40 years ago today, The Rolling Stones played two concerts at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. In the darkness of the audience was a man known to history only as
"Dub"...
[audio auto-plays] [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Nov 9, 2009 -
13 comments
Boys dared to grow their hair and girls dared to wear mini skirts and in Korea indecency officers patroled the street with scissors and rulers, publicly cutting hair too long and checking if skirts were too short. Shin Joong-hyung, was there with his 70s hit,
Beauty, as were other musicians and artists like
Sanullim and the
Key Boys.
[more inside]
posted by kkokkodalk
on Nov 5, 2009 -
12 comments
Electric Junkyard Gamelan is the brainchild of bandleader and composer
Terry Dame, and fuses Dame's passions of composing, inventing and building. Originally inspired by traditional
Gamelan music from Bali, the group recycles and repurposes
everyday objects into musical instruments. While some of their songs do indeed resemble the hypnotic percussive melodies of a Balinese/Javanese gamelan orchestra (
The Nutbutter Challenge), other tunes strike out into new, distinctly urban American directions (
Ode to Fred Beans). Following the band's motto, "
Reuse, Recycle and ROCK," instruments are fashioned from coat hangers and rubber bands, bed frames, old farm equipment, turntable platters, clay pots, saw blades and truck springs. The "
Big Barp" rubber-band harp makes a particularly unusual sound.
[more inside]
posted by ocherdraco
on Oct 12, 2009 -
5 comments
Dig! Destroy The System. The entire film about the Brian Jonestown Massacre's rivalry with the Dandy Warhols (after a 30 second ad). One week only on Pitchfork TV.
posted by msalt
on Oct 2, 2009 -
56 comments
Fifty years ago, those decrying rock 'n' roll as devil music that would crumble the morals of America needed to look no further than
Wanda Jackson for evidence. Her
raspy, brassy voice,
suggestive lyrics, and
sexual energy were almost unbelievable for the Eisenhower years. Coaxed into singing rockabilly by her then-boyfriend,
Elvis, she had a
string of
rock hits, before marrying and IBM programmer and switching to more traditional,
conservative country music.
posted by Jon_Evil
on Aug 20, 2009 -
23 comments
My Beat Club has a whole ton of classic rock perfomance videos, mostly from old German TV shows
Musikladen and
Beat Club. Among the videos on offer are
Small Faces' Tin Soldier,
Chuck Berry's School Days,
Ike & Tina Turner's River Deep, Mountain High,
The Who's My Generation,
Country Joe McDonald's I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag,
The Everly Brothers' All I Have to Do is Dream,
The Ramones' Sheena is a Punk Rocker,
Mungo Jerry's In the Summertime,
T. Rex's 20th Century Boy,
New York Dolls' Looking for a Kiss,
The Byrds' So You Want to Be a Rock n' Roll Star,
Thin Lizzy's Whiskey in the Jar,
Slade's We'll Bring the House Down,
The Jimi Hendrix Experience's Purple Haze and so much, much more!
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 29, 2009 -
30 comments
Greil Marcus writes
Real Life Top Ten for the Believer Magazine, in which he lists "anything that remotely has to do with music, a dress Bette Midler wore at an awards show or a great guitar solo in the middle of a song that otherwise wasn't very interesting." But he's been writing this
column online for just about
10 years. [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue
on Jun 25, 2009 -
4 comments
Dr. John Rudoff is a cardiologist in Oregon, but before he entered medical school, he was the staff photographer at
The Main Point, a coffeehouse in Bryn Mawr, PA associated with the early 1960s folk revival in the Philadelphia area. His photographs of the Philadelphia folk scene include
unidentified local folkies, but also touring folk singers such as
Dave van Ronk and
John Hammond. Eventually, Rudoff got a press pass to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he took photos of
Mary Travers sharing a moment with Mimi and Dick Fariña and
Joan Baez with a pre-psychedelicized Chambers Brothers, but the most amazing discovery of all are the photos of
when Bob Dylan "went electric." And now you can see
Rudoff's whole collection, thanks to the magic of Flickr.
posted by jonp72
on May 7, 2009 -
13 comments
100 Best Icelandic Pop & Rock Albums all streamable in full for free. Icelandic state broadcaster RÚV and Icelandic subscription music website
tónlist.is have published what they, their team of experts and the Icelandic public consider to be the 100 best Icelandic rock and pop albums of all time. Björk, Sigur Rós, Múm and The Sugarcubes don't need much introduction but below the cut there are short description of the other artists.
[via RÚV] [more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on May 6, 2009 -
47 comments
Clips from the BBC documentary, The African Rock n' Roll Years -
Part 1 l
Part 2 l
Part 3 l
Part 4 l
Part 5 l
Part 6 - a six-part series mixing interviews with key artists, concert footage and news archives, the series examines and explains the "styles that make up the continent's music, and the political and social pressures that led to their development."
