Blog Archives
Dylan & Bloomfield
In 1965 Bob Dylan released Bringing it all Back Home — the record’s first side featuring the folk music hero playing with an electric band. In July of that same year, Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival and made history when he took to the hallowed stage with the fully amplified Paul Butterfield Blues Band [...]
Purple Rain at 30
Purple Rain — the record and the film — came out thirty years ago this month and Prince recently reunited with Apollonia to celebrate the date. Prince was a musical prodigy who transformed himself from “the new Stevie Wonder” into a genre blurring phenom who had as much impact on the culture of the 1980′s [...]
Blondie 4(0) Ever
40 years ago Chris met Debbie — the pair fell in love and made musical history. If you need more clues than that to know that I’m telling the origin story of the band Blondie than this post is especially for you. Here’s the Wiki‘s take on Blondie: The band was a pioneer in the [...]
Echoes of Trane
On this day in 1967 we lost a giant of jazz. John Coltrane is a personal hero of mine. As a saxophonist I’ve always been enthralled by the instrument’s superlative ability to mimic the human voice and one is hard pressed to find any other horn man in jazz who exemplified the saxophone’s potential for [...]
The Day John Met Paul
Yesterday we celebrated one of the most important days in the history of pop music. But, since nobody reads blogs on the weekend, I decided to save this for today… On July 6, 1957 John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time. Here’s the skinny from The History Channel… Only John was scheduled [...]
The Animated Tom Waits
Pioneering animated filmmaker Ralph Bakshi had already produced landmark films like Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic and The Lord of the Rings when he approached John Lamb at Lyon Lamb Animation Systems about building a rotoscope set-up that worked with video instead of film. Rotoscoping involves drawing and painting over images projected from live footage [...]
Celebrate Summer Soltice with Insomnia
Here at Insomnia we’re anticipating a great summer celebration this Saturday, June 21st — no doubt many regular readers are planning revels of their own. With that in mind, check out this amazing 24 hour broadcast of live Indian ragas courtesy of WKCR in New York. The music started last night at midnight and will [...]
The Last Unicorn
The 45th anniversary of Tyrannosaurus Rex’s third album, Unicorn, might not seem like an auspicious anniversary, but, for a number of reasons you better believe it is. Tyrannosaurus Rex was the acoustic duo of Marc Bolan and Steve Peregrin Took — who pulled his stage moniker from the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. [...]
