Have you seen American Hustle yet? It is the best movie, about a story that happened during my favorite decade: the 1970s. The Seventies were a time of amazing visual stye in everything from furniture design to fashion, but it was also the decade of the best music ever. Just think about it: the worldwide phenomena that was Disco book-ended by The Beatles and Punk Rock. Wow. Mind blowing. It all happened in The Seventies!
Continue reading Recommended Listening: American Hustle Soundtrack
Album Cover Art By Steve Powers!
When it comes to modern music, not much impresses me these days. If you look back over the past few years at any Top 10 Albums list I might have compiled – in those years where I was even able to cobble together such a list at all – you’ll see it’s comprised partly of comeback records by classic rockers, greatest hits packages or tribute albums that revisit the material of a legendary artist. That’s rather pathetic, I know, for a writer who once embraced the tagline ‘Rock Critic at Large,’ but it is what it is. I don’t apologize for being unable to shake the feeling that the best years for popular music are, for the most part, 30 – or even 40 – years behind us. Continue reading Recommended Listening: Kurt Vile, Wakin’ On a Pretty Daze
Photo by Jessie Trbovich
I was so crazy about Kurt Vile’s 2011 release, Smoke Ring For My Halo that I could not possibly be more excited to hear that he has a new CD coming out in 2013, entitled Wakin on a Pretty Daze. What makes this news even cooler is the announcment that the album cover art, seen as a street mural in the photo above, is by contemporary painter Steve “Stephen” Powers, whose fun and original work I was introduced to this past summer at an exhibit at Joshua Liner Gallery. This mural, which I am guessing depicts the names of songs found on the album, is located at the intersection of Front and Master Streets in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia, where Vile is from. Produced by John Agnello, and described by Vile as being comparable to Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, but “No cheese, just rock,” Wakin on a Pretty Daze is due out in the spring.
The Butterfly Man, Paris by Peter Blake
British pop artist Peter Blake never really became a household name here in the US despite having designed one of the most famous and iconic album covers of all time; that of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. While Blake is often called “the Godfather of Pop Art” – and his work is widely shown and collected throughout Europe – he has rarely shown in the United States. World Tour, now on display through June 18th, 2011 at New York’s Mary Ryan Gallery is only his third exhibition in New York since 1962.
Continue reading Peter Blake’s World Tour at the Mary Ryan Gallery
On This Date, December 4th, in 1993: Frank Zappa died of prostate cancer at his home in Los Angeles with his wife Gail and children, Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva, at his side. He was 52 years old. In the image above, Zappa poses with his parents in the living room of his Los Angeles home. On the wall directly behind him is the Ed Beardsley painting Pretties For You, which was eventually used as the cover art and title for the first album by the band Alice Cooper.
