About a year ago, while surfing through new additions on rdio, I stumbled on an artist I had never encountered before. That in itself is not unusual, but what surprised me was that the record was so fantastic — there aren’t many fantastic records from the 1970s that haven’t bubbled up to “classic” status over [...]

Over at Discaholic Corner, excellent Interview with Robert Crumb on his multi-ton collection of old 78s (more than 6,500 of them, and that’s with constant pruning! Unfortunately, the site design is so horrible that the article is almost unreadable, but worth it. Just last night, though, Aline, my wife, made a big Indian dinner for [...]

They said it couldn’t be done, but Stuck author Scot Hacker has finally cracked the code! New post over at birdhouse.org: How to Listen to Your Home iTunes Collection from Work

Quick, who’s the better drummer: 1) The Compressorhead ‘bot doing brutal justice to Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”: OR 2) This four-year-old (?) prodigy wailing (and smiling) on Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You”: Please leave your vote in the Comments. (Thanks Jim Theobald and Jeremy Graham)

“Poor false eye lash, trapped beneath the ice!” And poor Steely Dan, trapped beneath Donnie and Marie. Word on the street is that Sid & Marty Krofft had a hand in putting together the Donnie and Marie show… which goes a long way toward explaining why it was so awesome. Seriously though, whatever happened to [...]

Ready to have your musical mind blown? Just how many possible songs are there, anyway? Do all possible note combinations count as music? What is the relationship between the compressibility of data and our general threshold of enjoyment? VSauce nails it.

Listening to a Phillip Glass piece is more  like studying a stained glass window than listening to music in the conventional sense  - a passing glance would only tell part of the story, while the full picture is revealed by standing in deep meditation of its nuances.  Originally purchased tickets for last night’s Zellerbach performance of Einstein on [...]

It’s been 26 years since I last watched Laurie Anderson perform (“Big Science”). I was much younger, and so was she. The audience at the time was composed mostly of new wave/punkers with a literary bent – young adults into Fripp and Eno and William S. Burroughs. I remember a raft of white violins descending [...]

Even during busy months, I try to absorb at least some new music. This May, I barely had time to keep up with obituaries, and will admit to getting all Righteous Brothers over the band possibilities in Rock and Roll Heaven. If they had ever played together, I’m convinced the combined talents of Doc Watson, [...]

A few weeks ago, I started pulling together a bicycle-themed playlist. I’d hoped it would motivate me to train for a late-April metric century bike ride in Chico, California, which due to some feat of bike snobbery or hippie irony is known as the Mildflower. The ride was terrific. Unfortunately, my playlist never got past [...]

To Be or Not to Be/ The Bee Gees Jazz Hands/ Thea Gilmore Shakespeare’s Sister/ The Smiths Killer Queen/ Queen (Just Like) Romeo And Juliet/ Scott Kempner Wet Blanket/ Metric Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide/ Marvin Gaye Sleep to Dream/ Bettye LaVette Paperback Writer/ The Beatles The Modern World/ Jam Where Is My Mind?/ [...]

We end up around the mountain that I climb to lose you I said, I said give me the business that business could work through, I say, Ask me but all my wisdom departed Tell me but all my wisdom departed But help please at least answer me this, Answer me, answer me What’s the [...]

This’ll get your Maker nerd and guitar geek wheels cranking – ArcAttack performs a Tesla Coil version of Sabbath’s “Iron Man.” The guitar player is using an iron guitar while wearing a faraday suit, which causes half a million volts of electricity arc’ing from the Tesla coil to circle his body without harming the wearer. [...]

Years is a modified turntable created by artist Bartholomäus Traubeck, that uses light to play a slab of tree trunk rather than dragging a needle through vinyl, translating growth patterns into haunting piano music. Lovely concept – Brian Eno would be proud. YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo. A tree’s year rings are analysed for [...]

Evelyn Glennie has been profoundly (not completely) deaf since the age of 12, but tours the world as a master percussionist, speaker, improviser, and living embodiment of the act of hearing – not with the ears, but with the whole body. Contending that deafness is largely misunderstood by the public, Glennie creates and absorbs vibration [...]

Cafe Tacuba, “Rarotonga” The Marketts, “Out of Limits” The Who, “Boris the Spider” Screamin Jay Hawkins, “Little Demon” The Cramps, “Human Fly” Napoleon XIV”, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Ha” Kraftwerk, “The Robots” Strangeloves, “I Want Candy” Boogalox, “Chez les Ye Ye” Weird Sisters, “Do the Hippogriff” Roky Erickson, “Night of the Vampire” Byron [...]

Crystal clear, warm night at the classic Paramount Theater in Oakland – a venue every bit as classy and surprising as Esperanza Spalding and the Chamber Music Society, who we were there to see during San Francisco Jazz Festival. Instead of a standard review, decided to try and tell the story through Storify, capturing other [...]

As a native Chicagoan who grew up listening to men in black walking the line and grizzled bluesmen wearing their hearts on their throats, I have a pretty high tolerance for moving music that some might consider unpleasant. But even I have my limits. Following up on my Joy Division post, I’ll descend even further [...]

One of the most awkward dates of my life ended when I played Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures for someone whose favorite singer was Billy Joel. Since then, that album has killed more romantic moods than any of my other favorites. Martin Hannett’s creepy production evokes Phil Spector’s wall of sound as if rendered by Spector [...]

Growing up, Chaino’s face was always around, floating in and out of the amazing collection of LPs and reel-to-reel tapes my Dad had accumulated before marriage. Every now and then, we’d plop it on the turntable and groove to raw African beats, churned through a mesh of steel drums, slapping palms, shakers, bongos, and moaning [...]

Remember George Clinton’s fantasy verse in Parliament’s “Chocolate City,” imagining a future government in which Stevie Wonder holds a cabinet post, Secretary of Fine Arts? We’re probably lucky Clinton never got his wish to have Richard Pryor serve as Secretary of Education. But something like his basic idea occurred in Peru this summer. President-elect Ollanta [...]

