Blog Archives
Calvin with a K
Tonight I got to see Calvin Johnson play a live show just down the road from my house at Fond Object. Johnson is an indie music pioneer based out of Olympia, Washington. More specifically, Johnson and his K Records label — along with the scene around The Evergreen State College — created a breeding ground [...]
Cool as Cale
Back in May I wrote a bunch of posts about the 50th anniversary of the Velvet Underground’s debut album. Here’s another Velvety post, celebrating the great John Cale. Here’s the word from a recent Rolling Stone interview celebrating the anniversary… The way John Cale tells it, he had a revelation one day in the mid-Sixties. [...]
Punks and Poets
I once read an essay by music critic Simon Reynolds where he pointed out that the fundamental difference between punk music and the new wave and no wave music that followed it is that new wave and no wave bands were formed by art school kids, but punk music was always rooted in literary inspirations [...]
East Side Sounds
We had a great show down at Bearded Iris Brewing on Saturday night during the Germantown Art Crawl. My pal — and our host — Tom Schreck played a short solo set before introducing us. We played some of the brand new songs I wrote in Arizona at the Sedona Summer Colony in July. We [...]
Rust Belt Roots Rock
It’s been weird weather here in Nashville this week. We’re getting the fallout from Irma right after getting the fallout from Harvey. We had tornado activity coming from Texas, but this week we’ve got cold drizzly rains that I imagine came all the way from Cuba. It feels a bit like winter when it’s chilly [...]
Lust 40
2017 marks 40 years since the release of Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life. Including the classic title song and the evergreen “Passenger,” the album also features the dark romance of “Tonight” and the jailbait jam, “Sixteen.” I’ve always loved this album as it’s probably the best example of the massive influence that Jim Morrison had [...]
Merry Jerry
Jerry Garcia was born on August 1, 1942 and in 2017 we’re observing his 75th birthday. This anniversary calls to mind my BEST AMERICAN BANDS OF ALL TIME LIST. I won’t get into all of the details of that list here, but I will tell you that when I first made that countdown about 12 [...]
Suburban Savior
One of the videos I posted to the blog last week somehow lead to my discovering this BBC rock doc featuring Boy George’s personal musicological tour of Britain’s 1970s music scene — the music of his teen years highlighting the bands and the tunes that influenced Culture Club in the 1980s. Here’s a bit about [...]
