daniels bottle with lemon juice. Click to Read More...