Since I’m in a serious funk over the astonishing increases in inequality that define our age, it seems like a good time to feature the seriously funky legacy of England’s two-tone rebel soul pioneers, The Equals. The biracial group of native Brits and immigrants from Jamaica and Guyana, formed in North London in 1965, has [...]

Over at WFMU’s excellent Beware of the Blog music site, Canadian writer Brian Joseph Davis has penned a hilarious music review parody, the Ultimate Negative Christgau Review. Davis is no stranger to outrageous satire. His own music-obsessed rant, Portable Altamont, reimagines Don Knotts as a Buddhist philosopher and Margaret Atwood as a gangsta as it [...]

Droll grievous geek squad Murmuring through an earthquake Satan loved the Smiths. Decemberists, “Calamity Song”

Music gets all the attention. Record covers a little bit less. Totally neglected are the poor center labels, which are often great little mini-works-of-art. Simon Foster’s Center of Attention publishes photos of excellent LP and 45 RPM center labels. Lest we forget. Whilst record cover sleeve art has always received plenty of attention (and rightly [...]

I spent part of my summer vacation in New York with two living branches of the Coltrane family tree. Ravi Coltrane is the respected, bespectacled sax-playing son of John and Alice, and the namesake of Ravi Shankar. Ravi’s cousin, Steven Ellison, whose grandmother wrote “Love Hangover” for Diana Ross, is the producer, laptop musician and [...]

Radiolab (the finest podcast on earth) did something special for a recent short episode called Curious Sounds, bringing in three artists specializing in very different – and very weird – soundscapes. All three performances are worth listening to, but the big surprise was drummer Glenn Kotche of Wilco, removed from his usual habitat and throwing [...]

In one of my recurring dreams, I’m handed an enormous map of an unfamiliar city and discover that it’s written entirely in musical notation. Because I’m a mediocre sight-reader, I find myself hopelessly lost after a few turns. Bossa Nova Boulevard moves along nicely enough until it unexpectedly dead-ends at the Fusion Freeway, leaving me [...]

How cool are Brooklyn’s soulful, cerebral art-alt-funk combo TV On the Radio? Never mind their years of critical accolades. Never mind that second vocalist and guitarist Kyp Malone reached the prestigious final round of Stuck Between Stations’ battle of the beards. The real sign they’ve reached the pinnacle is that the Brickshelf Gallery has put [...]

Sometimes imitation is an insincere form of flattery. When I stumbled upon a new TV game show called Know Ya Boo, I found it reminiscent of the Newlywed Game. That’s mainly because it is a complete ripoff, from the smarmy questions of host Tom Haverford to its strange contestants. But a recent show provided an [...]

The day after the rapture, I drank coffee, watched both my children play soccer, drank more coffee, and ate jambalaya out of a paper container at a food festival in what looked suspiciously like downtown Oakland. In the end, or lack thereof, the armageddon craze led to little more than a flurry of judgment day [...]

For those actually interested in the outcome of the 1862 Battle of Puebla, many of the United States’ Cinco de Mayo celebrations must seem about as Mexican as chop suey. In the ranks of cultural misappropriations for inebriates, it’s right up there with St. Patrick’s Day, except that instead of offering you dyed-green Bud Lite, [...]

Everyone hearts Bo Diddley, everyone hearts The Clash. And once upon a time it all came together. One can only imagine the evening was slathered in awesomesauce, but “every generation has its own little bag of tricks.” Now about those amp stacks…

Louvin Brothers, “Great Atomic Power”

2011 will be remembered as a perilous and fascinating time. Thousands of protesters filled city streets, unwilling to tolerate assaults on their basic rights. Their out-of-touch head of state was even caught joking about clubbing dissenters. Is this Cairo or Tripoli? No, it’s mild-mannered Madison, Wisconsin. Comparisons between Mideast and Midwest have obvious limits. Jon [...]

For anyone over 40 (or maybe 30), having a music collection probably means that, in addition to racks of CDs and ridiculous piles of MP3s, you’re also sitting on bookshelves (or “borrowed” milk crates) full of vinyl LPs. Hundreds of pounds of space-consuming, damage-prone vinyl. LPs were music you could touch, with glorious full-color 12″ [...]

The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism recently hosted a panel discussion titled The Future of Music Journalism: Computer or Curator?, with the following lure: Critics and tastemakers have been talking about, reviewing, and exposing music to the masses for generations. With the advent of sophisticated algorithms, computer programs such as Pandora and Apple Genius [...]

Now that rapper-singer-activist Michael Steele has been relieved of his quixotic effort to make the Republican Party multicultural and funky, he can return to his regular day job as Humpty Hump in Oakland’s quintessentially nineties hip-hop combo Digital Underground. Still not convinced that Steele and Humpty Hump are the same person, despite the fact that [...]

Note: This piece was originally written for Pagan Kennedy’s book Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 70s but was most read at Scot Hacker’s Birdhouse Archives from 1994-2011 before moving to Stuck Between Stations. Dead links have been updated or removed and images/video have been refreshed, but I’ve otherwise refrained from editing the original. [...]

Simple but glorious idea: Scan all those 1″ banners at the top of old-timey LP covers that let the listener know what they were about to hear would be delivered in Full Living Stereo. Then make a giant tower out of them. Total visual treat. Click to shuffle the deck. Vintage LP stereo banners stacked [...]

The black paper between the mirror breaks my heart that I can’t go. Steal softly through sunshine, steal softly through snow. The good Cap’n has passed (through mirror paper?), evidence that the sun ain’t stable? If he wasn’t already, Don van Vliet is now having the neon meate dream of a octafish. Forever. Finally lost [...]

When I started writing about music back in the Paleozoic Era, I used to spend more time defining my tastes in distinction to what I supposedly opposed. As a bookish student with a penchant for streetwise urban blues and working-class British punk, I found the rootless, complacent self-absorption of Seventies-era singer-songwriters and pop stars a [...]

John Cage’s seminal work 4’33″ changed the world of music when its 1952 performance by David Tudor shocked audiences and critics into a new appreciation of avante garde composition techniques. The work was admired for its groundbreaking incorporation of audience noises such as shuffling chairs and blown noses, not to mention the creak of the [...]

