Blog Archives
Tom Waits’s Big Time at 25
Tom Waits released his groundbreaking concert video Big Time 25 years ago. Not only did Big expand the contemporaneous notion of a short, promotional music video into a feature-length work of art, it also served as a moving picture showcase for the artist’s audacious mid-career trilogy: Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Frank’s Wild Years. Of course, [...]
Astral Weeks at 45
Van Morrison joined the British Invasion with Them until he left the band to meet Dylan and the folk rock revolution head-on with his first great masterpiece, Astral Weeks. Here’s what Rolling Stone has to say about this epic, emotive music: Van Morrison never sounded more warm and ecstatic, more sensual and vulnerable, than on [...]
Hail, Hail Chuck Berry
I’ve been off the blog for a few days, enjoying some adventures in real life away from the keyboard. In the meantime I missed an important birthday that I wanted to make note of. On October 18, Chuck Berry turned 87 years old! While rock ‘n’ roll is infamous for its one-hit-wonders and too-young-to-die casualties, [...]
Unknown Hinson on Dental Hygiene
Halloween means scary costumes and lots of treats — it can also mean tooth decay. Never fear! Just in time for the spook-tacular holiday, here’s everybody’s favorite rockabilly vampire, Unknown Hinson with a few tips on taking good care of those choppers. Stay Awake! Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos [...]
Spellbound: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Before Alice Cooper, before KISS, before Rob Zombie there was Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. The original shock rocker, Screamin’ Jay’s performances combined outrageous theatrics and costumes with sophisticated songwriting that combined exotic borrowings with elemental rhythm and blues — take the Eastern European waltz tempo of Jay’s classic “I Put a Spell on You” as the [...]
John Cage VS Sun Ra
Louis VS Schmeling, Ali VS Frazier, Tyson VS Holyfield — it’s rare to see two great heavyweights meet head-to-head. But that’s what happened in 1986 on Coney Island when two champions of avant garde music met for a less-than-bloody collaboration that found a pair of the world’s most out-there tunesmiths having a musical meet-up that [...]
Sun Ra’s Cosmic Cult Film
One of the weirdest cult music movies of all time, Space is the Place (1974) is a fictional film written by Joshua Smith and composer, poet, keyboardist and cosmic philosopher Sun Ra. Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, Ra’s music ultimately found him following his muse all over the country from Chicago [...]
Joe Nolan’s Paradise
Here is the premiere of the new video for my song “Paradise.” Conceived, directed and edited from public domain footage found at Archive.org, “Paradise” combines images of San Francisco in 1941 with shots from the city captured in 1968 during that era’s counter-cultural revolution. The video takes the song’s declarative chorus as a jumping-off point [...]
