Seattle, it turns out, was — and, it should be noted, still is — a perfect breeding ground for great music. Before the Space Needle, Microsoft and Ken Griffey put it on the map, Seattle was an isolated city in the northwest corner of the United States. In fact, it was...
The most popular form of entertainment in America during the first half of the twentieth century was dancing, of all things, and in order to provide music for people to dance to during the swing and big band era of the ’30s and ’40s, live bands were needed. (Not only...
Springsteen’s most popular album, Born in the U.S.A., was recorded with the E Street Band and released in 1984, but Bruce disappeared into the wilderness in the late ’80s after recording Tunnel of Love in 1987 largely without his band. He divorced his first wife,...
I have the same problem with Led Zeppelin IV that I have with Nevermind, except to an even more extreme degree. I began to listen to classic rock radio religiously when I was about 15 or so, and it wasn’t long before I discovered that Led Zeppelin is the definitive...
Rolling Stone started doing their “Greatest _____ of All Time” publicity grabs in 2003. As I’ve stated before though, it’s easy to be cynical. I’m glad they do them. They stimulate discussion and are celebratory in nature, which is a good thing. Their albums list was...
The first kind of music I was ever into was alternative rock, and man, does that music owe a lot to Paranoid. (If you’re a fan of grunge music and you haven’t heard Paranoid, you gotta give it a listen.) Paranoid is one of those albums whose influence is so obvious...
Hip-hop may have started as lightweight party music, but by the mid to late ’80s it was evolving rapidly, and a golden age dawned with the release of Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell — an honorable mention, incidentally — in the summer of 1986. Run-D.M.C. gave hip-hop its...
When I first started listening to music back in the summer of 1999, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ album Californication was released, and it was quite popular, selling some 16 million copies worldwide. I didn’t buy that album until ten years later, but considering that...
Five years ago, a tiny Irish movie called Once took the world by storm. I first heard of it when Richard Roeper and Michael Phillips (filling in for Roger Ebert when he had surgery from which he never fully recovered) reviewed it on Ebert & Roeper. Phillips later...
It’s easy to overlook the enormity of the fact that Bob Dylan has been making music for five whole decades now; on March 19, 1962, Bob Dylan released his self-titled debut album. It consisted mostly of covers and original arrangements of traditional folk songs,...