Sister Sue, tell me baby what are we gonna do. She said take two candles, and then you burn them out. Make a paper boat, light it and send it out, send it out now ... Willy DeVille (formerly William Dorsay), died of pancreatic cancer on August 6, at the age of 58. So much of his music evoked the languid heat of a city night. This might be a good evening to turn it up loud. [more inside]
posted by maudlin on Aug 7, 2009 - 21 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

Metafilter's own COBRA! has been producing a great comic about a rock band for quite awhile; and now it's been released as a book! Get to know the Awesome Boys in Nowhere Band.
posted by interrobang on Jun 23, 2009 - 11 comments

Of all the pretenders to the throne of "British Elvis" in the pre-Beatles UK music scene, none had the swagger or moves quite like Vince Taylor. [more inside]
posted by fire&wings on May 3, 2009 - 15 comments

WFMU's The Hound has been delighting record geeks for the past few decades with sets of some of the wildest, wooliest rockabilly, R&B, blues, gospel, garage rock, and punk that can be dug out of crates. His site offers full podcasts, and individual mp3's under the show links, and organized by artist, and title. Bo Diddley singing to Kruschev! Blues songs about the Kinsey report! The Cashmere's talking about the hop! Brownie McGee singing about baseball's integration! Roughly 4 million variations on 'The Twist!' And that;s just the tip of this glorious iceberg. [more inside]
posted by jonmc on Nov 18, 2007 - 12 comments

NickCaveFilter: Fifty years ago this very day, Nicholas Edward Cave [previously] crawled from the womb and started to plot.  At 16 he formed his first band which evolved quickly into the Boys Next Door [Shivers].  This in turn mutated into the Birthday Party (1980) who terrorised the post-punk soundscape in Australia and the UK [Release the Bats | Nick the Stripper].  The Birthday Party relocated to England and in 1984 the band imploded in an orgy of drugs and booze.  Shortly after Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were born [The Ship Song - video & solo live | The Mercy Seat - video & live | Where the Wild Roses Grow], and 23 years and 11 studio albums later (not to mention a best selling book, a great screenplay, some acting and several soundtrack projects) he is still going strong.  But, instead of sitting on his musical laurels he decided to get back to basics and, in 2006, grew a huge moustache and formed Grinderman – a four piece with a primeval hybrid Birthday Party/Bad Seeds sound [No Pussy Blues | Honey Bee].  Fellow Mefites, I ask you to raise a glass to Mr. Cave… And, especially if you are not familiar to his work, don’t forget to “look inside” for my primer on the enigma that is Nick Cave, one of the finest song-writers on the face of this miserable planet. [more inside]
posted by the_very_hungry_caterpillar on Sep 22, 2007 - 98 comments

Christs, Communists, & Rock 'n' Roll is an excellent introduction to a tradition of anti-rock writings and recordings by the Religious Right. In the 1960s, there was David Noebel who wrote Communism, Hypnotism, & the Beatles and The Marxist Minstrels. In the early 1970s, Reverend Riblett constructs a seven-foot cross out of rock music records and sets it aflame with gasoline. Michael Mills finds hidden Satanic messages in Bow Wow Wow and the Grateful Dead, while Bob Larson valiantly debates Mandy, a 13-year-old fan of the Cure. The motherlode is probably the cassettes of John Todd, who traveled the fundamentalist circuit in the 1970s claiming to be a former witch and a member of the Illuminati, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. (more inside)
posted by jonp72 on Aug 20, 2007 - 31 comments

Cracked Pepper by ccc and ill chemist is a mash-up of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and an amazing array of songs you know. While not quite on par with the focus and sheer audacity of DangerMouse's Grey Album, Cracked Pepper is a smart, rich, and rewarding listen. Available track by track or as a torrent. See inside for tracks sampled.
posted by saguaro on Jul 30, 2007 - 35 comments

“We consider the 'primitive' music of blues singers such as Leadbelly to be more authentic than that of the Monkees. But all pop musicians are fakes . . . Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor . . . have turned out their personal record collections to produce a persuasive defence of inauthenticity as the defining characteristic of great popular music[.]” (via)
posted by jason's_planet on Apr 20, 2007 - 144 comments

What are the greatest hoaxes in rock history? [MP3 links] They Might be Giants' John Flansburg tells John Schaefer what he knows, and Rolling Stone readers weigh in as well. Was it Mama Cass choking on a sandwich? Jack and Meg White as siblings? Paul dead (again)? Keith Richards getting his blood replaced? Or snorting his father's ashes? Oh, wait, that last one was true.
posted by psmealey on Apr 4, 2007 - 59 comments

The Beatles are Bigger than Jesus. It was 41 years ago today, that the Evening Standard published a Maureen Cleave interview with John Lennon, in which he declared the Beatles “more popular than Jesus”. Later in July, DATEbook, an American teen mag, printed only the Jesus statement and nothing else from the interview. The firestorm of reaction in the US was immediate. Radio stations nationwide, but particularly in the South and in the Midwest, banned the playing of Beatles records [Real Audio]. Death threats against all of the Fab Four poured in. In Cleveland, a preacher threatened to excommunicate any member of his congregation who listened to the Beatles, and in the South, the Ku Klux Klan burned the Beatles in effigy and nailed Beatles albums to burning crosses. On August 11, Lennon held a press conference in Chicago, where he apologized, sort of [Real Audio]. The press conference was on the eve of the Beatles’ last tour of their career. Many say this epsiode, as well as the riots that accompanied their tour of the Philippines (also in July), as well as the accumulated stress of being on top of the world for nearly four years at that point, precipitated the beginning of the end of the Beatles.
Is it true though? Are the Beatles bigger than Jesus? Though this was unanswerable in 1966, thanks to the magic of the web, we do know the answer today: according to Google, the answer is no. Still, other views persist.
posted by psmealey on Mar 4, 2007 - 71 comments