On the last day of this summer’s family Kauai trek, at the base of the road leading up to Waimea Canyon, stopped with my crew at a shave ice joint on the South Shore called Jo Jo’s, and sat on the side porch in the hot sun, enjoying our last licks. A few days later, [...]

Saxophonist and composer John Zorn was found dead last night in his Manhattan apartment, a victim of his own success. Zorn rode into town on a white horse, his yarmulke flapping in the breeze. He didn’t know why he came back. He didn’t know how he’d gotten roped into another war with desperadoes. The day [...]

At a nightclub years ago, while overpraising some now-forgotten musical discovery, I found myself upstaged by a stranger who was raving about something even more obscure he claimed to have heard in London. Articulate but thoroughly lubricated, he raved about a legendary late-sixties Israeli garage band called the Seders. The band, he claimed, were what [...]

In the tradition of Harry Partch, whose microtonal scales played on gorgeous one-of-a-kind instruments my son once described as sounding like “space chimps driving a broken car,” Diego Stocco bought a bonsai tree and went at it with piano hammers, bows of various sizes, and a paint brush. And a MacBook Pro. The result is [...]

Rock Fans Outraged as Bob Dylan Goes Electronica: Audience members at the Newport Rock Festival were “outraged” Monday when rock icon Bob Dylan followed up such classic hits as “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Maggie’s Farm” with an electronica set composed of atonal drones, hyperactive drumbeats, and the repeated mechanized lyric “Dance to the club [...]

Not since Hohner released the Siamese Twins model harmonica in 1904 – or perhaps since Tod Browning’s 1932 film opus Freaks – has our advanced civilization had the unmitigated pleasure of being serenaded by a pair of congenitally joined twin girls who have mastered the piano, ukulele, and accordion, each twin contributing their respectively available [...]

Unless you count celebrity cephalopods, the only larger-than-life presence at this year’s World Cup was a man standing five feet, five inches. Having barely survived his Fat Elvis phase, Argentine legend Diego Maradona re-emerged from his usual work as a religious icon to coach (or at least cheerlead) his national team to the quarter-finals. This [...]

When long-suffering Spain defeated Germany yesterday to qualify for its first-ever World Cup final, you could point to the usual sports pundit’s list of factors to explain the 2008 European Cup champion’s victory, from Spain’s superbly choreographed short-passing game to the offensive wizardry of the brilliant midfielder Xavi. But since none of these reasons would [...]

Ted Hawkins, “Peace and Happiness” After a lifetime of continental drifting, our everyman busker anchors himself on the California coast, channeling the ghosts of Otis Redding and Sam Cooke as he pleads for some peace, love and understanding. And what’s so funny about that? Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, “Misirlou” Once you get beyond know-nothingism [...]

Fans of the beautiful game throughout Africa are painfully aware that it took nothing less than the the second hand of God to keep Ghana’s Black Stars from becoming the first African side to reach the semi-finals in World Cup history. But if the World Cup were awarded for music, host South Africa’s opening concert [...]

Somali-Canadian rapper/ singer K’naan performs his stirring anthem “Wavin’ Flag” with such quiet dignity and righteous power that it seems like the sort of song Bono would trade half the gross domestic product of Ireland to have thought of first. With its loping tempo and big chorus, K’naan’s signature song seems simple the way that [...]

What’s been the most embarrassing moment at your job this year? If you’re a broadcaster, the answer is obvious: trying, and failing miserably, to pronounce the name of that pesky Icelandic volcano that has turned into nature’s equivalent of Grecian fiscal policy. Try as they might, the most seasoned of non-Scandinavian reporters repeatedly stumbled home [...]

Sometimes the simplest music hits you like a ton of bricks. Somewhere between Chopin and Sun Ra (in his more pensive moments) lie the gorgeous etudes of 87-year-old Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, reflecting on her passage from religious persecution to depression to solace. Emahoy’s piano moves between dark sultry and enlivened pizzicato, like the [...]

One of the great things about my job is that I get to go to SXSW every year. The drag part is that I only get to go to the Interactive week, not the Music week (the part where the attendees start looking less like grown-up, pot-bellied Eddie Munsters complete with chunky eyeglasses and more [...]

I’m part Irish-American, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend Saint Patrick’s day in leprechaun-themed restaurants guzzling pints of Guinness until I smell like the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan. Beyond the cartoon version of Ireland, this day provides the opportunity to celebrate the culture and history of a charismatic and embattled island nation stepping out [...]

From the tippy end of the Very Long Tail comes this morsel of immutable baritone joy, apparently culled from the set of an obscure entertainment programme aired only in Russia in the early 70s. The full title is “Я очень рад, ведь я, наконец, возвращаюсь домой,” which I believe translates into something like “A Gleeful [...]

My seven year-old girl loves a book called Math Curse, which begins when a girl’s teacher, Mrs. Fibonacci, notes that “you can think of almost anything as a math problem.” The girl starts seeing crazy patterns and cruel fractions in everything from schedules to snacks. Later she conquers fear and makes peace with her semi-irrational [...]

Since all post-1963 speculation about J.D. Salinger’s state of existence is more or less a blank slate, save for the occasional lurid detail you wish you didn’t know, I’ll share my pet theory that he spent the years since 1989 preoccupied with endless repetitions of the Biblically dense, ridiculous, outrageous and uplifting scavenger hunt that [...]

Coastal California in January is a setting for unpredictable bursts of melancholy and joy. Scandinavians or Minnesotans would barely recognize “winter” here, but we have impossibly thin skins for ours. We have too many sunlit summer teaser days to steel ourselves for the bleakness, and when the big storms hit the Bay Area, you might [...]

Chris Weingarten (@1000timesyes) on music criticism in the age of Twitter. A 10-minute rant well-worth watching.

Despite a lifelong obsession with politics and music, I only really learned about Victor Jara because of Professor Joe Strummer. “Please remember Victor Jara, in the Santiago stadium,” the late, lamented Clash bard quietly intoned in “Washington Bullets,” and I had to find out what he meant. Jara, the Chilean singer-songwriter and pioneer of the [...]

