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A few nuggets the Stones can consider when they record a follow-up to their all-blues album Blue & Lonesome.

What's the best way to honor blues legends Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf? Stage a virtual cutting contest.

Desert-island discs, featuring Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, The Rolling Stones, The Band, Lucinda Williams, Bo Diddley, Aretha Franklin, etc.

Rubber City Review tackles the tough issues: the Middle East, the Midwest brain drain, brain surgery, Scarlett Johansson, Kanye West, the Cavs, frozen custard...

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.

Is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum worth arguing about? Some say no – the whole idea of enshrining punks and metalheads in some shiny glass-plated pyramid that many of them would rather [...]

Let’s talk about the Seventies. What exactly happened? I’m not sure I can answer that question, because I lived them – in the same smoky haze that partially obscured my view of The Rolling Stones [...]

When well-established musicians join forces, it’s not always for purely artistic reasons. Sometimes their managers arrange it as a promotional gimmick. Or the performers could be stuck in the [...]

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting overwhelmed by all the dire news and violent images I’ve been digesting lately. Maybe it’s time to shut everything off, disconnect the cable, buy someone’s [...]

Here’s a re-post in honor of The Rolling Stones’ final 50th Anniversary concert (the 12/15 show in Newark will include Rubber City favorites The Black Keys… Hopefully [...]

I’ve got RCR’s IT department working on a redesign of our site to address a nagging problem – if you’re reading our blog on an iPad and sample a song, it takes you away from our site. And good [...]

I’m usually not a “let us praise our fallen rock heroes” kind of guy. But I have to admit, the passing of Levon Helm hit me a little hard. And I’m not sure I can really explain why. I always had [...]

Here’s a re-post of an item we first published back in October 2009 (RCR’s third post… we’re now up to 115). It remains the most visited page on our site, by far – and it [...]

Since we got some of you to play along to “My First Album,” I decided to try something else along the same lines: What’s your most memorable concert experience? The venue can be anything from a [...]

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 [...]

I’ve played blues harp for years… not on the same level as, say, Charlie Musselwhite, but I can get the attention of a bar full of drunks. One band I played in never seemed to make it [...]

The Cavs crashed and burned, the team’s fragile chemistry in ruins. LeBron’s making noise about leaving town. The Indians can’t hold a lead, and Asdrubal Cabrera broke his arm diving for a ball. [...]

How’s that for a blowhard title? The operative word being “moments”… which speaks to one of several fundamentally different ways that we experience music. Some folks like it in the [...]

Time to dig through the old mail bag and respond to a few comments about previous posts… Most of these comments show up on the blog, but a few others take a more direct route – either via email [...]

Newly promoted to Keyboard Correspondent for Rubber City Review, Brother Jack is back with this look at the wonderful Otis Spann – a true giant of the blues piano… If you were looking to [...]

Greetings from Carefree, AZ… where they like to point out “it’s a ‘dry’ heat.” I’m using this brief respite from the Rubber City as an opportunity to read yet [...]