Sam Cooke is back in the spotlight with the release One Night in Miami, a feature film set during in the wake of Cassius Clay’s victory over Sonny Liston. That...
Johnny Thunders and Tom Petty would seem to have little in common other than the names of their bands. However, a recent Facebook debate about the origin of tha...
By the time Jack Kerouac died at 47 in 1969, he’d exiled himself from the 1960s youth culture he’d partly inspired with the likes of On the Road and The Dharma ...
Composer David Amram, now 90, has worked with some of the jazz greats, including Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Monk, Gillespie and Mingus but his connection with ...
Leonard Cohen and Phil Spector were an unlikely pairing, to say the least. And yet, there they were, in an L.A. studio in 1976, both drinking heavily, both deal...
Allan Sherman, a pudgy TV game show producer, dominated the pre-Beatles record charts with a string of hit singles and albums. His blend of post-Borscht Belt hu...
George Orwell and Henry Miller, two of the most influential writers of the 20th century, had a single brief encounter in Paris in Dec. 1936. It has intrigued an...
Though Laura Nyro's songs are familiar to millions of people–through hit versions by Three Dog Night, the 5th Dimension and others–she herself remained in the s...
Few major musical artists faced the obstacles Billie Holiday had to face, but then few can match her musical legacy. She sang, she said, the way Louis Armstrong...
Wayne Kramer of the MC5 was sent to ‘The Narcotic Farm’ in 1975, the same federal facility—part hospital/part prison—where the likes of Ray Charles, William S. ...
Mixmaster Arthur Russell meets wannabe rapper Mark Sinclair (aka Vin Diesel). What could possibly go wrong? That’s what Gary Lucas thought when he brought these...
Automne Zingg is an artistic force. The New York City-based visual artist creates funny, surreal, psychedelic portraits and images, but she’s also an author, pu...
As Howlin’ Wolf’s longtime guitarist, Hubert Sumlin (1931-2011) kept to the shadows, but his sweet, subtle, sophisticated leads were the perfect foil for the bi...
Richard Hell and the Voidoids are best-known for their debut album, the masterful Blank Generation (1977). Before completely disbanding, they released a second ...
