It’s A Beautiful Day, with their soaring, unforgettable “White Bird,” were an anomaly among bands of the San Francisco psychedelic scene of the late 1960s. With...
Before the hippies swarmed in to reshape America’s counterculture—and before the city embarked on a disastrous urban renewal (or 'redevelopment') plan—the Fillm...
Influenced by the punk scene centered at Mabuhay Gardens, and the fun, bohemian spirit of a city that was, back then, an affordable place to live, Judy Gittelso...
The subtitle to Remain in Love, the new memoir by Chris Frantz, is “Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina”. He was the co-founder and drummer for the first named ba...
Though the guitarists for The Yardbirds got all the ink, the band's other four members—bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, drummer Jim McCarty, rhythm guitarist (and la...
Bruce Licher’s rise to the top of post-punk graphic design began in 1980 as a means to package the music for his own bands, Project 197 and Savage Republic. Gra...
Philadelphia’s relatively short-lived (1956-1967) Cameo-Parkway label never got the attention of contemporaneous labels like Motown, Chess, Stax, Scepter/Wand o...
Mick Houghton came of age as a pop music ‘obsessive’ in the 1960s. By the 1970s, he was a pop music industry insider. His previous books—biographies of Sandy De...
Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones’ troubled but gifted guitarist and blues maven, made a few attempts to find life outside the celebrated rock & roll band. On...
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...
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.
