The Who’s 1969 double-album Tommy is generally considered the first ‘rock opera’ (cases could, of course, be made for S.F. Sorrow by the Pretty Things or Villag...
Did you know that LSD and hippies were invented by the CIA in the 1960s? No? Well, the idea was to hook kids on sex, drugs and rock & roll (hey, it worked!)...
As a film director, Nicholas Ray made some memorable films, like They Live by Night, In a Lonely Place and, of course, Rebel Without a Cause. As a father, he wa...
Born in the Mississippi Delta, the son of a sharecropping pastor, John Lee Hooker absorbed the blues of that region before heading north and picking up an elect...
The real-life Edward D. Wood, Jr. was far more interesting than the character depicted by Johnny Depp in the 1994 Tim Burton campy Ed Wood. Yes, Wood was a seri...
Billy Hough tackles Patti Smith's Horses in 3 minutes
Legs McNeil gave Billy Hough three minutes to unpack as much information about some of his favorite thing...
Christine Ohlman, the Beehive Queen, is not just a great singer. She’s also a record collector and an archaeologist of American song, diving deep into the roots...
As Bikini Kill makes plans for their first tour in 23 years, PKM revisits the roots of the Riot Grrrl movement that the band helped bring to life. Sharon M. Han...
Philadelphia’s relatively short-lived (1956-1967) Cameo-Parkway label never got the attention of contemporaneous labels like Motown, Chess, Stax, Scepter/Wand o...
Cartoonist Basil Wolverton (1909-1978) cast a large, if sometimes unrecognized, shadow over the underground comix of the 1960s and punk graphics of the 1970s an...
Chip Taylor followed an unorthodox path to late-career musical success. Though born and raised in tony Westchester County, he began his career in his late teens...
Billy Hough tackles 1967’s “Velvet Underground & Nico” in 3 minutes
Legs McNeil gave Billy Hough 3 minutes to unpack as much information about some his fav...
When Sonny Franzese died last month at age 103, he was the last living remnant of the New York Mafia from its heyday. A feared enforcer and dictatorial head of ...
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...
