Preston Lauterbach’s The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll is a must read, but it’s also a must listen. The music covered spans a period of sixty years, and listening […]
Deep Cuts: A Listener’s Guide to the Chitlin’ Circuit
(Really) Deep Cuts: Classic Rock
An alert reader and good friend I’ll never meet brought up classic rock radio recently. I’m paraphrasing here, but he mentioned that in the good old days of radio — say, 2005, for […]
Deep Cuts: Songs for Ten Resolutions
So you’ve decided that 2012 is the year you drop that dead weight, whatever his or her name is, or take a trip to Greece while it’s still there. Here are some […]
Deep Cuts: The Obligatory Christmas Playlist
I swore that I wasn’t going to do this, but here we are just two days away from the big day and I can’t bear the thought of you listening to the […]
Deep Cuts: Songs About Fighting
Have you ever seen lion cubs wrestle? Humans are no different, especially boys. We go through a period where we behave like badasses even though the overwhelming majority of us aren’t. We […]
Deep Cuts: Seven Decades of Sweet Transvestites
The Rocky Horror Picture Show hardly was rock and roll’s first foray into blurred gender roles, nor was it the last. Since the dawn of rock in the mid-Fifties gender confusion has […]
Deep Cuts: The Bromley Contingent and Then Some
There are a few revered flashpoints in rock and roll history, those moments that sparked the audience to go out and form their own bands — The Beatles appearing on Sullivan, for example. […]
Deep Cuts: Ten Songs To Hate School By
Songs about school date back to the beginning of rock and roll. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties they focused on just how keen and swell school is, and then Alice Cooper happened. […]
Deep Cuts: Weird Television Musical Appearances
Music television predates MTV — it even predates the Ed Sullivan Show — and as a kid I would watch any show with a special guest appearance. From Bobby Sherman on The […]
Deep Cuts: Eight Songs About Flying
Some kids are train kids, others go for cars. Me? I was an airplane kid. My ceiling was the backdrop to an epic, never-ending dogfight between plastic models bearing sticky fingerprints. Eventually I […]
Why It Matters 