Want to hear how the Grateful Dead sounded in concert before its members conquered the world? If so, your best bet is July 3, 1966, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA, which was released on the 60th anniversary of the event. The album preserves a show from only about a year after the group (then called […]
The 5th Dimension’s original lineup has been compared to the Mamas and the Papas, whose songs it occasionally covered. Both were vocal groups, both featured male and female singers, both achieved major commercial success, and their heydays overlapped. But important differences explain why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the Mamas and the […]
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Two weeks ago, this column discussed singer Joe Brown, who is virtually unknown in the U.S. but has some fans in England, where several of his songs charted in the 1960s. Cliff Richard’s career offers a more extreme example of a similar dichotomy. Though he scored two Top 10 hits in America in the 1970s, […]
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Guitarist and singer Christian Parker and nearly a dozen of his pals, including Earl Poole Ball, Patrick Cleary, and JayDee Maness, are on a mission. They want to expose new generations to the so-called cosmic country pioneered in the late 1960s and early 1970s by acts such as the Byrds, Gram Parsons, and the Flying […]
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Have you watched Concert for George, the film of the memorial show held on the first anniversary of George Harrison’s death? If you have, you witnessed performances by some of popular music’s best-known acts, including Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr. But you also saw a prominently featured artist whose name likely […]
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If you listen to oldies stations or are old enough to have tuned into rock radio in the late 1960s, you undoubtedly know of Strawberry Alarm Clock. The Southern California group, originally called Thee Sixpence, recorded a psychedelic pop song called “Incense and Peppermints” that became a huge hit. Its success, for which the band’s […]
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Lance Cowan is on a roll. A music publicist for decades, he only recently reinvented himself as a folk/Americana recording artist. But he has now issued three excellent albums in as many years, and the latest of these is arguably his best. Called The Air That You Breathe, it cements his reputation as an affecting […]
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Fisherman’s Blues, the fourth and best-known album by the UK’s Waterboys, signaled a quantum leap for an already excellent band. The result of three years of studio work, this 1988 LP found the group expanding its focus from alt-rock to embrace country, folk, gospel, and soul as well as traditional Irish, Scottish, and Celtic music. […]
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The Rolling Stones’ last album of new material, 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, was their first such CD in 18 years. Now, a little less than three years later, they’re back with Foreign Tongues. They must have realized that at this point, waiting another 18 years to record again wouldn’t work out so well. Time is not […]
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To say the Cyrkle got off to an auspicious start would be a major understatement. This 1960s pop-rock outfit was the first American band signed by Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who named the group. (John Lennon provided the spelling.) In 1966, the Cyrkle served as an opening act at 14 U.S. Beatles concerts, including the […]
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