4/18/2010
“The Greatest Rock Movie You've Never Seen,” says Steven Van Zandt.
Attention, music fans and pop culture connoisseurs everywhere:
Your assignment today is to gather together in one medium-sized concert facility, for one evening only, one dozen of the world’s most popular entertainers. Age, style, size, corporate affiliation and particularly musical pigeonhole is...
3/18/2010
An absolutely fab collection of new DVD's show there was much more to catch in the Sixties than Beatlemania
"No more Beatles! No more Stones! We just want the Viletones!" went the cry of true teen angst 'round my Toronto neighborhood circa the Summer of Hate, 1977. And, memories of my favorite punk-rock combo from a misspent youth notwithstanding, I do find myself feeling very much the same...
3/1/2010
The Elvis biopic is alive.
Nowadays, it seems anyone and everyone with easy access to velcro sideburns and a karaoke machine are busy making livings (of a sort) out of playing at Elvis Aaron Presley.
After all, Mojo Nixon was right: Elvis Is Everywhere.
But retrospective credit is definitely due director John Carpenter and...
1/14/2010
The First-Ever British Rockers Celebrate Their Fiftieth (!) Anniversary
For those still old enough to peg the launch of British Rock to the evening of February 9, 1964, when four young Liverpudlians appeared as if from nowhere on the stage of The Ed Sullivan Show, think of this:
Last year, a different U.K. band celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a series of sold-...
11/22/2009
On the fortieth anniversary of their television debut, Monty Python tells their whole story (almost).
No less an authority on such subjects as the late, very great George Harrison once proclaimed, they picked straight up from where The Beatles left off.
11/8/2009
The origins of Southern California's music and lifestyle are vividly told, in many of the participants' own words and images.
I certainly tend to agree that, in the infamous words of no less an authority on all things Laurel Canyon, California as Frank Zappa, most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read. Which makes a book such as the one I write of today...
10/17/2009
Smithereens drummist debuts his very own "Late Music."
Discriminating consumers of only the best in rock n' pop have long revered Dennis Diken as drummer with those rightfully legendary Smithereens. Yet did you know that in between making Jersey beat, Dennis has penned some of my all-time favorite liner notes (The Beach Boys' Lost and Found collection...
9/8/2009
Did you know the very first North American Beatles album was Canadian?
Being 8 years old in the Toronto suburbs of 1963, I was at the perfect age and in the perfect place to, yes, meet the Beatles. Because by the time "those four youngsters from Liverpool" hit "The Ed Sullivan Show" on 9 February '64, my friends and I had already spent the past six months...
9/30/2004
Brian Wilson's Teen-age Symphony Leaves Home ...At Last
Historians must certainly agree that 1966 was a pivotal year.
7/2/2004
One of my all-time favorite words is honesty
One of my all-time favorite words is "honesty." And we must all agree that is one word being bandied about quite a lot lately, though not always in the most particular of ways.But when it comes to the truth, both onscreen and off, all roads actually lead to Marlon Brando, that most deceptively sly...