Since Thanksgiving weekend gives us all the chance to dwell on the huge chasm between the Norman Rockwell expectations and Jackson Pollock realities of our everyday lives, it’s all too easy to make it an occasion to break out the Schopenhauer and wallow in self-pity. That’s what makes it the perfect time to pay homage [...]

Felt a bit less oblivious than usual the other night when I discovered that one of Stuck’s contributors had never heard of auto-tune, nor had an accompanying Music Head who doesn’t happen to be a Stuck contributor. I’ve been seeing the term “auto-tune”  thrown around (mostly derisively) on Twitter for a year or so, but [...]

Via Very Short List In the 30 years since the Stooges recorded “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” the song has been covered by a variety of other artists, including Uncle Tupelo, Joan Jet [sic.] and Sonic Youth (“Weird Al” Yankovic even paid tribute, with the parody “Let Me Be Your Hog”). But perhaps the most [...]

Good grief. As usual, the Great Pumpkin failed to show up in the most sincere pumpkin patch I could find. To keep the faith during my annual existential crisis, I compiled an impromptu playlist of Halloween favorites from the last six decades or so (clips and commentary follow). I did this while trying to decide [...]

Wife and I sat down to watch Radiohead: Seven Television Commercials, a brief collection of Radiohead music videos. It had been sitting in the NetFlix queue for so long I had forgotten it was there — arrived in the mailbox like the memory of an old friend.  Such impressionistic stuff, we decided to skip any [...]

I recently stumbled upon Neojaponisme‘s summary of the hundred greatest Japanese rock albums, as compiled by Kawasaki Daisuke two years ago. While I’m generally no fan of numerical rankings for music, I’m struck by his explanation of why such lists have often been uncommon in Japan: he claims that almost entire music industry there “is [...]

For a long time after I first saw spoken-word artist Sarah Palin recite for a national audience, part of me doubted her existence. I have nothing against regional dialect poetry, and hers hasn’t suffered from lack of attention. Last fall, the Utne Reader described her work as beat poetry, comparing her Katie Couric interview line-by-line [...]

I only remembered it was Bastille Day an hour before it was over this Tuesday, but I knew just what I wanted to hear. Jacques Dutronc is a revered figure in his country’s rock history that remains a total obscurity to many stateside. That’s a shame, because if there’s one person who can demonstrate that [...]

When the last firecracker fades and the light grows dim, there’s no better way to close out the Fourth of July than with a Dave Alvin trilogy. This isn’t “Americana”; this is America. The three songs below are from Alvin’s 1994 acoustic showcase, King of California, which includes then-new material and earthy reworkings of a [...]

Baby, baby, I can’t let go I got the Seeds on the stereo…. The Zeros, “Wild Weekend” Last Thursday, the world lost a musical pioneer known for his childlike wonder. He sealed his reputation making joyful noise, yet also seemed doomed to tiptoe through fields of anguish and despair. The singer precisely captured his moment [...]

Can you just imagine digging up the King, Begging him to sing About the heavenly mansions Jesus mentioned…. He went walking on the water with his pills. Warren Zevon, “Jesus Mentioned” When Elvis left the building a generation ago at what seemed then the very advanced age of 42, I loved a few of his [...]

I enjoy cathartic, noisy racket as much as just about anyone, but there are times when I just need music to transport me breathlessly and rapturously to a magical place I’d never see on my own. As a little kid with a homemade cardboard rocket, I remember hearing Julie London’s version of “Fly Me to [...]

If I had the opportunity to replay video footage of my entire life (a horrifying prospect, for those who haven’t seen the Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life), I could pinpoint the precise moment where music became more than just background noise and started to become a passionate life force. While still in elementary school, [...]

Burrowing through the hidden recesses of Tivo’s “Video on demand” menus, past the usual high-profile Amazon and Netflix offerings, I recently tripped over a set of sub-menus that surfaced lo-fi, low-profile offerings pulled straight off the web. It was there I stumbled on Gemini Rising, a web-only mini-series about a mythical ’74 band that looks [...]

I’m a walking bag of contradictions. In my mind’s eye, I am free of bigotry, but as soon as someone I don’t know walks in the room, I immediately start sizing up the music they listen to, based upon their appearance and wardrobe alone. Typically, the set of associations goes something like this: Ann Taylor [...]

The noble quest of Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter to be the keystone in the Senate’s archway may have ruined his chance to sing with Senator Orrin Hatch and the Osmonds. Switching parties was a drastic step, but I personally blame the EPA for years of inaction. For two decades, scientists have warned that the habitat which [...]

Just shy of 23 years ago, when I shared a tiny apartment in D.C. with two music-obsessed buddies, a staggering collection of vinyl, and zero umbrellas, I walked a few miles in an insane rainstorm wearing a garbage bag to see the Feelies play the 9:30 Club, and it was worth every soggy step. On [...]

Sometimes after seeing a movie with memorable music, I later discover that the best songs are missing from the soundtrack. This recently happened with my six-year old daughter Amelia’s favorite, Bridge to Terabithia, which moves from tween fantasy fare to thorny and honestly portrayed realist drama once the music starts to take hold. An unlikely [...]

Those of us old enough to remember that being obsessed with music used to mean hefting stacks of LP-filled milk crates from high school bedrooms to college dorms also have strong memories of flipping through endless stacks of musty cardboard LP sleeves in record stores. We weren’t just looking for particular music, but discovering, constantly [...]

You expect lead singers to be tall and gangly, but Bradford Cox, of Atlanta’s ambient noisemakers turned gonzo garageband Deerhunter, is in a league of his own, with a physique that would make even presumed invertebrate Iggy Pop look like a fullback. This isn’t because he’s trying to be cool. Like Joey Ramone before him, [...]

Neil Sedaka, “Love Will Keep Us Together” Joy Division, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” Etta James, “I’d Rather Go Blind” Roy Orbison, “Love Hurts” Chet Baker, “My Funny Valentine” Van Morrison, “The Way Young Lovers Do” Otis Redding, “Try a Little Tenderness” Fairport Convention, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” Leonard Cohen, “I’m Your Man” [...]

