The Beatles had no greater fan than a 14-year-old from Reseda, California, named Pam Miller. Young Pam was so smitten, she invented weird rituals to gauge her f...
Miles Copeland III was already a veteran music promoter and manager when the punk scene exploded in London. With an office in the same building as Malcolm McLar...
Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, was a folk-blues giant whose music and persona transformed American culture. He sang what he lived (poverty, priso...
The Plasmatics, fronted by the unmatchable Wendy O. Williams, may have been the most misunderstood rock ‘n’ roll band ever. Conceived as all of the following: p...
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...
Cleveland’s Scat Records, brainchild of Robert Griffin, set a high bar for indie labels in the Midwest, especially after he introduced Guided By Voices to the w...
In the second and third installments, presented here together, Ben Merlis and Daniel Weizmann track how the genre hidden between punk and hardcore smashed throu...
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...
Ben Merlis and Daniel Weizmann are mad musical scientists who, while staying late one night in their lab, discovered a new musical genre. Or, rather, a hidden g...
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...
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. ...
