Much like Neil Young, the Kinks were a band that I’d heard on the radio forever, but didn’t explore further until my friend Tony brought over a copy of one of their records. It was their 1980 live album One … Continue reading →

One of the fun things about letting iTunes shuffle mode curate these entries is that sometimes it’s going to pull in a band from out of left field, just because the random number generator happens to glide to a stop … Continue reading →

There are some musicians who don’t so much arrive in your consciousness as you suddenly realize they’ve been there all along. But with Tom Petty, there are a couple of moments that made him leap from “guy I don’t mind … Continue reading →

I have a clear memory of the origin story here: In my Sociology 101 discussion section at UC-Berkeley, a classmate showing off the new LP of Stop Making Sense that he’d just bought. Or she. Or maybe it was a … Continue reading →

It was the mid-’90s, and we were all just discovering what was starting to be called “alt-country,” which mostly meant a whole lot of punk rockers who’d discovered that it could be just as effective to turn off your amps … Continue reading →

The notion of being “introduced” to Neil Young seems ridiculous: In the 1970s, his music was always in the air, and on the air. On rock stations like WPLJ and WNEW (which all the cool kids listened to), and even … Continue reading →

I’m pretty sure the first time I heard of Superchunk was in a story told to me by my much-aforementioned friend Pete, back when we were writing an article about how Nirvana were just riding on the coattails of more … Continue reading →