Part One: Life During Wartime Last week, when Aretha Franklin put on her oversized bow hat and melted fire with her inaugural version of “America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee)”—Samuel Francis Smith’s 19th Century rewrite of a German rewrite of “God Save the Queen”—a piece of my heart held the memory of another queen of [...]

I love art and I love rock, but to say that “art rock” has usually been neither would be an understatement. This problem calls to mind Matt Groening’s French sex comedy paradox: the French are funny, sex is funny, and comedy is funny, yet French sex comedies are are never funny. I know, there are [...]

When I started writing about music in the Eighties, a prominent beard on a musician was often viewed as a sure sign that the performer was an out-of-touch hippie fossil, or barring that, a member of ZZ Top. That started to change during the goatee epidemic of the Nineties, which I was convinced would make [...]

Zealously pining for the status symbol of the decade, the iPhone Ocarina? With a little practice, you know you’d become more studly than Ian Anderson, more virtuosic than Zamfir himself. And you wouldn’t be satisfied with breathy renditions of “Row Row Row Your Boat” or “Lemon Tree,” either – you’d go straight for the classics, [...]

For this year’s Thanksgiving, I posed this question to our Stuck Between Stations co-conspirators: “What music are you thankful for, and what would you suggest eating with it?” The results are posted below, including my edible playlist and helpings of pot luck from Zoe Krylova, Scot Hacker, Christian Crumlish, Benoit Baald, and Dan Haig. Need [...]

What would you say to the crazy guy in the park muttering about alien spaceship landings on the day the mothership finally beams down to bring him home? The makers of Dr. Pepper must be wondering the same thing. Earlier this year, Dr. Pepper notoriously promised that if professional head case Axl Rose finally released [...]

For months, I’ve wondered what music I’d want to listen to once the long election march toward the post-Bush era was finally over. The always-reliable Carrie Brownstein had some great pre-election suggestions in her Monitor Mix blog —the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today,” Al Green’s version of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”—but like me, [...]

If it’s not already perfectly obvious what Tuvan throat singing, Yul Brynner, and theoretical physics have to do with one another, feast your peepers (and your ear-holes) on this (via Boing-Boing): Filmmaker Ralph Leighton says, “This was the highlight of my recent trip to Vladivostok, Russia, where the film GENGHIS BLUES won the Governor’s Prize [...]

Can you think of a band that could save your life? I didn’t ask which band could be your life, the subject of the Minutemen‘s classic “History Lesson, Part II” and Michael Azerrad‘s survey of the American rock underground circa 1981-1991. The question posed here is more literal. A Reuters article this week reported that [...]

Do you remember the first time you heard a song that gave you the chills? For me, that moment happened the same month Richard Nixon resigned. Too young to fully grasp current events, I still knew that a disturbing otherness was intruding into daily routines, something unsettling enough to make grownups forget their keys at [...]

If WNYC’s RadioLab isn’t a staple of your podcast diet by now, it should be. No one else has embraced the medium’s unique characteristics as well. Each week brings astounding new discoveries, wrapped in a blanket of sonic textures that perfectly illustrate – never distract from – the subject of the episode. It was through [...]

Last Thursday in Denver, at the rousing convention finale held on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the most gifted orator of his generation finished the most important speech of his life before a crowd of more than 80,000 and an international audience of millions. And what music did [...]

While I found the movie Juno charming, I instinctively thought that the musical tastes of its teenage heroine—the old soul anti-folk charmer who upstages the cynical guy whose head is stuck in 1993—had to be an adult artifice, created for people over 35 (for example, me) to validate their own moldy tastes as “classic.” But [...]

I) Ferrous Oxide’s Day Off Remember the bad old days of yore, making mix tapes for yourself and friends, mistakenly believing you could re-use the same cassette over and over again ad nauseum ’til the ferrous oxide particles started to dissolve or flake off? Somewhere between the time you first slid off the shrink-wrap and [...]

You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em… but how exactly DO you know?  Because if you’re gonna play the game boy, ya gotta learn to play it right. Most of us can recall the lyrics like aces, but if you could become Kenny Rogers for a day, would you really [...]

Putting together a summer playlist that has staying power is harder than it seems. A few shades too breezy and it veers toward unbearable lightness; a few shades too serious and it becomes leaden and ponderous. In what follows below, I’ve abandoned any attempt to follow a coherent pattern or unifying theme. In short, although [...]

When I was growing up just outside Chicago, my indoor cats used to shed in reverse seasons. It made perfect sense in context, because they’d spend their summers pressed against the air conditioner and their winters asleep on the radiator. But there were times when my musical preferences reminded me of my cats. I’d want [...]

Bo Diddley’s tombstone head finally joined his graveyard mind last week, and if there’s one thing Bo knew, it was how to distill the sound of danger. Warren Zevon was understating the case when he called him a gunslinger; as the featured clip below from the Ed Sullivan show attests, one-chord cavalry was more like [...]

Forced to choose my favorite American rock guitarist of the last dozen years, I’d need two seconds to answer: Carrie Brownstein. If you want a showoff guitarist who plays arpeggios with her teeth while wearing a bucket on her head, she’s not going to be your axeperson of choice. And sure, I have moods that [...]

As if you needed more evidence that Tom Waits has big ears, excellent interview (“True Confessions,” actually) with He Who Fears Giant Squid at the Anti-label blog. Excerpts: Q: What’s the most curious record in your collection? A: In the seventies a record company in LA issued a record called “The best of Marcel Marceau.” [...]

Barack Obama can’t even do an interview anymore without having to address one of his least-favorite subjects: the suspicion that beneath his calm demeanor and business-suited exterior, he is a fanatical Pink Floyd fan. The long-simmering suspicions boiled over last week at California’s Coachella Music Festival. Former Floyd leader Roger Waters arranged an unauthorized airdrop [...]

