If it weren’t for speculation, our cultural imagination would be a far darker place. Moby Grape’s debut appeared in 1967, and their final album came in 1969 (they reformed briefly two years later, and continued to do so with varying […]
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When Gene Clark died in 1991 after years of substance abuse, obit writers cited his brief period as a founding member of the Byrds. Clark was actually much more. He infused the original band with much of its soul and […]
Link Wray was in the Army in 1952 when middle-aged, bespectacled Archie Bleyer, bandleader for Arthur Godfrey’s CBS TV shows, founded Cadence Records to capitalize on the growing fame of young Godfrey crooner Julius LaRosa. Several LaRosa hits followed. In […]
Shelby S. Singleton was Nashville’s ultimate fat cat, remembered by keyboardist Jim Dickinson as a “redneck” with a “long, greasy ducktail and mirror sunglasses,” passing out cigarettes with his name embossed in gold. Perhaps Singleton’s most famous move was purchasing […]
My Goodness, Yes! collects twenty of the best singles released on the Nashville-based Silver Fox label. It’s a great portrait of late soul music, and suggests that soul — commonly regarded as the product of specific cities and studios — […]
I tend to be an open-minded sort (I’ll answer the door without asking who it is), but I have to admit that I was nervous cracking the shrink-wrap on Buck Owens’ 1970 release Bridge Over Troubled Water, a collection of […]
Roger McGuinn’s first two post-Byrds solo albums were reissued in early 2004. The third, 1975’s Roger McGuinn & Band, while inherently flawed, is a marked improvement over its predecessor, the unfortunately titled Peace On You. As its title suggests, the […]
Though the first trucker song (Cliff Bruner & His Boys’ “Truck Driver’s Blues”) came in 1939, the genre didn’t hit its stride until Dave Dudley’s motorvatin’ 1963 hit “Six Days On The Road”. For the next decade-plus, by which time […]
The Byrds at their artistic peak were a fractious band with an uneasy chemistry, unable to sustain a balance for any significant duration. They were not alone in this. Some of the era’s other important bands had equally volatile combinations […]
The Holy Modal Rounders recorded a pair of albums for Prestige in 1963 and ’64. Thereafter, the duo of Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber lent their free-ranging skills and attitudes to the Fugs, a similarly inclined bunch who leaned more […]
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