To chart my hard rock/heavy metal development, I would have to start as a budding young KISS devotee as a child in the late 70s. In 1981 I discovered AC/DC, having pretty much worn out my dog-eared “Back In Black” cassette tape through massively repeated listens on any boombox I could get my hands on.…
Ram may have been unfairly targeted as pabulum in 1971, but Paul McCartney ultimately produced one of the strongest albums of his career and a now-acknowledged indie pop classic.
(All photos courtesy of the lovely Boots and her amazing skills, considering we were all the way back in Row T and she wasn’t using any flash…) It’s not exactly a groundbreaking revelation that, as a near-lifelong Beatles fan, I’m sick to death of Beatles tribute bands. I’m explicitly referring to the Wigs-n-Costumes bands in…
Thin Lizzy’s 1973 album Vagabonds of the Western World marks their third LP release, their final album with guitarist Eric Bell, and a continued evolution of their sound. Sure, you have Phil’s inimitable vocal stylings and lyrical prose aplenty, and Bell — as underrated a classic rock guitarist as they come — continues to show off what…
Rating: Are you kidding me? I don’t think you have really lived until you’ve watched the Bee Gees engage in a disco kung-fu battle against poorly choreographed nurses while Steve Martin, gyrating in the corner and performing a rather freakish Peter Lorre impression, dodges blows from a silver cane swung by Peter Frampton. But let’s not get ahead…
For the first time in his solo career, Paul McCartney had heat! The consensus was that Wings produced another strong effort.
The Kinks’s previous album, the exquisite The Kinks are The Village Green Preservation Society, certainly didn’t deliver on the commercial front, did it? Never mind that it would go on to become the most acclaimed and biggest selling non-compilation album of their careers… Still, that must have smarted a bit for the Ray and the…
The 1978 Kiss “solo” albums are pretty infamous for how they were marketed, developed, and received, rather than for the quality of the released product. They all shipped Platinum, which means the distributor released over a million copies of each of the four records… and when most of them didn’t sell all that great, they…
One of the most endearing elements of Thin Lizzy’s legacy is that you could never quite pigeonhole them with a single sound. They ran the gamut from their early folk-rock to dalliances in R&B, FM radio rock, soulful balladry, near metal intensity, and nearly everywhere between all points in their career. The common thread woven…
I like being born into the last generation that was able to appreciate vinyl LPs in a non-retro, non-ironic manner. I got my first CD player in 1988 and that was just the beginning of the end of vinyl for me (and for vinyl as a whole, which gave up the ghost to CDs soon…