Because spring is all about dancing through contradictory strains of melancholy and joy, it’s a perfect time to listen to the tangled, effervescent music of Virginia native Thao Nguyen, showcased on the almost surreally catchy “Bag of Hammers” and most of her soulful sophomore album, We Brave Bee Stings and All. Thao draws plenty of [...]

A short trip to Austin earlier this month felt like a homecoming, even though I’ve never been there before. I’ve rarely been bombarded with so much music, with so little planning or effort, for so long into the night, since I left Chicago for California more than two decades ago. Austin is the sort of [...]

Although Cuban bass virtuoso Israel “Cachao” Lopez took his final breaths this week, it’s hard to imagine this humble giant, who played in more than 250 groups from the 1920s on, as not having a pulse. Cachao would have been legendary even if he had retired around 1940. As a member of Arcaño y Sus [...]

Rickrolling is the Web 2.0 equivalent of the old bait-and-switch: Promise footage of Madonna covering Sonic Youth on your tragically hip music site, but instead deliver video of Rick Astley’s debut single, “Never Gonna Give You Up.” You’ve been rickrolled! The meme is apparently giving way to its bastard step-child “buttrolling,” in which the unsuspected [...]

Herbie Hancock’s tribute to Joni Mitchell “River” is gorgeous in every way, and wholly deserving of its recent grammy (one of only two jazz records to have won Album of the Year in the past 50 years, yeesh). Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, Joni herself, Hancock’s lush keyboards, horns by Wayne Shorter… what more [...]

We can all breathe a sigh of relief now that last week’s Super Bowl managed to conclude without a Tom Petty wardrobe malfunction. Petty’s halftime set was solid enough, although Patriots fans would probably have substituted “Even the Losers (Get Lucky Sometimes)” for “Free Fallin’.” It could have been much worse, and at the Super [...]

As our website returns from a winter hiatus, poll results are everywhere, and not just in Presidential politics. When I still voted in the Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop critics’ poll, I remember thinking how absurdly fast it seemed to rank the previous year’s best music in January. But this time, when Pazz and Jop [...]

Playing a round of Scrabble (no, not that kind) with the wife tonight, needed some good thinkin’ music to get in the groove. What better choice than a far-from-pristine LP copy of Donny Osmond’s 1973 opus, A Time For Us? But lo, what should greet my hungry eyes when sliding the record out of its [...]

Always wanted a tubular fish tank that could encircle a room, maybe even go up stairs, exist underfoot… basically some way to enmesh the meditative qualities of “ambient fish” into my life. Will probably never get my wish, but while I’m waiting, the Chemical Brother’s “Salmon Dance” will have to do.

Violinist Joshua Bell‘s virtuosity is so renowned that Interview magazine once said that his playing “does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.” A few months ago, Bell walked into a D.C. subway station, flipped open his violin case, and played his heart out for spare change — on a $3.5 [...]

Canadian reggae and soul, eh? If you expect that combination to go down as easily as curried goat with a side of Canadian bacon, you may be surprised. By the late sixties, economic strains, liberalized Canadian immigration laws, and fear among draft-age men that a United States passport would lead straight to Vietnam led a [...]

I knew from repeated experimentation — and subsequent disappointment — that Van Morrison records had stopped being worth owning sometime between Veedon Fleece and Wavelength — and even that mid-70s block was a marginal, iffy period. To have a truly psychedelic experience with Van required a large supply of candles and a Mexican Talavera candlestick, [...]

Becoming the favorite banjo-playing Episcopalian geography expert and Halloween costume inspiration of NPR listeners apparently wasn’t ambitious enough for Sufjan Stevens. Today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival—whose lineup also includes firebrand harpist Zeena Parkins— Stevens will present “The BQE,” a symphonic testament to that fount of poetic inspiration, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. [...]

This week, Stuck Between Stations combed through a Denny’s shortstack of YouTube bookmarks to find videos that simply will not escape the brain, no matter how many times you call the sheriff to force their eviction. The visual equivalent of ear-worms, these A/V train wrecks take up residence in the corpus callosum, either because of [...]

A Tribute to Devendra Banhart And hey there mister happy squid, you move so psychedelically You hypnotize with your magic dance all the animals in the sea For Sure Devendra Banhart – Little Yellow Spider At first spin of Devendra Banhart’s Little Yellow Spider, one might think it a children’s song. That is what came [...]

If I mentioned that Oakland-based guitar guru Henry Kaiser ventured into the Deep South for a recording, you might think of Lynyrd Skynyrd, or if you’re younger, perhaps the Drive-By Truckers and Cee-Lo. But Muscle Shoals and Jacksonville must seem like mid-northern outposts to the globetrotting Kaiser, who earlier this year became the first musician [...]

Jefferson Airplane and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters may have invented the acid test, but after a while, black lights, fluorescent paint, and ink swirling between the sheets of an overhead projector – as trippy as they were – had to pull up a beanbag and make way for the integration of the greater pop culture. [...]

On the second anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, I’m posting my New Orleans odyssey, “Listening to the Water.” The soundtrack to the story features Irma Thomas, Mos Def, the Meters, Amerie, Bessie Smith, Randy Newman, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, with a special public service announcement from Kanye West. The man at the [...]

Against my better judgment, I’m succumbing to the craze among online music fanatics to rewite songs in limerick form. Borrowing the popular idea to rewrite famous poems, Carl Wilson at Zoilus wrote limericks for an assortment of rock chestnuts ranging from Zep’s Jurassic classic “Stairway” to Sonic Youth’s adult-aged “Teenage Riot.” Rock, soul and hip-hop [...]

Karl Marx viewed “the economic formation of society as a process of natural history,” where individuals could not control or direct the growth of commerce. The result is that capitalism inevitably creates an infinitely complex web of social interconnections. Meanwhile, the Russian constructivists were more interested in portraying man and mechanization than they were in [...]

M.I.A. mania is starting to sweep the world in anticipation of the official release later this month of Kala. The new album follows the thoroughly unclassifiable British/ Sri Lankan aural graffiti artist’s breakthrough Arular album and Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape, the sources of several of the Zeroes’ most arresting rhythms so far. Since the artist [...]

