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RCR's happy place, with Johnny Carroll, Link Wray, Southern Culture on the Skids, Sleepy LaBeef, and Robert Plant tackling a song by Akron's Bill Allen.

From W.C. Handy to The Black Keys: A quick look at how American roots music evolved in the 20th Century. Footnotes available upon request.

With all the great original music coming out of the Rubber City, I’m almost embarrassed to say that one of my favorite local bands plays covers. Not your garden-variety covers, like the kind of [...]

Here’s a re-post that opens with RCR’s formal mission statement (if we had to boil it down into a tidy little tag line, I guess it would be “Pay It Forward, [...]

We’ve covered guitarist Robert Quine pretty well in this blog, especially here and here. But I had to throw this post together after my sister came across a long-lost article in the bottom of a [...]

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 [...]

Although it may seem like we’re careening out of control now and then (“Thankless Jobs”), I started this blog with a simple, basic premise. Over the years, I’ve collected a whole lot of music. [...]

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 [...]

I have this theory about the Beach Boys… that people who live in northern, land-locked areas, where it’s brutally cold nearly half of the year, have little patience for their well-crafted odes to [...]

Welcome to Rubber City Review.  It’s not intended to be Akron-centric, but I should probably kick things off by asking the question:  When it comes to roots-rock and other mutant forms of modern [...]