for those who never gave up their turntables
LAST WEEK, I RECEIVED AN EMAIL from a young musician that I had never heard of. (No big deal there: my ignorance of musicians young or old of the past few decades might cause you to titter in wonder at the immensity of it.) His name was Lawrence Bray, which set off no alarms of memory in my aging brain. [Continue reading]
THIS ARTICLE is an introduction to Bamboogie Injections, a contemporary Russian surf band, with a look at their first album, Wild Dandelion Stomping. It is also a very brief look at the Russian surf music scene of the past—something few of us who grew up in the ’60s were aware existed. [Continue reading]
FRANK DANIELS has been collecting records for a long time. Somewhere along the way, he started collecting all sorts of record-related data and information. For years now, he has been researching, compiling, assembling, and publishing several incredibly detailed and accurate Frank Daniels discographies (listings of records) and labelographies (breakdowns on the visual changes in the label designs of a given record company). [Continue reading]
THINGS WERE GETTING WEIRD in Brian Wilson’s world when he met David Anderle. By the third quarter of 1966, many significant changes had taken place in his life and his surroundings. PET SOUNDS and Good Vibrations and the SMiLE sessions that everyone in Los Angeles seemed to know about had brought a very different kind of attention to Brian that previous Beach Boys records had not. [Continue reading]
IT WAS 1975, and I was out of my hippie wannabe stage. I was playing it straight; not out of choice, but necessity. (But that’s another story.) I was still as anti-authoritarian as all get-out—at least when it came to bosses who were really bullies with authority—taking crap from no one. [Continue reading]
WHAT EXACTLY IS A ROCK & ROLL ALBUM? To answer that question, we need to answer another: What is rock & roll music? After sixty years, we still don’t have a definition that everyone agrees with! Arguments about its definition and its origin in the early ’50s—no wait, was it the late ’40s?—have [Continue reading]
IT IS ACCEPTED “FACT” that two seminal works of popular music—the Beach Boys’ PET SOUNDS and Bob Dylan’s BLONDE ON BLONDE—were released on the same day, May 16, 1966. And there was a second reason to celebrate that date: BLONDE ON BLONDE was also the first rock double-album of all-new studio recordings, beating the Mothers of Invention’s FREAK OUT! [Continue reading]
MOST INFORMATION on the Internet about gold and platinum records of the Sixties is crap! That is, most of the “information” regarding RIAA Gold and Platinum Records awarded to albums from the ’60s and early ’70s is factually incorrect. This applies to almost every website: the few that aren’t plain incorrect are often unintentionally misleading, and this includes the RIAA’s own website! [Continue reading]
HOW HAVE WE MISSED THE OBVIOUS for so long? Look, I know that old-school rock & roll fans in general and Elvis fans specifically are supposed to reactionarily hate punk rock—and most do! But the punks of the ’70s were carrying on some of the spirit of the ’50s rock & roll that we love so much—especially the untamed Elvis of the Dorsey Brother Shows! [Continue reading]