I haven’t had much contact with my famous nephew since The Black Keys conquered the world. Just the occasional text about someone I should check out, like Michael Kiwanuka or Bombino. So, like [...]
Over the past year, I pulled all my music gear out of cold storage and started playing in bars again. Which wasn’t as difficult as it could’ve been, since I only took a two-year hiatus. But my [...]
Back in this post, we featured a carefully selected playlist of songs best suited for Sunday mornings, when godless ingrates like me are busy reading the Times and sipping artisinal coffee. Now [...]
I’m a bit of a “completist,” but only with a few select artists. For example, I don’t need all 1,000 songs that Lightnin’ Hopkins recorded throughout his career. Just give me a little bit of this [...]
Alright, just one word for you this week: Bombino! Alright, I lied… just a few more words. Special thanks to nephew Dan and our good friend Rick Saunders for turning me on to Omara “Bombino” [...]
They called him the King of the Hillbilly Piano Players. I like to think of Moon Mullican as one of the lost heroes of rock ‘n roll – a vital link between R&B piano pounders like Amos Milburn [...]
In the last issue of Rolling Stone magazine, I was described as the “blues snob uncle” of The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. At first, I took great umbrage to this (how’s that [...]
(Listen to Eddie Cochran while you read.) Start with a good mystery. Then throw in some intimate and revealing images from the early years of rock ‘n roll. Therein lies the beauty of “1950s Radio [...]
Psychedelic rock: I know I shouldn’t try to boil down an entire sub-genre of music into a few sentences. But here’s my take on psych rock. First and foremost, it changed my life – starting with [...]