the one after the big one

Turn-of-the-millennium pop music is best remembered as the era of the boy band (NSYNC, Backstreet Boys) and saucy girl pop (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and the like), but dig another layer or two deeper, and you’ll find some gems that...

Each of the early J. Geils Band records was a great Saturday night on a platter. Who could resist that Boston-accented blast through Motor City soul and Chi-Town blues? Heck, their third studio record, 1973’s BLOODSHOT, had even hit the...

Graham Nash appeared to be in a dour mood in 1973, and there were any number of reasons why. Romantic relationships with Joni Mitchell and Rita Coolidge had gone sour; the Vietnam War was still taking lives; and he could...

Like the Grateful Dead, to whom they are often (and often unfairly) compared, Phish are equally adept at creating songs that are conventionally structured and songs whose intent is to crack those structures open, spilling out all manner of improvisational...

Toward the end of their time together, the funk band Rufus and their star lead singer Chaka Khan had an odd arrangement – the band would make a record with Khan, then Khan would make a solo album on her...

With their debut long-player OUT OF THE CELLAR all over radio and MTV in 1984, Ratt had gone from being Sunset Strip superheroes to something bigger – a loud and proud American rock band that had jumped into national commercial...

Few bands hit it out of the park with their first album quite like America did with their self-titled 1971 debut and its indelible single “A Horse with No Name.” The song is still played on classic rock and adult...

Rapper, singer/songwriter, country-funk bandleader, gutter poet, political lightning rod, proud Michigan man – ol’ Bob Ritchie (known by most as Kid Rock) is all of these things, a polymath’s polymath. He can name which breakbeats Jam Master Jay sampled on...

For a time in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s there were a handful of young musicians intent on preaching the gospel of country music to their peers (listeners and fellow players who were largely, if not completely, more interested...