On May 14th, 1967, the new British pop group The Pink Floyd makes one of their first ever TV appearances. Despite a stellar performance of the song Astronomy Domine, the pretentious host of the show, Hans Keller, has nothing good to say about the band. During the interview (youtube, performance comes first, interview starts about 5:50 in. transcript here.), he chastises the band for their "continuous repetition", "terribly loud" volume, and their "proportionately a bit boring" sound.

However, it seems that all Hans' show will ever be remembered for is this single interview. Pink Floyd, on the other hand.. Well, we all know what happened to them. Syd Barrett, on the other hand, was not so lucky.
posted by Afroblanco on May 29, 2006 - 67 comments

"So I think we maybe have this sort of snobbish reputation. But we're just really honest, opinionated music fans." (via)
posted by bardic on Apr 30, 2006 - 178 comments

Never Mind the Bollocks.
posted by bardic on Feb 27, 2006 - 81 comments

Vault Radio. Remember Wolfgang's Vault? They've now started releasing the massive amounts of music that they discovered via FM-quality 128k stream. The current rotation isn't huge (not much worse than commercial radio), but there's a lot of great stuff on there that you've never heard before, presumably.
posted by bigmike on Feb 10, 2006 - 9 comments

Wolfgang's Vault : Bill Graham, of Fillmore fame, was born Wolfgang Grajonca in Berlin. He grew up to invent, more or less, the modern rock 'n' roll promotion industry. He also had an eye for the future, stashing away posters, T-shirts, backstage passes, tickets, and photography for posterity (us).
Now, 15 years after his death, you have him to thank not only for $350 Rolling Stones tickets but also for $3800 Rolling Stones posters.
Purchased from Satan at a crossroads Clear Channel a few years back, the vault also contains a bunch of audio and video that Clear Channel didn't know it had and which we may or may not ever get to experience.
posted by bigmike on Jan 6, 2006 - 13 comments

Shoes of local and national rock n' rollers. It all started one day when we were sitting around talking about how much we love each other, how much we love rock n roll, and how much we love shoes, when Amy exclaimed "That's IT!!! We need to make a web site that combines our love of rock n roll and shoes.
posted by KevinSkomsvold on Oct 6, 2005 - 14 comments

The Brill Building , located at 1619 Broadway in the heart of New York's music district, is a name synonymous with an approach to songwriting that changed the course of music. Housing legendary songwriters like Carole King, Jerry Leiber, Neil Sedaka, and Burt Bacharach, the Brill Building created some of the greatest hits of the rock'n'roll era. [more inside]
posted by rocket88 on Dec 29, 2004 - 11 comments

Bobby Fuller was a Texas based rock and roll singer best known for the immortal rebel anthem "I Fought The Law,". Considered by many to be the heir to Buddy Holly as the king of Texas Rock, he built on Holly's style with songs like the aforementioned "...Law," "Jenny Lee," "Love's Made A Fool Of You," and the 2 1/2 minute masterpiece "Let Her Dance." And then it ended, at age 22, in very weird circumstances. Over the years, interest in Fuller and his work has ebbed and flowed, and plenty of archival material surfaced, but the mystery of his death remains unsolved, although many have speculated. Ann odd end for a footnote character in rick history, but who was bound for more
posted by jonmc on May 7, 2004 - 16 comments

50 moments that shaped popular musical history in the last 50 years --from Elvis walking into Sun Studios 50 years ago to last fall's entirely non-white Billboard Top Ten for the first time ever. Anything missing?
posted by amberglow on May 3, 2004 - 38 comments

The seminal shoegazing band My Bloody Valentine hasn't released a record since its ground-breaking 1991 release Loveless (Amazon samples). MBV's primary voice and reclusive in-general genius Kevin Shields finally gives an interview to The Guardian after 12 years of silence.
posted by xmutex on Mar 12, 2004 - 28 comments

Spot The Essential, Seminal, How-Could-These-Imbeciles-Have-Forgotten? Popular Song: A well-made list, specially if it's authoritative and includes no less than 500 songs, is just asking to be cruelly inspected for omissions, ridiculed for certain inclusions and generally derided. This one is, admittedly, a toughy. But perhaps way too US-centric and too Rockist. I mean, honestly, sometimes you Yanks act as if you'd invented Pop music! ;) (Via the newly-discovered Rivurcated Bifets.)
posted by MiguelCardoso on Nov 19, 2003 - 67 comments

I wish Elvis had lived long enough to record La Vida Loca... but since he did not, I have to content myself with "Kingtinued", a CD of modern, largely A.E.D. (After Elvis' Death) tunes recorded in the style of the large one. Only the highest quality material was selected for the CD, to be sure.
posted by jonson on Apr 17, 2003 - 13 comments

Rock n Roll! We know that Sex and Drugs ain't good for us, but researchers at McGill University are using very fancy devices to learn how our brains react to music. (Probably not much to discuss, but it's an interesting article)
posted by adamms222 on Nov 27, 2002 - 6 comments