Tag Archives: rock ‘n’ roll
An April Season In Hell
Celebrating National Poetry Month, here’s a rad radio production of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell which was published 145 years ago this year. Even though it might not be immediately evident Arthur Rimbaud had a lot in common with William Blake: both saw the benefits of altered states on literary vision and both were [...]
A King is Born
Elvis Presley was born on January 8, 1935. Here’s Kurt Russell as The King in John Carpenter’s 1979 made-for-TV-movie, Elvis. As I remember, this is the end of the opening scene, before we flashback to Elvis’ childhood in Mississippi. Celebrate the birth of rock ‘n’ roll by watching TV Elvis shoot a hotel television… Please [...]
Canyon Control
After recent posts about The Doors and Easy Rider, I’m on a bit of a hippy jag, and the fact that 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love means that I’ll likely linger on the longhairs for a lot of posts during these warm weather months. It’s always fun to celebrate the [...]
50 Years of Love
This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967. During that auspicious season about 100,000 young Americans traveled west to the Fog City to twist in the gyre of a countercultural hurricane while similar youth movements blossomed in Canada an across Europe. Suspicious of government oppression, aligned [...]
Dawn of Moon
Keith Moon “The Loon” was born on August 23, 1946. Moon was a flat-out genius, one-of-a-kind rock ‘n’ roll drummer who found a perfect home for his chaotic style in a little band called The Who. Moon was also the poster boy for excessive appetites, and one of rock’s most famous casualties. From playing in [...]
The Clash’s Last Testament
The Clash’s eponymous first album was a classic that didn’t get released in America until after their second album was released here. Give ‘em Enough Rope is generally considered a slick, American produced sophomore jinx of an album, but I’ll be posting about that soon. The band loses their manager and heads back to London, [...]
Pink Fritz
I think of this blog primarily as a “countercultural” clearing house. It’s hard to define what “counterculture” even means in a world where sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll won the war a long time ago. My movie posts are always counter cultural in their way and today’s post is no different. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [...]
The James Dean Story
Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre kicks off its massive Robert Altman retrospective this weekend. The series includes 19 features and 3 short films, but completists might notice that one of the director’s earliest projects didn’t make the cut. For me, the most important period in American culture is that window during the 1940′s and 1950′s when European [...]
Gene Vincent Lives
Today we celebrate the birthday of one of rock ‘n’roll’s original madmen: Gene Vincent embodied sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll about a decade before the emergence of an American generation that would take hold of those values and recreate world culture in a new era of freedom and expression. By 1969 Vincent was a [...]
Jane’s Addiction: Gifted
In the late ’80′s and early 90′s, Jane’s Addiction brought the druggy, draggy Los Angeles underground sound to mainstream audiences with a trio of unforgettable albums: Jane’s Addiction (1987), the classic Nothing’s Shocking (1988) and Ritual de lo Habitual (1990). The fact that Jane’s guitar player Dave Navarro claims to have no recollection of recording [...]
