the one after the big one

By the time Iron Butterfly followed up their massive (and massively influential) hit album IN-A-GADDA-DA-VIDA with 1969’s BALL, the band was on a downward internal spiral that would see it shed members and eventually break up (for the first of...

Much has been made about the back-and-forth one-upmanship between the Beatles and the Beach Boys in the mid- and late-Sixties, how records like the latter’s SUMMER DAYS (AND SUMMER NIGHTS) had informed the former’s RUBBER SOUL, which, in turn, had...

Cher has been a star for so long, it’s hard to count all the ebbs and flows her career has experienced since she topped the charts with husband Sonny Bono in late 1965. She’s been a force in pop music...

Turn-of-the-millennium pop music is best remembered as the era of the boy band (NSYNC, Backstreet Boys) and saucy girl pop (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and the like), but dig another layer or two deeper, and you’ll find some gems that...

Each of the early J. Geils Band records was a great Saturday night on a platter. Who could resist that Boston-accented blast through Motor City soul and Chi-Town blues? Heck, their third studio record, 1973’s BLOODSHOT, had even hit the...

Graham Nash appeared to be in a dour mood in 1973, and there were any number of reasons why. Romantic relationships with Joni Mitchell and Rita Coolidge had gone sour; the Vietnam War was still taking lives; and he could...

Like the Grateful Dead, to whom they are often (and often unfairly) compared, Phish are equally adept at creating songs that are conventionally structured and songs whose intent is to crack those structures open, spilling out all manner of improvisational...

Toward the end of their time together, the funk band Rufus and their star lead singer Chaka Khan had an odd arrangement – the band would make a record with Khan, then Khan would make a solo album on her...

With their debut long-player OUT OF THE CELLAR all over radio and MTV in 1984, Ratt had gone from being Sunset Strip superheroes to something bigger – a loud and proud American rock band that had jumped into national commercial...