Lollapalooza has announced its 2013 lineup and has already sold out of three-day passes, individual day passes, and VIP passes. I’ve gone every year since it settled in Chicago and have consistently had a good time. Some years have been more fun than other, but there are always bands I’m excited to see and there [...]
Concord Music Group’s reissue campaign of the Paul McCartney catalog continues on May 28 with 1976′s triple live album, Wings Over America. This will be the fifth release in this series following Band On The Run (2010), McCartney and McCartney II (both 2011), and Ram (2012). All of those have featured excellent remastering and presentation. [...]
Brudenell Social Club is a workingman’s club in Leeds with an old function room that was used previously for bingo and cabaret style acts – it still has brass fittings and seats and tables at the back on the elevated section – while the dance floor in front of the stage is all standing. It [...]
“It’s funny how, as we grow old we cling to the past as we cling to the air, and feel nostalgia for things that were maybe never there.” I loved that song when I was 19. I worshiped the Smiths in high school and followed Johnny Marr’s career when he split the group. Pretenders, Talking [...]
Okkervil River’s Will Sheff posted a fantastic essay on his “very-favorite-ever cinematic document of a rock and roll band” which happens to be “a 10-dollar import DVD of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show doing a live-for-German-TV performance sometime in 1974.” It’s interesting timing, because just a couple months ago GLONO co-founder Derek Phillips, who [...]
Hurray! Billboard has published the 2012 Soundscan numbers! I love this data and I’ve been collecting it for years, looking up back issues of Billboard and scouring old news reports. It’s fascinating to see how the numbers evolve over time as people’s music purchasing habits change. Soundscan has been counting music sales since 1991, and [...]
When Chrysler busted out with the 2011 Super Bowl ad with Eminem, which gave rise to the whole “Imported from Detroit” theme, a theme that was green-lighted by Olivier Francois, a Parisian-born executive of Fiat, an Italian company (that owns Chrysler), people in Detroit at large got a good feeling. Yes, the people are tough [...]
John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John – This Christmas (Universal) The pairing is complete nostalgia. There is no other reason that John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John are together for a Christmas album aside from the fact that they were both cast together in a small little movie musical called Grease over thirty years ago. Grease has [...]
Roxy Music – Viva! Roxy Music (Virgin) During my first year of high school, I befriended an upperclassman who shared my obsession with rock and roll music. The two of us were also similar in trying to expand our collective musical knowledge by exploiting every opportunity that presented itself to us so that we could [...]
Roxy Music – The Complete Studio Recordings 1972-1982 (Virgin) A few years ago, I named Bryan Ferry’s Olympia release as worthy enough to receive the Roxy Music moniker. The argument went that the Roxy personnel all took part in its creation (including Brian Eno) so why not just used the brand name? I had a [...]
