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The Escape Club – Wild, Wild West: The Story Behind the Song
Run-DMC, whose TV track sparked Holliday’s beat. Photo: Janette Beckman, May 1988 press photo / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain Some number-one records arrive after years of careful planning. Others arrive almost by accident, carried along by a machine that was set too fast, a television left on late at night, and a singer who happened…
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Chris Dreja: The Yardbird Who Turned Down Led Zeppelin and Picked Up a Camera
Chris Dreja in 1966, in the pages of KRLA Beat magazine. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain In the autumn of 1968, Jimmy Page had a problem. His band, the Yardbirds, had just broken up. He had a new band in mind — a band that would become Led Zeppelin — and he needed a bass…
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Neil Young – 81 Years of Rust That Never Sleeps
Neil Young, promotional photo, c. 1970. Photo: Warner/Reprise / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain Opening: Eighty-One Candles on a Restless Life On November 12, 2026, Neil Young turns eighty-one. That is a long life by any measure, and an almost unreasonable length of time for a rock-and-roll career. Most of the singers who shared a stage…
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Sepultura’s “Morbid Visions”: The Raw Debut That Put Brazilian Metal on the Map
Sepultura live in Olinda, Brazil, in December 2024, on the band’s farewell tour. Photo: Joaaoo / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 It is August 1986, and the air inside a small recording studio in Belo Horizonte is thick with heat. Outside, the city goes about its business in the dry winter of Minas Gerais. Inside…
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Victor Bailey: The Bassist Who Stepped Into Jaco’s Shoes and Made Weather Report His Own
Victor Bailey in 2008. Photo: Donderkatje63 / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain On November 11, 2016, the jazz world lost one of its great bassists. Victor Bailey was fifty-six years old. He had spent the last years of his life teaching at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the same school he had entered as…
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Berry Oakley: The Bass Player Who Held the Allman Brothers Band Together
Berry Oakley with the Allman Brothers Band in 1972. Photo: Grant Gouldon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 It is a night in March 1971, and the Fillmore East in New York City is packed to the rafters. On stage, six men are playing as though the song might never end. Two drummers lock into…
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Kathleen Hanna – 58 Years of Riot Grrrl Fire
Kathleen Hanna live in Bikini Kill in 1991. Photo: jonathancharles, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The Night the Room Turned Around Picture a punk club in the early nineteen-nineties. The air is hot, the guitars are already feeding back, and the crowd is pressing toward the stage the way crowds always do — the…
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Allen Toussaint: The Quiet Genius Behind New Orleans’ Greatest Songs
Allen Toussaint at the Freret Street Festival, New Orleans, 2009. Photo: Derek Bridges / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 It was the night of November 9, 2015, and the Teatro Lara in Madrid was full. Allen Toussaint sat at the piano, as he had done ten thousand times before, and played the songs he had…
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The Cover With No Name: How Mari Boine’s “Gula Gula” Carried a Silenced Language Around the World
Mari Boine geaidnu. Photo: Krg / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 In the summer of 1990, a strange new album appeared in record shops far from the Arctic Circle. Its front cover showed no singer, no title, and not even the artist’s name. There was only the close, golden eye of a snowy owl, staring…
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Remembering John Tavener: The Sound of Stillness
William Blake’s illustration for his poem “The Lamb” (Songs of Innocence and Experience). Artist: William Blake, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This is a thematic illustration for Tavener’s “The Lamb”, not a portrait of Tavener. The Silence the Whole World Heard There are moments when music does not perform so much as preside. On a…