Bruce Springsteen’s moving and mesmerizing Western Stars, which I reviewed when it came out less than five months ago, enjoyed the success it deserved, though it perhaps wasn’t “#1 on charts in every continent on earth,” as a recent press release claimed. (They have record charts in Antarctica?) Now Springsteen has taken the unusual step […]
The Rolling Stones have often been right in step with their times but never more so than in the final two years of the 1960s. Having dispensed with the psychedelia of 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, they returned the following year with Beggar’s Banquet, which includes lines like “I shouted ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’ / […]
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Dylan photos by Al Clayton/Sony Music Archives In June of 1966, Bob Dylan was still putting the finishing touches on the “thin, wild mercury sound” of Blonde on Blonde, a wordy, seemingly drug-fueled rock classic loaded with impressionistic, often abstruse lyrics. The album garnered the rave reviews it deserved; but only about 14 months later—having […]
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What’s left to offer in the retrospective department when you’ve already released Anthology, Best of 1968–1973, Greatest Hits 1974–78, Young Hearts: Complete Greatest Hits, Ultimate Hits, and several other noteworthy compilations? For rock’s Steve Miller Band, the answer is a box set that completely eschews the hit recordings that powered their career in favor of alternate versions, demos, and […]
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In the late 1970s, the airwaves and record stores offered a mix of mainstream pop, disco, and so-called classic rock with hits ranging from Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” and Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now.” Some of the era’s bestselling music was good, but nearly all of it was […]
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Abbey Road—the Beatles’ final studio project, issued before but recorded mostly after Let It Be—opens with a John Lennon song called “Come Together.” In fact, though, the group was coming apart. Six days before the album’s Sept. 26, 1969 release, Lennon privately told his bandmates he was leaving, and Paul McCartney publicly quit the foursome […]
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By Jeff Burger The music that germinated in the mid and late 1950s in and around Bakersfield, California, is typically more authentic-sounding and less commercial than what Nashville has delivered. Wikipedia calls it “the first genre of country music to be significantly influenced by rock and roll, and as a result, the first to rely […]
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Your guess is as good as mine as to why pop/soul singer Paul Young never became a household name in the U.S. True, he topped the charts one time here, with his 1985 cover of Daryll Hall’s “Every Time You Go Away,” and he broke into the top 20 with the follow-up to that song, […]
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By Jeff Burger Fifty years ago, on July 31, 1969, Elvis Presley began a concert series in Las Vegas at a critical career juncture. Nine years earlier, following his stint in the army, he had traded the stage for the screen, opting to walk away from live performances and focus on moviemaking. But after acting […]
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By Jeff Burger This has been quite a year for box sets of vintage material. We’ve already witnessed the release of a four-disc Smithsonian Folkways collection celebrating the social power of music, a 14-disc collection from Bob Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, and a 38-CD Woodstock festival box, to name just a few of the […]
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