General

Latin boogaloo – one of those great cultural collisions, like fried chicken and waffles or Tiger Woods. Rooted in Cuban son montuno and bastard stepchild of the Fifties mambo craze, boogaloo [...]

No over-arching themes this week. No long-lost album to dissect. No need to dig up buried treasures from any given genre. And nothing about Mamie Van Doren, even though we use her glowing figure [...]

Let’s revisit a couple of albums that had a big impact on yours truly, Brother James and Nephew Dan – basically, the vast majority of RCR’s global workforce. Marc Ribot (pronounced ree-bow) [...]

A few posts back, I touched on my stint playing in a Columbus, Ohio bar band. And one of the pleasures of that assignment was opening for and rubbing up against some fairly respectable players, [...]

What if Lady Gaga turned out to be The Antichrist? Imagine armies of her meat-clad minions cutting a huge swath of destruction across the country. Entire towns are being leveled by massive, [...]

Brother Jack is back with a reconsideration of that old lefty anthem, Kumbaya. Time for a change of pace here at RCR, an interlude from the rock and blues. Time to quiet it down and turn off the [...]

We’re in full holiday mode here in the Rubber City – plenty of white stuff on the ground and white people in our malls searching for Susan Boyle’s latest CD. Now I’ve got nothing against Ms. [...]

It’s time to bring back the funk of Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Why not? You can hear Seventies funk of every stripe on TV commercials and movie soundtracks by everyone from The Isley Brothers and [...]

We’ve emptied all the bottles and thrown away the broken furniture. That means our panel of judges has completed its deliberations and picked a winner to The Black Keys ticket giveaway. But [...]

How many of you are heading to Akron for the holidays? Actually, once you get past the startling lack of color and “fresh as the driven slush” look of our winter landscapes, this time of year has [...]

A few months ago, my blogging buddy April asked me what I thought about the movie “Cadillac Records,” a glossy look back at the birth of modern electric blues at Chicago’s Chess label in the ‘50s [...]

We now have a twitter account, which means we need to do something drastic to promote it. So we’re giving away 2 free tickets to The Black Keys’ sold-out New Year’s Eve Show at the historic [...]

In one of our first posts, I described the unique challenges of serving as a hired sideman for rock legend Bo Diddley. Well, that assignment probably was a cakewalk compared to backing up Chuck [...]

The election’s over, so it’s time to drink. Heavily. Which brings us to the second installment of our tribute to the Great American Drinking Song. And we’re using the same basic guidelines [...]

Centrists red and blue are expected to take a beating at the polls today. But it won’t be for lack of effort on the part of the Stewart-Colbert Nation, which seemed to be fully represented on the [...]

Are there fan clubs for dead blues guys? I should start one for Lightnin’ Hopkins. I never get tired of the signature guitar riffs he played over and over again throughout his 50-some years as a [...]

Article first published as Music: The Case of the Mysterious Banjo Player on Blogcritics. In that crazy business called show, there are few pursuits offering less glamour than the life of a [...]

In 1977, I’d just landed in Athens, Ohio, to begin my junior year of college at Ohio University. But more important, I started working at a record store uptown – a great opportunity to fill out [...]

As you can tell from the title, I really didn’t feel like writing much this week. So I decided to take the easy way out by featuring some video clips that people have been kind enough to [...]

Much has been said and written about the great blues singers – Muddy, B.B., Bessie, Wolf, Big Mama, Sonny Boy… But I think it’s time to praise one of the more overlooked subgenres of the [...]

What kind of town do you live in, musically speaking? Is it classic rock, country, jazz, polka, Tuvan throat-singing? I’m not referring to the kind of music you hear on the radio. I’m talking [...]