Author: Jeff Burger

  By Jeff Burger   There’s a modicum of truth to the notion that rock and roll hit a slump in the late 50s and early 60s—from around the time that Elvis entered the Army and Buddy Holly died until the Beatles-led British Invasion and psychedelia arrived to shake things up. But don’t believe anyone who tells […]

Robin Lane grew up amid L.A.’s Laurel Canyon scene and entered the music world as a folk-rocker. (She sang backup on a song on Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere when she was 16.) But the punk/new wave movement—which embraced the Police’s Andy Summers, her husband from 1968 to 1970—clearly had an impact on […]

By Jeff Burger I’ve been singing Tom Russell’s praises since 1977, when he sent me Ring of Bone, the excellent album he’d recorded with his then musical partner, Patricia Hardin. Nearly half a century and dozens of albums later, I continue to maintain that he’s a national treasure; and I remain baffled by the fact […]

Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway show, which ran from October 2017 to December 2018 at the Walter Kerr Theater, will stand as one of the most powerful works of art that he has ever created. That’s saying plenty, given that his resume also includes some of the greatest concerts and albums of the entire rock era, not […]

By Jeff Burger When I saw Don McLean in concert some years ago, he introduced “American Pie” by mentioning that people often asked him what the song meant. “It means,” he noted after a pause, “that I never have to work again.” Bobbie Gentry could undoubtedly say the same thing about her brilliant “Ode to […]

By Jeff Burger The Beatles—the November 1968 double LP that has been known from Day One as the White Album—occupies a place on many if not most fans’ lists of the group’s greatest recordings. That it is, but its new six-CD-plus-Blu-ray 50th Anniversary Special Edition is greater still. The first Beatles record to find the […]

Lefty Frizzell arguably played almost as big a role in the development of modern country music as his friend Hank Williams. Nevertheless, he didn’t make it into the Country Music Hall of Fame until 1982 and, for reasons I’ve never quite figured out, he is not as well known or loved by the public today […]

by Jeff Burger Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series began relatively modestly back in 1991, with a three-disc collection (labeled Volumes 1–3) that featured a grab bag of previously unreleased material recorded over nearly 30 years. Volume 4 didn’t appear until seven years later, but the pace has picked up considerably since then, with the releases becoming […]