At his excellent blog, Can’t Explain, Jeff Pike assembles a small road crew to re-evaluate Neil Young’s 1979 Pazz & Jop-winning LP, Rust Never Sleeps. Jeff, Phil Dellio, Steven Rubio, Jack Thompson, and yours truly all pipe in, with reactions which, while positive overall, are surprisingly varied. The one perhaps not-so-surprising common denominator, mentioned at least once by everyone, is punk. (My original impulse, in … Continue reading Rust, Still Awake
“I’m so sick of writing good stuff that never ends up getting published.” Once in a while my Tumblr feed does its job. Continue reading To Miriam from Lester
So of course I always thought Talking Heads were about the individual human units (ha!—and fuck you, Fripp) response to cybernation, depersonalization, the effect of corporate consciousness on individual identity, all those great contemporary questions nobody can seem to come up with any real or workable answers for. Richard Hell was about the same thing on a darker, more hermetically selfenclosed/obsessed/possessed level, in fact the … Continue reading “Fear of Everything”
“[Dylan’s] music will far outlive anything I’ve ever done. I think a lot of reasons why I look good are because times are so bad. “There’s not a heck of a lot of music around now that I’m really thrilled over. Patrician rock is going down now. I like punk rock.” Don McLean, quoted in The Free Lance-Star, Feb 17, 1973 Continue reading Don McLean, American Punk
Was reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a second run-through, for college, and whenever I picked up the book I’d put the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” on the record player, over and over, my sound of Quentin Compson trying to break out but turning in on himself in loathing. My point is that here are a couple of the many ways into hard rock, if someone wants … Continue reading Painting red doors black
It has always been hard for the priests of RockThink to deal with punk in any manner other than ideological; this is why the Sex Pistols go down in history as somehow more valuable than the Buzzcocks.) An almost unlistenable triple LP dedicated to a communist revolutionary government (The Clash’s Sandinista!) means more to those who write the histories than an unspeakably gorgeous #1 pop … Continue reading The Priests of RockThink
Invented punk rock as we know it; penned one of the great singles of ’68; inspired an essay entitled “James Taylor Marked for Death.” [Obit] Continue reading R.I.P. Reg Presley
Yes, that James Chance. From the latest edition of Perfect Sound Forever. Because I’m fairly noir-deficient, much of the context here eludes me, but there’s some great lines throughout. On 1947’s Nightmare Alley: “The movie that proves that the geeks that you meet on the way up are the same ones you meet on the way down. In fact, you just might be meeting yourself.” … Continue reading James Chance on Film Noir
The Future of Everything, ca. Jan 1978, Rolling Stone Continue reading Donna Pistols
RockCritics.com 