Dave Davies started The Kinks with his older brother Ray in early ‘60s England, mostly because, as he says, “our family was very supportive in letting us [live out our rock ‘n’ roll fantasies].” It didn’t take the lead guitarist long to singlehandedly kick-start the snarl and blare of…
Rant ‘N’ Roll: Steve Earle Is Our Woody Guthrie
BETHLEHEM, PA—The Sands Entertainment Center has a lot going on every night but this night, April 26, is special. Steve Earle’s in town and it’s the first night of the tour, a 38-city worldwide trek that ends July 28 in Canada and hits Montana and Colorado as well as…
Rant ‘N’ Roll: Ruminations After The Death Of George Jones
George Jones died today, April 26, at 81. He was hospitalized April 18 with fever and irregular blood pressure. An argument can be made that he was the greatest country singer of them all. He certainly was the most soulful. I loved this man. And he’s hardly dead in…
Rant ‘N’ Roll: An Endearing Portrait Emerges…
I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to reading Springsteen On Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches And Encounters (Chicago Review Press), edited by New Jersey journalist Jeff Burger. Truth be told, I just wanted to see if my own interview (“The Return Of The Native,” Aquarian Weekly October 11, 1978) would be included.…
Rant ‘N’ Roll: Rarest Of The Rare
In the 1990 Miles: The Autobiography, Miles Davis tells his biographer Quincy Troupe, “After we finished In A Silent Way, I took the band out on the road. Wayne [Shorter], Dave [Holland], Chick [Corea] and Jack DeJohnette were now my working band. Man, I wish this band had been…
Rant ‘N’ Roll: Sex, Drugs & More Drugs
Shell Shocked: My Life With The Turtles, Flo & Eddie And Frank Zappa, Etc. (Backbeat Books)—by Howard Kaylan with Jeff Tamarkin—starts with Kaylan at the White House (The Turtles were Tricia Nixon’s favorite band) snorting coke on Abraham Lincoln’s desk.
This 262-page rock star memoir gets good after only…
Rant ‘N’ Roll: Beth Hart
You’d think she was Alicia Keys the way she starts her album off with that soulful piano intro. You’d think she was Billie Holiday when she starts slurring about “the man is like a drug” and “if this is love what was I thinking” on the startlingly dramatic opening…
Rant ‘N’ Roll: King Clive
32 pages into his 586-page memoir, The SoundTrack Of My Life (Simon & Schuster), legendary record man Clive Davis admits he never really liked rock ‘n’ roll that much, preferring the music of Dinah Shore, Kay Starr, Bing Crosby and Broadway show albums. He thought of rock ‘n’ roll…
Rant ‘N’ Roll: Living Legend Dr. John
Towards the end of a two-hour set of funk at the Musikfest Café in Bethlehem, PA (one of the hippest venues in the Northeast), Dr. John leaned into the microphone and said, “Here’s a song by Lead Belly. He wrote this song in prison serving double-life at Angola. The…
Rant ‘N’ Roll: Turn Off Your Radio
John Driskell Hopkins is a founding member of the rockin’ Zac Brown Band where he continues to reside. That doesn’t mean he can’t also hook up with a North Carolina bluegrass band, Balsam Range, and put out the kind of acoustic real country music that makes the crap on…
