(A Guest Blog By Terry Douglas)
I really think the moment the “music died” (popular/rock based music) was the day that Kurt Cobain (or whoever killed him!) blew his brains out. Now, allow me a moment (hopefully not being too long winded and redundant) to give you an abbreviated, yet somewhat concise opinion of how we got to where we are now… Continue reading How I Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Justin Bieber: A Music Industry Insider Ponders The Decline Of Popular Music
As the past is reinvented to serve present needs, modern pop music continues to suffer from an absence of historical revisionism dating back farther than last Tuesday. It’s not such a mystery why anyone over the age of 17 (wait, make that ‘anyone with taste,’ which is not always a given) would probably rather listen to music from 20, 30 or even 40 years ago than anything currently stagnating on “the charts” – which haven’t been interesting or relevant since you were an egg.
That’s why it’s so refreshing to be able to moderate my regular listening sessions of Love’s Forever Changes and Mania, the lone album by Australia’s The Lucy Show (remember them?) with liberal doses of New Jersey’s best, not-well-known-enough band, The Grip Weeds.
Continue reading Rad CD of the Week: The Grip Weeds, Strange Change Machine
It’s a fact that there will never be another band like The Beatles. I mean, it takes too long to even talk about. But for about 15 years, Oasis sure did have us imagining what a second coming of the Fab Four might be like, didn’t they? Tabloid tales of poor personal hygiene and ridiculous sibling rivalry / rampant fisticuffs between brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher aside, Oasis was a real rock & roll band! Together with whoever happened to be in the band at the time, the brothers Gallagher wrote and recorded so many classic melodic pop songs that are better and more enduring than anything you’ll hear on the radio today.
Continue reading Oasis Receives the Legacy Treatment
On This Day In 1967: The Beatles released the groundbreaking concept album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album was a worldwide critical and commercial success, spending a total of 27 weeks at the top of the UK Album Chart and 15 weeks at number one on the American Billboard 200. A defining album in the emerging psychedelic rock style, Sgt. Pepper was critically acclaimed upon release and won four Grammy Awards in 1968. Often recognized by prominent critics and publications as one of the most influential albums in the history of rock music, Sgt. Pepper frequently ranks at or near the top of published lists of the greatest albums of all time. In 2003, the album was placed at number 1 in the Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
“Neon Angels On The Road to Ruin…”
Few true tales have the power to compel and transport the reader quite like the life story of a bona fide Rock & Roll Survivor. Of Rock’s innumerable legends with stories worth telling, so many of them – Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison; the list is endless, really – never lived long enough to write their histories in their own words. And of those that have written autobiographies, no one ever really gets – or takes advantage of – the opportunity to go back and revisit his or her life on the written page, updating the tale or adding details that were perhaps forgotten or too painful to tell the first time around. Cherie Currie, former lead singer of the teenage all-girl rock band The Runaways is an exception to that rule.
Continue reading Must Read Book: Neon Angel, A Memoir of a Runaway By Cherie Currie