BBC documentary details. Found in YouTube member,
Duncanzibar's, good collection of mostly African music videos.
[more inside]
posted by nickyskye
on Dec 30, 2008 -
9 comments
Punkcast is a long running series of videos of live underground music in NYC shot by
Joly MacFie. Each video is usually one song. The Internet Archive hosts
its videos and offers downloads in a variety of formats. MacFie also has a
YouTube channel with
480 videos and a video podcast
[iTunes link, feedburner link]. Here are a few bands that caught my fancy:
The Icicles and The Besties, The Slits (
1,
2 ),
Andrew W. K., Oneida (
1,
2),
The Long Blondes,
The Gossip,
Acid Mothers Temple & Cosmic Inferno,
Art Brut,
Be Your Own Pet,
Cansei de Ser Sexy,
Lesbians on Ecstasy,
The Fall,
Fred Frith,
Rose Melberg and Jennifer O'Connor,
The Horrors,
The Homosexuals,
Bat for Lashes,
Radio 4 and Teddybears,
Kimya Dawson and Tiny Masters of Today,
Yeah Yeah Yeahs and
Nikki Sudden.
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 25, 2008 -
12 comments
Internet apotheosis. When 13 year-old Japanese girls rock Rush, complete with drumstick insanity, then we can all go home. We've done what we've set out to do. (SLYT)
posted by awenner
on Dec 21, 2008 -
71 comments
I think that we can all agree that the best-selling duo in rock history, Hall & Oates, are pretty freaking awesome. They recorded some of the greatest songs in pop history, including "
Rich Girl", "
Kiss on My List", "
Private Eyes", "
I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)", "
Maneater", and "
You Make My Dreams Come True".
They were incredible live.
And they participated in the greatest back-alley song-writing duel of 1978.
Also Daryl Hall considers himself a modern-day warlock.
However, last night the world learned that Hall and Oates's are sad.
They are extremely saddened by the upcoming departure of Alan Colmes from his show Hannity and Colmes, and they have chosen to express their sadness through song.
[more inside]
posted by ND¢
on Dec 12, 2008 -
88 comments
They cannot perform in public. They cannot pose for album cover photographs. Even their jam sessions are secret, for fear of offending the religious authorities in this ultraconservative kingdom.
The AccoLade is Saudi Arabia's
"first all-girl rock band."
posted by Navelgazer
on Nov 23, 2008 -
36 comments
30 seconds over Tokyo is a song that is both unpretentious and epic at the same time. Anticipation mixed up with fear, flying, crashing, burning. Nevermind just give it a listen
30 seconds over Tokyo. Rocket from the Tombs, a nasty bit of
rock history. Get out a shovel and exhume it's remains.
[more inside]
posted by nola
on Nov 18, 2008 -
18 comments
"Beautiful Sunrises" is a pretty good litmus test for whether or not you like music for reasons I can get behind. If you don't appreciate "Beautiful Sunrises" as a unique and untempered piece of genuine expression, then you probably like a lot of bullshit music.
If I could spend five minutes of my life as completely into something as the vocalist of Complete is about being the vocalist of Complete, well then I'd think I had reached some sort of life accomplishment pinnacle.
-
Steve Albini (quote via this electrical audio thread) [more inside]
posted by anazgnos
on Nov 17, 2008 -
135 comments
Love Story: the 2006 documentary about the obscure, semi-legendary 60s L.A. psychedelic band Love, and its leader Arthur Lee. One week only on Pitchfork.TV
previously 2001 and 2006 [more inside]
posted by msalt
on Oct 24, 2008 -
38 comments
It's not so often that a US Top 40 chart hit is a song whose origins can be traced back 300 years, and even less often that such a song would be sung in Spanish. So when
Ritchie Valens went into a studio and recorded
La Bamba 50 years ago this month, he carved himself what would become a special place in American pop music history. It was one of those cases of the B side becoming the hit, though: the A side was
Oh Donna, which showcased a sweeter, croonier side of Valens (singing in English), but was a somewhat unremarkable tune on its own. Here's a
live recording of La Bamba by Valens, who, of course, along with rock'n'roll legend Buddy Holly, lost his life in an airplane crash just as his career was blossoming. Almost 30 years after
La Bamba's original release,
a version by Valens' natural heirs Los Lobos became a hit once again. And, admittedly, I didn't make it through the entire clip, but it's perhaps worth noting, for the record, that a
Barack Obama-related version is available for your listening and viewing, er, pleasure?
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Oct 15, 2008 -
44 comments
