By Dan Zapruder Phillips

Before I was exposed to a lick of their music, Led Zeppelin’s reputation preceded them by about a mile. Before the Internet – before MTV, even – their fans spat out extra-musical information like fog from a dry ice machine, all of it either deviant, creepy or both. How was I expected to wrap my junior high brain around those weird symbols that formed the “title” of their fourth album? Was one of those basically pot?
Then there were the rumors of backstage shenanigans with a baby shark (or a snapper, depending on who you asked). Not to mention the spooky backwards messages “hidden” on their records, professing allegiance to Almighty Satan. Or how about the cast of characters I’d see emblazoned on their T-shirts between every class, each one reeking of sneaked cigarettes? There was the “winged hippie,” the old hooded dude with the lantern and those naked, possessed kids from the Houses of the Holy artwork . . . Couldn’t these guys just show their faces on their album covers? Like Hall and Oates? Or Tears for Fears?

Read More

Posted on November 12, 2007

By Dan Zapruder Phillips

Buried in the lousy/loud graphic design he’d sadly champion for the next few years, we see a message from the man himself, presented in a splotchy typewriter font on crumpled white paper. Amid the surreal-yet-none-too-subtle images of a hypodermic needle bleeding money onto a recording console (!!!) and a heart being flushed down a toilet, it reads: “Originally intended for private use only, this compilation serves as the last original material recorded by (Prince) 4 Warner Brothers Records.”
I like to imagine a more honest rewrite that goes a little something like this: “If U end up not liking Chaos and Disorder, keep in mind that it was never supposed 2 B heard outside of my very large and sparkly living room in the 1st place. But if U love it, that’s because it’s made out of super-secret UNDERGROUND jams I pulled from my highly sexy Vault. Just so we have that str8. Rave Un2 the Ecstatic Whatever. –P.”

Read More

Posted on October 5, 2007

By Don Jacobson

Old Rat Packers never die . . . they just move on to new generations of admirers who are perhaps better able to separate the obnoxious cultural norms of the era from the music itself. God knows I wasn’t able to do that for most of my life. “Swinging” meant drunken, sexist escapades to me, gotten away with only because they happened at a time when women were not yet in a position to say “no.” But damn, thanks to the bargain bins, it’s clear to me now the Rat Pack crowd made some awe-inspiring sounds, none more so than Buddy Greco, who’s swinging furiously on 1960’s Buddy’s Back In Town, part of which was recorded live at Chicago’s Le Bistro.

Read More

Posted on August 27, 2007

By Don Jacobson

Jimmy Swaggart was still mainly a radio preacher known for his fiery opposition to rock ‘n’ rollers like his first cousin Jerry Lee Lewis in 1972 when You Don’t Need to Understand was released on his private-label JIM Records. He made his first TV appearance the next year in Nashville – the initial step on his infamous road to TV preacher mega-stardom – so this is probably the final album of more than 50 he’s made on which it was still mostly about the music and his considerable gifts as a piano-playing gospel song interpreter.

Read More

Posted on June 25, 2007

By Don Jacobson

This is the moment in 1966 when the steam starting coming out of a Righteous Brothers juggernaut that, thanks largely to the ever-lovable Phil Spector, had all but invented the genre of “blue-eyed soul” during the preceding two years. Only 12 months after Verve Records had succeeded in prying the (probably very grateful) Righteous boys away from gun-totin’ Phil for the then-unheard of sum of $1 million, not even Carole King and Gerry Goffin could keep the times from changing, and it shows on Sayin’ Somethin’.

Read More

Posted on May 14, 2007

By Don Jacobson

When you look at the carefully trimmed beard of Mark Lindsay on the cover of his 1970 solo album Arizona, you can just feel where it’s going: The photogenic facial hair, along with the turtleneck sweater, means it’ll be a trip to easy listening land, an effort to reinvent one of the choicest teen garage rock heartthrobs of the ’60s into a kind of tad-more-happenin’ Glen Campbell. And for a couple of songs, it works.

Read More

Posted on April 8, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

“(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” will live on in some minds as the greatest cowbell song ever (lovingly) parodied on Saturday Night Live, but the album from which that timeless classic sprang is as surprising and mysterious a recording as the band that made it.

Read More

Posted on March 11, 2007

By Don Jacobson

The early ’70s was the era when rock ‘n’ roll became old enough to have “comebacks.” Elvis established the precedent in 1968 with his famous NBC television special, which set up the good news-bad news paradigm of pretty much all of the rock ‘n’ roll comebacks that have followed. The part of special where he sat in the round, reminisced with his old bandmates and played acoustic versions of his early hits was great and timeless. But that was more than offset by a ton of schmaltzy production numbers that presaged his “Fat Elvis” Vegas years.
By 1972, the inevitably tragic arc of the rock ‘n’ roll comeback wasn’t yet fully understood, but after Sonny and Cher followed Elvis on that sad journey, no doubts remained.

Read More

Posted on February 1, 2007

By Mick Dumke

At one time, “Lady Marmalade” was unquestionably one of the great tracks from the ’70s: a sexy, four-minute funk party with a hot streetwalker whose lovers just can’t stop thinking about her or her come-on line: “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” But if you actually really listen to “Lady Marmalade,” you’ll sense that this character and her story are also fleeting and sad.

Read More

Posted on November 27, 2006

By Mick Dumke

Def Leppard has always been cool . . . at least for some of us.

Read More

Posted on October 16, 2006