Steven Ward joins the WordPress fray with Hamburger Midnight - and with any luck he’ll pop his head in here at some point also.

Three new Greil Marcus-related pieces regarding Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs (edited by Phil Freeman).

• Everything’s bigger than life for legendary rock critic Greil Marcus... “In a Marcus sentence, every idea is a universe, and every song is a seismic disruption of the tectonic plates of American culture. Do not try this at home.” [Toledo Blade]
• A conversation with… “It’s wrong to force these questions. It’s a completely false choice. I have probably 20 different records I can argue are the greatest. At any given time I feel that the sum total of what human beings can create is contained in the Chiffons’ ‘One Fine Day’ or the Clash’s ‘Complete Control.’” [Toledo Blade]
• Desert Island Dick: (By Kevin John) … “It’s as though Marcus can’t recognize the many vital communities created and reinforced by modern music because they aren’t the globe-spanning movements of his imagination. Or in other words, he doesn’t get it, so it must be ungettable. Ugh.” [Chicago Reader]

All links directly from the Marooned blog, which has more info about the book, plus more links and stuff.

Listening: Kinks, “See My Friends”

If you can attach first names to all of the above in less than 8.5 seconds, you’re in the right place. The following batch of interviews were re-posted here:

• Paul Nelson (Steven Ward’s interview that really kicked off the whole rockcritics “phenomenon”)
• J.D. Considine
• Martin Popoff
• Richard Meltzer
• Stanley Booth
• Tom Smucker

Speaking of Paul Nelson… More on this later, but see Kevin Avery’s blog, Everything is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson, an online companion to Avery’s upcoming Nelson bio. Looks pretty amazing.

R.I.P.

Not a rock critic, obviously, but someone whose imprint on rock criticism is nonetheless immeasurable.

Re-posted rockcritics archive interviews with:

• Chris Buck (1996)
• Frank Kogan (1997)
• Chuck Eddy (199 (+ a related piece on Chuck by Phil Dellio)

Listening: Rolling Stones, “Complicated”

Rock’s Backpages compiles a tribute to the late UK music critic.

Cook, as quoted by Barney Hoskyns: “Describing a piece of music in a way which isn’t either cliché-ridden or merely fanciful is desperately difficult. I suppose if I have any advice to offer, it’s the simple truth that you have to listen properly, and hard, and ask yourself what’s going on and why.”

… and refreshed and cleaned up, etc. Bang! Bang!

See, it’s not so bad, kids… everything will come back in due time. Here’s the Lester Bangs links page. I’ve rid the page of all the bad links (of which there were several), will try and find where some of those links have moved to–and of course, will add any new ones as I see them.

 UPDATE: More links added, more restored… and special thanks to Glorious Noise for organizing such a great collection of Bangs’s scribblings in Rolling Stone.

Think I’m gonna start things off here by (slowly) catching up with a few interesting books that have come out recently–none of which I’ve read yet, of course, but all of which look, um, “interesting.”

First up: Michael Awkward’s Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Struggle for Artistic Identity, described as “an engaging look at how three very different rhythm and blues performers—Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Phoebe Snow—used cover songs to negotiate questions of artistic, racial, and personal authenticity. ” Haven’t seen any actual reviews of this yet, though I did skim the introduction, and it looks more promising–a little less dry–than that description implies (it struck me as being a very personal book, but I could be wrong).

The archives page (sans content) has been successfully loaded onto the new server. Now it’s just a case of re-uploading all the old interviews and features, which I figure will take, oh, three to four years give or take… nah, 2-3 months tops. I hope. Anyway, stay posted–I’ll note them here as they go up.