When I think about Tom Snyder, the talk show host who passed away earlier this week, the first thing that comes to mind is his laugh, an old-school guffaw that bordered on self-parody long before Dan Aykroyd made it the centerpiece of a Saturday Night Live routine. Then I think about the eyebrows, twin black [...]

One of our oldest and dearest friends, who goes by the name Rinchen, is a devout Buddhist currently two thirds of the way through a three-year hitch in a monastery in the Santa Cruz mountains, where he is studying with the teacher he’s chosen for life, and practicing almost total silence. Rinchen has no access [...]

Is a record not spun a record not played? Dragging a needle across old, brittle vinyl records or wax cylinders can damage them — not something you want to do with rare historical recordings. At the Library of Congress, researchers have developed a scanner that can extract audio from records by scanning them digitally – [...]

For the past 231 years or so, a favorite American pastime has been to pretend to hate the French, while secretly admiring French cuisine, art, architecture, philosophy, and yes, even its music. And the French have helped us become ourselves. It took French intervention to secure victory in the American Revolution, French theorist Alexis de [...]

On the 231st birthday of an outrageous experiment in nation-building with a pretty decent soundtrack, I asked our regular Stuck Between Stations contributors to take time from their five-alarm barbecues and traffic jams and hissing summer lawns to answer a simple question: What songs would you like to hear on the Fourth of July, in [...]

Budding guitarists (hell, all guitarists), take note: Guitar music is church, and there are ten commandments you gotta internalize if you want that axe to say something that will raise souls to the ether. Prophet / spiritual leader / ghost dancer Captain Beefheart, whose voice allegedly once destroyed a $1200 Telefunken microphone, saw (sawed?) through [...]

When I’m on road trips, a favorite pastime is to flip through the radio dial trying to find local stations featuring regional music or other hidden treasures I may have overlooked. In recent years, though, these flips through the dial have increasingly become the aural equivalent of what urban sprawl critic James Howard Kunstler has [...]

Something you probably didn’t know about proto-spudboy, de-evolutionist, and original jocko homo Mark Mothersbaugh: He’s been creating a mixed-media postcard every day — for over 30 years. Originally created as personal diaries, they’ve become an obsession, and now go on tour with him. The postcards combine media and styles freely — painting and illustration, found [...]

Forget Kenny Rogers (and really, please forget Kenny Rogers). The musician best deserving the title “The Gambler” is our favorite Sonoma County rancher, Tom Waits. On July 10, Anti- will release Healing the Divide, the long-anticipated album version of a semi-legendary 2003 benefit concert at Lincoln Center. The concert features four performances by Waits with [...]

Every few decades, reincarnation goes on a bender and a soul is born into the wrong nexus of the time-space continuum. Take Meg Reichardt and Kurt Hoffmann, a dashing pair of musicians from pre-war France, accidentally transported into 21st century New York. Unheeding of their incorrectly assigned era, the pair – two parts of the [...]

A friend took his nine-month-old son to the local record store recently, muttering something like “I’ve got to teach him early about the importance of buying music, rather than downloading.” “For copyright reasons or tangibility reasons?,” I asked. “Neither,” he responded, “It’s about getting all the information.” He was talking audio aesthetics — preserving maximum [...]

Part One: International Sheep of Mystery With a style that veers between downright rude and merely impudent, Rufus Leaking isn’t your usual music reporter. He began an interview with funk legend George Clinton by introducing him as the “42nd President of the United States,” and spent most of the time asking him where he thought [...]

Dana in white, fully-clothed. The final season of The Sopranos is casting a long shadow in my life these days. I know, this is a music site—we’ll get to that. But as I write this, there are merely two episodes left in the greatest television show ever, and I’m pretty deeply engrossed. Anyone familiar with [...]

Nick Collier of Sheffield’s psychotic sextet Pink Grease isn’t the first knob twiddler in rock history to wear a strap-on-synth, but dude – his is hand-made. And it’s got no keys. Apparently Collier got a little build help from Pete Hartley, who also designed the drum kit Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen used after losing [...]

Plastic Bertrand is not answering his email. I’m trying not to take it personally — maybe he’s on tour in Eastern Europe, playing “Ça plane pour moi” over and over for 40-somethings in Buda, or across the Danube, in Pest. Maybe he’s overwhelmed with interview requests. Maybe he just doesn’t check his MySpace page very [...]

I could call Prince a “genius,” but would it matter? In music, art, and writing, everybody’s a goddamn genius. So let’s come at it from a different angle. My dad, a physician, tends to look at things from a genetic point of view. When we’re watching a truly brilliant athlete or musician, he’ll point out [...]

Mmmm… Skinny dipping on a cool autumn night, river rocks basking in the moonlight, perfect banjo and ukulele* strings glancing gently off rippled water. The sweetest canary floating through the pines, crooning in French. Kurt Hoffman and Meg Reichardt (aka Les Chaud Lapins, aka The Super-Turned-On Rabbits) perform Il m’a vu nue at Midnight Ukulele [...]

I admit I was predisposed to dislike British soul chanteuse Amy Winehouse’s new album Back to Black until I finally listened to it. How could the future of R&B lie with a troubled diva who vaguely resembles a goth version of Barbarella-era Jane Fonda? But appearances can be deceptive. I played Back to Black right [...]

Via WFMU, wonderful video clip of a youngish and very dapper looking John Cage, appearing on a TV game show to perform his piece “Water Walk” on a motley collection of household objects. By 1960, when this piece aired, Cage was already controversial for his seemingly innocuous idea that “music is a production of sound” [...]

Stuck writers dig the tradition of music magazines such as Down Beat playing tracks for famous musicians “blindfolded” to extract un-scripted gut reactions. Most of our musician friends are better described as “notorious” and some of them are shy– so for now, we’re slumming it and playing tracks for each other. In our inaugural Needle [...]

