Blog Archives
Greil on Blonde
Continuing our celebration of 50 years of Blonde on Blonde here’s an expansive interview with Greil Marcus looking back on all of the ink he’s spilled on the troubadour. Greil is followed by Al Kooper interviewed at Belmont University in Nashville talking about the making of Blonde on Blonde… Stay Awake! Please subscribe to my YouTube [...]
Dylan Country
Continuing our celebration of Blonde on Blonde at 50 here’s a segment from The Other Side of Nashville illuminating Dylan’s recording career on Music Row… Stay Awake! Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.
Blonde on Blonde at 50
A quick Google search finds Blonde on Blonde on most every top rock albums shortlist and it always places high in rankings of Dylan’s best. I take Highway 61 Revisited over Blonde, but Blonde is probably in any Dylanologist’s top three. Blonde‘s epic poetics in songs like “Visions of Johanna” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the [...]
Airplane Rising
This weekend I wrote a review of the new DVD release for Janis: Little Girl Blue. It’ll be out in The Contributor next week, and I’ll try to remember to drop it here later with some more info about the actual DVD &emdash; I had to watch an online screener as I didn’t get my [...]
Looking for Richard
This spring we mark 50 years since we lost Richard Fariña in a tragic motorcycle accident on April 30, 1966. The author of this great article at The Guardian assumes most readers will be familiar with Fariña as a literary figure who wrote the novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me [...]
Beggars Birthday
Today we celebrate the birthday of Rolling Stones producer Jimmy Miller who was born on March 23, 1942. Like the Stones, Miller was a little kid growing up during and after World War II, but Miller was an American born in Brooklyn. Miller made important recordings with Blind Faith, Spooky Tooth, Traffic, Motörhead, the Plasmatics, [...]
Remembering Richie Havens
Today we celebrate the birthday of Richie Havens who was born on January 21, 1941. Havens is one of my favorite singer/songwriter’s of all time: his growling vocals were immediately recognizable, his unique open-tuning guitar style emphasized the rhythmic expression of his right hand, and Havens is one of the only artists who consistently made [...]
You Belong to the Night
With the passing of Glenn Frey, the Eagles will never fly again. The band was beloved, but also hated for it. Whether you were an Eagles fan or not, their story is truly compelling and the documentary History of the Eagles: The Story of an American Band is required viewing for contemporary country music fans [...]
Bowie Cuts Up
The late great David Bowie made changing his artistic identity look easy by borrowing freely from every creative discipline within his reach — Bowie studied mime, played the saxophone and was well-versed in Beat Generation lit… Here Bowie demonstrates his own application of Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s “Cut-Up” technique… Stay Awake! Please subscribe to my YouTube [...]
Shane Show
Yesterday I posted about the birthday of The Pogues’ bassist Cait O’Riordan. It’s likely that my YouTube searching for that video of Cait singing “Danny Boy” had YouTube suggesting this today: The Great Hunger-Life and Songs of Shane MacGowan. “This the extraordinary story of how a North London punk transformed himself into one of Ireland’s [...]
