the riley rock report

Drummer Georgia Hubley turns 66 on February 9, a convenient excuse to plug a favorite covers album that vies with the best . Fakebook' s map points every which-way but weak, done respectfully but without pretense or caution, and shared like a favorite quilt. I wrote it up for the Phoenix in 1990, before used records stores started to feel nostalgic… PEOPLE STILL COMPLAIN that they "can't understan...

Musicologists have avoided Dylan longer than most other academics, in part because of how folk culture enters intellectual frames only gradually. Academics also need to invent new terms to deal with vernacular speech and how recorded sound differs from written notation. I took aim at this in Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary (1992): “Bob Dylan’s voice can crook emotion the way a prism refracts light…”...

John Lennon would have turned 85 on October 9, cue the holiday box set . Some Time in New York City (1972) still gets underrated, as does Rock and Roll (see this ) , and Lennon’s vocals win those arguments handily. (Some young turk should re-mash “ Luck of the Irish ” to omit that cringe Ono bridge.) The Elephants Memory band can still sound amateurish, but that counted for a lot in 1972, much lik...

Peter Carlin and I met while checking out that cringey Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show LOVE way back in the olden times before Obama, and we’ve kept in touch. He was working on his Paul book while I was working on John, and he gives good blurb. Carlin worked his way into Springsteen’s crew when he wrote his biography, and created alliances that make his new book on Born to Run , now 50, a worthwhi...

Grateful Dead books now rival those about Springsteen, Dylan, and the Beatles in the rock publishing market. Brian Anderson’s Loud and Clear chronicles its quest to create a Wall of Sound concert experience that reproduced the clarity and separation of home stereos. Stanley Owsley, the audiophile designer—and the real-life inspiration for Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne”—insisted on separating as ma...

The January inauguration has thrown everything into twisted new context: trauma gloat turns prosaic, overstimulation mocks innocence. Suddenly, Severance’s cult of Kier feels cartoonish, like a miniature theme park. The many sex-driven scripts that wrapped in 2024 now feel like quaint throwbacks, and given the cowering media, the confusion-is-sex meme has ballooned in a puff. You can’t play that P...

Historian Preston Lauterbach works the backstreets of rock’s story, the many accidental and circuitous paths the music takes before congealing into a popular style. With Before Elvis , he lands a major statement about how Presley immersed himself in the Memphis of 1948-1945, what he heard on the radio, in churches, and in clubs. We started by talking about one of Presley’s key mentors, the Reveren...

When you watch the Netflix Playlist series you get a standard-if-sturdy startup story with legal hurdles and tech geeks coding outside the lines. The labels carry all that golden booty, and they will make Daniel Ek pay. Ek accomodates the gatekeepers and takes over the world; it’s almost weird he didn’t attend last month’s inauguration. Author Liz Pelly agreed that the series works like a genre pi...

Moondog Matinee, The Band (Capitol, 1973) Garth Hudson, the last living member of The Band, turned 88 on August 8. Hudson’s Lowrey organ gave the Band regal colors, and he wove in synthesizer lines as if he had three hands. In songs like “Wheels on Fire,” his flourishes evoked the church, the speakeasy, and the carnival, sometimes in the same phrase. Where the Grateful Dead ritualized a long drum...

The Boys , Amazon Prime original (based on the Dynamite Entertainment comic book series written by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, developed by Eric Kripke) With events in the saddle, even this RNC update suddenly feels dated: WATCHING THE NEWS break in real time on July 13, it almost felt like reality had sprung directly from a script for The Boys . In Prime’s vicious and profane (and poorly na...

Two years ago, this Woody Guthrie piece ran on his birthday (July 14, 1912) to boost awareness and renew anti-fascist history. Given Biden’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” moment, Guthrie imparts yet more wisdom: beware cynicism, the right’s lethal stealth tactic. And lo, our first rerun… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus epis...

John Bonham (1948-1980) would have turned 76 at the end of this month (May 31). As a drummer he had chops beyond his years, and ears as big as any Page riff. When I covered Led Zeppelin’s mandatory box set release in 1990, it changed how I heard all those albums… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockrepor...