I’m on my annual pilgrimage to New Orleans, the big not-so-easy-anymore, checking out the first weekend of the Jazz and Heritage Festival, or JazzFest for short. Fest is an orgy of music, food, and crafts, not necessarily in that order. Every year we try to revisit some old favorites, check out a few ringers, and stumble over some music we’d never heard before. Last year’s discovery was twisted Louisiana piano perfessor Bobby Lounge, who we’ll be seeing again tomorrow. This year so far I’ve fallen in love with Bonerama (not what it sounds like) and have two more days to discover something totally fresh.

It’s time to play a punk rock variation on the ancient What’s My Line quiz show, where you guess the musician and his new career direction. Here are the clues: • Suppose your guitar playing and threadbare singing carry such coruscating intensity that concertgoers can hear their ears ringing days later—and this is after your [...]

Those of us who go back a ways with Iggy Pop know that he certainly has more than a little “Lust for Life” — even at age 60. He was full of lust when I saw him eat dog food on stage almost 30 years ago. I’d never imagined that the cruise line travel industry [...]

The Rolling Stones have become the scourge of Serbian humane societies due to their plan to hold a July concert at Belgrade’s Hippodrome, home to hundreds of horses that live a few meters from the stage. If things get out of hand, Hippodrome staff plan to give the horses Bensedin, an animal tranquilizer that became [...]

Iggy Pop is missing some bones. I’m sure of it. There’s no other way to explain how his 60-year-old frame can slither through space the way it does. The rippled wall of lithe-yet-steely muscle he calls a torso compensates for the bonelessness, suspending The Iguana like a marionette. Fewer bones, more muscle, and just a [...]

I can’t help thinking there’s something a mite odd about the way my brain will take some string of music fed into and run this frantic search to find even an approximate match in my memory. But then, it’s not just me, is it?

The Copyright Royalty Board has recently decided to nearly triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora. [...]

Tom Watson at newcritics calls Patti Smith’s cover of Van Morrison’s Gloria “the greatest rock cover performance (studio release) of all time.” Love how he doesn’t attempt to qualify or temper the statement by prefacing with the usual “All top ten lists are silly, but here I go anyway.” Just comes out and says it. [...]

The Bay Area’s burgeoning ukulele scene, which (like most ukulele scenes) has endless fun covering both 1930s trad and classic punk, has found another natural affinity in the gritty catalog of Tom Waits. And where goes ukulele, so go its companion instruments: the washboard, the singing saw, accordions, kazoos, and toy pianos — instruments that [...]

The Dylanhearsawho.com site we mentioned a few weeks ago is getting lots of attention this week, with a fresh article on Salon confirming that legal threats took the site (or at least the music) off line. With luck, archived versions will continue to be posted at other web sites, and the music will survive virus-like [...]

Remember ingesting the Talking Heads’ 1979 Fear of Music for the first time? You may have come away with your brain drenched in a hybrid African / New Wave alchemical sweat. Not quite as aromatic as the sweat that oozed from Remain in Light, nor quite as pungent as the sweat that squirted from the [...]

Don Bolles (better known as 70s drummer for punk outfits The Germs and 45 Grave) has reportedly has been arrested for (wait for it): possession of soap. That news comes from a recent posting by musician Nora Keyes. We haven’t independently confirmed the details of her account, but if it’s even mostly accurate, the charges [...]

The Arctic Monkeys’ reworked version of “Dancing Shoes” with a ridiculously catchy Cuban rhythm, featured on last fall’s Rhythms del Mundo compilation, first seems noteworthy simply for its goofy exuberance. A YouTube video, which borrows a classic Bollywood dance sequence, makes the song even more relentlessly silly. But beneath the surface humor is a desperate [...]

While you were busy not paying attention, the world changed: “Buyers of digital music are purchasing singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1.” That stat could be a smidge misleading, since an album may consist of, say, 12 songs, and only get counted as a single purchase, but still, “Individual songs account [...]

Yesterday on National Public Radio’s dependably hilarious quiz show, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Associate Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer attempted to answer questions inspired by a Blender article on the 50 craziest pop stars. Justice Breyer proved to be a good sport with a decent sense of humor, which you’d need to get through [...]

Sadly, Don Aicardi’s comment about my previous Dylan-does-Dr. Seuss post is true: Dylan Hears a Who is no more, and you can blame the Doctor’s handlers. The message at dylanhearsawho.com notes: “At the request of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, LP, this site has been retired.” That brings this episode a bit of resemblance to that of [...]

Guitar solos are self-indulgent. The bridge is always boring. Verses are repetitive. Everyone knows four minutes is way too long for a song. What we really want is the hook – the essence. Give me a meaty riff, and ditch the rest. Radio SASS (Short Attention Span System) “creative editing” to the rescue. Short Attention [...]

If you let iTunes set up cover art for your tracks, you’ve probably discovered by now that your copy of Led Zeppelin’s “BBC Sessions” has ended up with the cover art to Zepp whiteboy-dreadlock cover band Dread Zeppelin, and that George Harrison’s legendary “All Things Must Pass” is sporting cover art for “The Essential George [...]

    She’s a genius, she’s gorgeous, and Bjork is out of your league. As far as we know, she isn’t a blood relative. The harp is the sexiest of all musical instruments, other than the bagpipe and the accordion. She will introduce you to Devendra Banhart, who can help you do something else with [...]

Don Aicardi (aka the “Egg Roll King”), roots archivist extraordinaire and our favorite authority on all things Dylan, passes along this classic new bit of inspired insanity, featuring a faux mid-sixties Dylan voice assaulting Green Eggs and Ham, the Zax, and the Cat in the Hat, among other bits of classic Dr. Seuss. I wish [...]

When he tired of the expense, the navel-gazing, and the circular conversations in the weekly sessions of therapy, his bright idea was to revive his interest in drumming, and what he lacked in actual ability he could always compensate for with enthusiasm and volume. This was not music to the ears of his wife, for [...]

Guardian piece looking back on the origins of The Stooges and “the great Rock Iguana at 60.” Iggy talks a bit about his parents and how they viewed his quitting school to do music: And my dad told me later, ‘Weeell, you remind me of a lot of pitchers that I used to go to [...]