Curator

September 2023

The Rolling Stones have been a working band, with a few personnel changes, for more than 60 years, and have been a visible and active part of popular culture for nearly all that time. There have been a few dull moments, perhaps, but it’s hard to think of another rock’n’roll band or musician, aside from Bob Dylan, that has enjoyed such a long, sustained stretch of popularity and relevance. The Stones may not have the hip currency now the band had in the past—who does?—but a Stones tour is still a big, stadium-filling event.

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July 2023

On August 17, 1969, the final scheduled day of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Sly & the Family Stone appeared onstage at 3:30 a.m. Stage announcer “Chip” Monck’s sonorous voice brought the group out, and they played a tight, 50-minute set. Two songs from that performance, “Dance to the Music” and “I Want to Take You Higher,” made their way onto Michael Wadleigh’s documentary film of the festival, and were among its most electrifying moments.

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April 2023

“James Brown was born to lose. He refused to accept that fate.” Those words begin the biography of the Godfather of Soul included in the booklet that accompanied Star Time (1991), a four-CD anthology that presents a comprehensive overview of Brown’s career. Harry Weinger and Cliff White continue the story: “Brown was determined to be Somebody. He called himself ‘Mr. Dynamite’ before his first Pop hit, and ‘The Hardest Working Man in Show Business’ before the business knew his name.”

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December 2022

Andy Partridge, the chief songwriter and coleader of the band XTC, has a chip on his shoulder about being from Swindon, a city of 233,000 in Wiltshire, about 70 miles west of London, England. In 2016, he explained why to an interviewer from Louder: “To the English, anything that comes from Swindon must have comedic value. And I think it’s held us back terribly.” He went on to say that if the band had been American, or even came from the northern city of Manchester, birthplace of many great English groups, it would have been held in higher esteem. “We were f**king brilliant,” he asserted: “One of the greats.”

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September 2022

Spirit is not exactly a forgotten band. Two of its songs, “I Got a Line on You” and “Nature’s Way,” have been constants on classic-rock radio playlists. Beyond those tunes, however, the typical rock fan probably hasn’t heard much from a group whose first four LPs rank among the best of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Perhaps Spirit’s eclecticism ended up limiting its appeal. At times its music could be pegged as progressive or hard rock, but it also included elements of jazz, folk, and even classical music. For all its ambition, Spirit wrote memorable songs that should have led to a much larger following.

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July 2022

The history of rock music is filled with musicians who were one-hit wonders, or whose career was somewhat brief but had a lasting impact. The Velvet Underground’s recording life was a mere four years, but inspired countless other bands. Of course, two of the original members, Lou Reed and John Cale, went on to have long careers in music. Music journalist Lester Bangs’s essay “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung” makes a convincing argument that Count Five’s lone hit, “Psychotic Reaction,” was more influential than the entire recorded output of some bands.

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May 2022

Let’s talk about vinyl.

I’ll begin by saying that you can call them records or LPs (which stands for “long player” or “long-playing”), but never “vinyls.” Vinyl is what’s used to make LPs, and vinyl as a general description for records that are pressed out of that material is fine. I’ve been buying records for more than 50 years, but I’ve never called them “vinyls.” I collect vinyl, but I have 4000 LPs. Or maybe 5000. . . .

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November 2021

The first time Bruce Dickinson, then a vice-president at MCA Records, saw The Tragically Hip play live was at the Toronto Music Awards in 1988. “I guess it was during the first song,” Dickinson told the National Post in 2016. “Gord [Downie, the band’s lead singer] drops the mic on the floor inadvertently. It comes unattached from the cord, and the top of the mic comes off. I remember distinctly, Bobby Baker [guitar] and Gord Sinclair [bass] just looked at each other like, ‘Oh, crap. What are we going to do?’ Downie, as you know, is a great improviser. He just picks up the mic, puts it back together and tells a whole story in the middle of the song that involves the mic. I thought that was really cool.”

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May 2021

When Stevie Wonder joined the Motortown Revue, the package tour of Motown artists who played theaters on the Chitlin’ Circuit, he had been with Motown’s Tamla Records label for about a year. Wonder had signed to the label in 1961, when he was 11, and had released two LPs—as “Little Stevie Wonder”—the following year. The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie, and Tribute to Uncle Ray, a collection of songs made famous by Ray Charles, hadn’t made a dent on the charts. Motown had also released three singles by Wonder, but only “I Call It Pretty Music but the Old People Call It the Blues” charted, and it only reached 101.

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January 2021

In September 1966, when James Marshall Hendrix arrived in London to record his debut album, fronting his own band, he was just two months shy of his 24th birthday. He had been playing professionally since 1962, when he and bassist Billy Cox had left the US Army, where they met, and moved to Nashville. While he was in Tennessee, Hendrix played on the Chitlin’ Circuit, sometimes referred to as the urban theater circuit. These were venues in the South, the Eastern Seaboard, and the Midwest that featured African-American performers. Hendrix backed a number of soul singers during his time on the circuit, including Wilson Pickett and Sam Cooke.

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