When I spoke with Jewell about her lucid and engaging history of college radio, my Covid case had grown pronounced enough that it bled straight onto the tape. She makes a smooth narrator, though, so the few places I do croak through you can hear just how ill I felt. I started by asking her what kind of history she teaches at Fitchburg State outside Boston… This is a public episode. If you would li...

Academic presses now fixing holes and taking risks where giants stutter, and the rest of us await the Big Leap Forward in long-form digital narrative… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

The quote that leaps out at me now comes from a violinist, who requested anonymity: “He tries very hard with Mozart and Haydn… But he doesn’t know the meaning of the word elegant. He doesn’t have classical ideas about sound. Elegance and charm—he doesn’t know from that. That’s a terrible thing to say, and I feel bad saying it, because he hired me. It’s not like he’s not trying; he’s just barking u...

Watching an episode of Black Mirror ("Fifteen Million Merits," 2011), I looked up the song that Jessica Brown Findlay sang (“Anyone Who Knows What Love Is”), and reeled back to find Randy Newman’s name next to Jeannie Seally. I started going through discogs.com and finding a buried history of tracks he’d written for others during his long apprenticeship before landing his own record deal in 1968....

You feel flattered watching Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film, and not just because you catch a contact high from her adoring audience. In a field of immaculate divas and country popsters, Swift creates her own rainbow fingernail category: rural Pennsylvania prom queen sets her diary to song with a charmed charisma and a singer’s dance moves. A lot of rivals now circle her career’s new grav...

The master guitarist Ali Farka Touré died in 2006 at the age of 67, widely praised for developing an “African desert blues,” woven from his Malian roots. This Earthworks domestic debut rode the Graceland world music wave alongside Salif Keita. He probably made his highest-profile album with Talking Timbuktu in 1994 with Ry Cooder. This US debut lingers with more meditative swagger, and when this r...

Big fat media blip for the Replacements, a band with a casual brilliance that chafed hard against success. Make sure to read Bob Mehr’s pungent book ( Trouble Boys ) and crank up the Ed Stasium remaster . I caught a smashing Boston Opera House gig in 1988 when we were still scratching our heads about Bob Stinson’s replacement, but it remains a golden favorite, especially for “B******s of Young” an...

When Living Colour reached No 13 on the Billboard album chart with its fourth album, Stain , in 1993, a lot of seasoned observers talked about watching the Jimi Hendrix phenom play out all over again on a twenty-five year loop. Seeing this band in a small club remains a high point of writing for the Phoenix , and Greg Tate’s comments on Mick Jagger’s involvement sounds like prophecy. (By the way,...

To celebrate the anniversary of Help!, released this month in 1965, I talked with Steve Matteo. Matteo’s 33 1/3 title on Let It Be had a big influence on my 2011 Lennon biography , and his new book, Act Naturally , talks to fresh sources who worked on these projects. Turns out A Hard Day’s Night features the same cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, who had just finished filming Stanley Kubrick’s Dr....

Kristin Hersh tours Europe in September after celebrating a birthday on August 7. So I went back to where I first tried to make sense of what made her Rhode Island band so compelling, and so fragile. just as they crested into alt-rock prominence. Sleater Kinney soon dominated the hipster crowd, but Hunkpapa holds up like a jangly oddity that makes sense of many other records. This is a public epis...

One of the few drawbacks of attending Oberlin College between 1979-1983 had to do with that small Ohio town’s lack of a record store. The bi-annual student vinyl swaps were both heavily attended and fiendishly idiosyncratic. B ut it’s still embarrassing to think that this 1988 Phoenix review was my first exposure to Joy Division, and how catching up made me sound daft. So this marks my first stab...

This week’s newsletter features an excerpt from my book review of Deliver Me from Nowhere for the Los Angeles Review of Books , plus an interview with author Warren Zanes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

Buffalo Tom guitarist Bill Janovitz has written a couple books on the Rolling Stones, and his new book talks to over a hundred sources to tell the Leon Russell story, which overlaps with the Stones in some telling ways. Here’s our interview. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com