live from your speakers

We could use Pete Seeger right about now, couldn’t we? Who wouldn’t appreciate a wise, folksy elder with a predilection for bringing together people of different perspectives and creeds, someone who used storytelling and music to find common territory (emotional...

Who would have picked the Four Seasons, of all the rock and pop acts to emerge in the very early ‘60s, to still be a relevant musical force in the disco era? Certainly, they had their periodic commercial ups and...

Country music and rock ‘n’ roll often make strange bedfellows, but when the twain meet, it can make for special moments. We’re thinking of events like Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnics or Charlie Daniels Band’s Volunteer Jam shows, where...

The Olympia Theatre in Paris holds about 2,800 people and you have to think it was pretty full on May 7, 1968, when Aretha Franklin – fresh off the back-to-back-to-back triumphs of I NEVER LOVED A MAN THE WAY THAT...

While we love the work Jack White has done as a solo artist, de facto leader of the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather and producer (including wonderful records by Loretta Lynn, Wanda Jackson and Jerry Lee Lewis), we miss the...

Ray Charles just oozed cool. What could he not do? He could give standard repertoire a uniquely Southern stamp; he could play elegant instrumental jazz and gutbucket blues with equal mastery; he could find the threads in country music between...

Those fortunate enough to see INXS at their commercial peak – we’re talking late ‘80s, early ‘90s – were blessed to see a band whose creative vision perfectly aligned to what audiences wanted, what they absolutely craved, if not demanded...

An Alice Cooper live record is missing something – something essential to the understanding of who Alice Cooper was (and largely is, even to this day). That something is the visual experience of seeing Cooper in a concert setting, a...

Live albums – particularly, those from the ‘70s, the veritable dawn of such things – make great time capsules, terrific snapshots of a particular moment in time. For most artists of a certain vintage, they represent the highest of high...