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...
Philadelphia’s relatively short-lived (1956-1967) Cameo-Parkway label never got the attention of contemporaneous labels like Motown, Chess, Stax, Scepter/Wand o...
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...
At age 90, Frederick Wiseman is one of those living American masters who would, in a better world, need no introduction. And yet, as a pioneer of documentary fi...
A school mate of John Lydon’s, Jah Wobble (John Wardle) was still a teenager when he joined Public Image, Ltd., and he learned bass on the fly. Not a huge fan 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...
Kathy Valentine was born with a rock ‘n’ roll heart, so it was no surprise to find herself playing bass in the Go-Go’s, whose first album Beauty and the Beat (1...
Signed to Mercury the same time as the New York Dolls, Ohio-based Blue Ash was part of a pre-punk wave pushing against the pretentions and bloat of 1970s rock &...
Taquila Mockingbird developed a following in LA with her various bands (punk and jazz) beginning in 1977, and she became a fixture on the LA punk scene when, fr...
The Village Voice, during punk’s heyday, called The Feelies “the best underground band in New York.” But, outside of some tracks for Ork Records and a single (“...
If there was a Mount Rushmore for reggae, Lee “Scratch” Perry's would be one of faces carved on it. The producer-songwriter-musician-singer, now 83, rose throug...
Henry Rosenthal might just be West Coast punk’s Renaissance Man. One-time drummer for the legendary S.F. punk band Crime, he has had an amazingly varied creativ...
While Hendrix, Morrison and Joplin were setting the musical tone for 1960s counterculture, Denver-based Lothar & The Hand People were following the lead of ...
