the
From Glam Rock…to Garbo….to Goats
the
HIP QUOTIENT
From Glam Rock…..to Garbo…..to Goats
the
From Glam Rock…to Garbo….
to Goats
If you're a three-chord-lovin' rock-n-rolla living in New York City, stop by Joey Ramone Place in The Bowery today and bow your head in memory of punk rock pioneer Jeffrey Ross Hyman, better known as Joey Ramone. He died at age 49 on this date in 2001 after a 7-year battle with lymphoma.
Through the years, The Great and Powerful Walmart has banned countless CDs on the basis of album art and song lyrics they deem distasteful or obscene. These include releases by artists like Nirvana, Sheryl Crow, Prince, Marilyn Manson, The Goo Goo Dolls and Green Day. While profit-obsessed record company execs may take offense at Walmart's music policing, the artists themselves probably couldn't care less whether the world's largest, most dehumanizing, morally righteous retail chain carries their wares. But there was one band from the 1960s - the MC5 - that didn't take kindly to a local department store's refusal to stock their record. And they sought revenge.
Most recording artists in the 1960s were singing about lovin' your brothers and sisters regardless of the color of their skin, but few practiced that ethos better than Sly Stone, who assembled the first - and one of the few - interracial, dual-gender rock bands of the era: the iconic Sly and the Family Stone. They perfectly summed up the generation's quest for total acceptance with their number one hit, "Everyday People," a song that produced one of the most popular catchphrases to emerge from rock culture: "different strokes for different folks." When it came to funkadelic rock and soul, Sly did it first and he did it best. Here's a tribute to him on his 72nd birthday.
An important event on this date kicked off what would become an indispensable element of rock-n-roll music for time immemorial. On March 2, 1955, legendary R&B master Bo Diddley entered a Universal recording studio in Chicago and burned onto vinyl his song "Bo Diddley." With it's distinctive five-accent rhythm beat, it launched a thousand rock songs. The sound sprang from traditional African clave rhythms and gave way to a style known as "hambone" - a technique of making music by slapping one's arms, legs, cheeks and chest while singing simple rhyming songs. Say the phrase, "shave and a HAIR CUT…TWO BITS" and you get a simple idea of the rhythm. Lots of Diddley-based tunes are obvious, like "Willy and the Hand Jive" and Bo's own "Who Do You Love?" But you may not realize just how many songs have been fueled by that distinctive beat. No rocker can resist it! Here's a collection of my favorite Bo Babies. Turn your speakers up loud and go crazy, man, crazy!
Way back in drab, post-war England, teenaged boys with bad teeth and sun-starved skin - bored to tears with BBC Radio's unflinching policy of airing nothing but show tunes and classical music - were stringing wires around their small, government-built "council houses" so they could tune in to the one radio station that gave them a reason to live. What they found - from across the English channel - was the infamous "pirate station," Radio Luxembourg. What they heard was a black-sounding white man named Elvis Presley. And what changed their lives was a moody little tune called "Heartbreak Hotel." Here's a tribute to Elvis, on what would have been his 80th birthday.