-
Modern Talking’s “In the Middle of Nowhere”: The Album at the Peak of Eurodisco — and the Start of the Fall
Modern Talking in the mid-1980s — Dieter Bohlen (left) and Thomas Anders. Photo: RCA Records / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain It is November 1986, and the radio in West Germany barely seems to play anything else. The beat is bright and synthetic, all gleaming keyboards and a drum machine that ticks like a clock. Then…
-
Mötley Crüe’s “Too Fast for Love”: The 900-Copy Debut That Launched Glam Metal
Oldies Music TimelinePhoto: Bjornsphoto / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 It is the spring of 1981, and four young men in Hollywood are trying to start a band that sounds like nothing else on the Sunset Strip. The bass player has songs his old band rejected for being too heavy. The drummer has been banging…
-
LaVern Baker: The Voice That Taught Rock and Roll How to Sing
LaVern Baker in 1956. Photo: Atlantic Records / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain In the mid-1950s, a young woman from Chicago walked into Atlantic Records and sang a song called “Tweedle Dee.” It was a Latin-tempo novelty number, bright and playful, and it went to No. 4 on the rhythm and blues chart and No. 14…
-
John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Two Virgins”: The Night Two People Made a Record Out of Tape Loops
John Lennon in 1969, the year after “Two Virgins” was recorded. Photo: Joost Evers / Anefo, Wikimedia Commons, CC0 It was the night of 3 May 1968, and the house in Surrey was empty except for its owner and one guest. Kenwood, John Lennon’s home in Weybridge, had a room full of tape recorders. Lennon…
-
Remembering Roy Haynes: Eight Decades of Swing
Oldies Music TimelinePhoto: Salem State University Archives and Special Collections, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons The Last Beat Falls Silent On November 12, 2024, the long rhythm of Roy Haynes came to rest. He was ninety-nine, and he died in Nassau County, New York, on the South Shore of Long Island, after a short…
-
The Song That Went Home Without Her: How Miriam Makeba’s “Pata Pata” Circled the Globe
Oldies Music TimelinePhoto: Rob Mieremet / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain On the evening of November 9, 2008, a seventy-six-year-old singer walked onto a stage in Castel Volturno, Italy. The concert was a benefit for a writer under threat for exposing organized crime. The audience was small, the hall was modest, and the night was cold.…
-
Russell Means: The Brave Eagle of Pine Ridge — Activist, Actor, and the Face of Wounded Knee
Russell Means in 1988, at the Illinois Libertarian Party convention in Chicago. Photo: Carolmooredc / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 It is late February 1973, and the wind coming off the South Dakota prairie cuts straight through a coat. The little village of Wounded Knee sits on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a handful of…
-
The Farm Boy in the Fat Suit: How Bryn Terfel Became the Falstaff of His Generation
Oldies Music TimelinePhoto: Frankie Fouganthin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 It is a Chicago night in the autumn of 1999, and the fattest man in opera is hiding inside a laundry basket. The basket sits in the middle of a respectable Windsor drawing room, and it is shaking. Inside it, folded nearly in half,…
-
Luz Casal at 68: The Voice from Boimorto Who Sang Spain’s Heart
Luz Casal. Photo: Manolo Lolo, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 It is 1991, and a Spanish film director has a problem. Pedro Almodóvar is making Tacones lejanos — High Heels — a melodrama about a famous singer returning to Madrid, a daughter who resents her, and a murder. He needs a voice for the film’s…
-
The Hit He Almost Kept for Himself: How “Burnin’ for You” Became Blue Öyster Cult’s Last Great Single
Photo: Eric Meola, Columbia Records / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain Around 1980, in a garage studio behind his Connecticut home, guitarist Donald Roeser sat alone with somebody else’s words. The words had arrived on typewritten sheets from Richard Meltzer, an old friend from their college days at Stony Brook. Meltzer’s pages looked less like song…