So revered in the UK that he made the top 50 in a BBC poll of ‘Greatest Britons of all time,’ John Peel (1939-2004) shaped popular culture in ways that American...
The Philadelphia recording studio Sigma Sound almost single-handedly defined the pre-Disco sound of the 1970s, with the smooth, soulful outpourings of the O’Jay...
Putting on punk shows in Los Angeles in the early 1980s became near to impossible with the lack of venues and police harassment of those events that did manage ...
In 1966, a Scottish folkie with beatnik affectations suddenly morphed into a pop music pioneer, segueing from “Catch the Wind” to “Sunshine Superman” in what se...
Even while catching the ears of the Beatles, who cited him as their favorite American artist, and pitching his songs to the Monkees, Harry Nilsson remained a my...
You’ve heard of the British Invasion, right? Well, ‘the Dutch Invasion’ that followed did not exactly storm the beaches of the USA (outside of hit singles by Sh...
Producer and record industry insider, John Simon helmed some classic albums by Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin and the Band (including Music from Big Pink), among o...
Though they lasted only five years, the Yardbirds reshaped rock, pop and blues. Through all the personnel changes—Clapton, then Beck, then Page—Jim McCarty was ...
Promoter/producer/club owner Joe Boyd, with his production company Witchseason, introduced the world to some enduring artists in its time (1967-70): Fairport Co...
A previously unreleased batch of demos from the late 1960s reveals David Bowie groping toward the sound, vision and alter egos he would later assume, and then ...
The Stones met Sly Stone when Little Willie G. stepped up to the microphone in the late 1960s/early 1970s to assert ‘Chicano Power’
In the mid-to-late 1960s, t...
A recently discovered tape, briefly released by Morrison on iTunes, may be a rock & roll Rosetta stone, serving as the link between Van the sorta-pop star a...
French film director Jean-Luc Godard believed that art was never finished. On the eve of his controversial film’s 50th anniversary reissue, Richie Unterberger t...
He appeared on more Velvet Underground recordings than John Cale or Nico and yet he is seldom mentioned in documentaries about the band, and was not included in...
Richie Unterberger has been writing about little-known and well-known rock and popular music of all kinds for more than 25 years. His dozen-plus books include "Won't Get Fooled Again: The Who from Lifehouse to Quadrophenia,"" published by Jawbone Press in March 2011.
