Contains “old” categories from before website rebuild.

Love Amid the Rubble: Ronnie Lane and Saint Stan

I heard your footsteps at the front door, and that old familiar love song. ‘Cause you knew you'd find me waiting there, at the top of the stairs. Those lyrics weren’t written by a heartsick bloke waiting for his lover to come home. They were composed by an artist recalling his boyhood days in a working-class London neighborhood, waiting for…

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Roaring Down Thunder Road: Darlin’, You Know Just What I’m Here For

August 25, 2015: I took a road trip with "Born to Run" yesterday. It's the 40th anniversary of Bruce's groundbreaking album, and there's no better way to experience it than by blasting it in your car, with the windows open and the wind blowing back your hair. Cars and tunnels and backstreets and highways are just as central to the…

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Not to the Manor Born: Rock Stars in Stately Pleasure Domes

Deep in the psychedelic wood, Where a rock-n-roll martyr plays You'll find the enchanted neighborhood Of Brian Jones's drug-haze days. Brian the posh, Brian the posh, A randy little dandy - all fine, divine. He's Brian the posh, Brian the posh, A ritzy little glitzy old soul. I'd hate like hell to be sued by the Disney Empire for parodying…

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Don Kirshner: “I Want a Band That Won’t Talk Back"

Between the ages of 13 and 20, yer usually date-less blogger spent many a Saturday night with an impassive middle-aged man sporting plastered hair, leisure suits, gold chains and the occasional sweater vest. His name was Don Kirshner, and he brought the top rock acts of the day into my living room with his syndicated late-night TV show. For many of us growing up in the 1970s, pre-car and pre-cash, the closest we came to attending an actual rock concert was staying up late to hear this pathologically unhip music impresario kick off 90 minutes of authentic live-on-tape rock performances.

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And, on Lead Typewriter — Lester Bangs!

Does a typewriter qualify as a musical instrument? To Lester Bangs, it did. The brilliant, outrageous rock journalist, who died on this date in 1982 from a cocktail of Darvon, Valium, and NyQuil, once joined the J. Geils Band on stage and proceeded to write/perform a live concert review on his "miked" Smith Corona typewriter.

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