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...
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...
You’ve heard of the British Invasion, right? Well, ‘the Dutch Invasion’ that followed did not exactly storm the beaches of the USA (outside of hit singles by Sh...
Producer and record industry insider, John Simon helmed some classic albums by Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin and the Band (including Music from Big Pink), among o...
Though they lasted only five years, the Yardbirds reshaped rock, pop and blues. Through all the personnel changes—Clapton, then Beck, then Page—Jim McCarty was ...
Promoter/producer/club owner Joe Boyd, with his production company Witchseason, introduced the world to some enduring artists in its time (1967-70): Fairport Co...
A previously unreleased batch of demos from the late 1960s reveals David Bowie groping toward the sound, vision and alter egos he would later assume, and then ...
