Dropping “Acid Rock” in the NY Times Etc.

As far as I could tell at the time, “acid rock” was a term already falling fast out of favor by the time I actively started paying attention to music in 1979. By the mid ’80s, I’d tripped over it somewhere deep in my memory’s crevices without comprehending precisely what it had referred to —…

Crampsy and She’s Kooky

Was never a giant fan of the band myself, but I have to believe the Cramps, of all people, would appreciate the idea of their gravest hit being exhumed zombie-like from the rock’n’roll cemetery to become a smash for teenage googoomucks the world over four decades later — especially when they had exhumed the song…

150 Best Albums of 1960/’61/’62

“At the time of our hike, the Appalachian Trail was 59 years old. That is, by American standards, incredibly venerable. The Oregon and Santa Fe trails didn’t last as long. Route 66 didn’t last as long. The old coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway, a road that brought transforming wealth and life to hundreds of little towns, so…

Country Dude Licks, 2003

Toby Keith tests the army’s latest super-secure landline technology. MERLE HAGGARD Like Never Before Merle has no doubt made more beautiful, more political, and jazzier albums, but maybe not all at once, and probably not in the past quarter-century. This one’s two pinnacles might be the best Gulf War II song and best Patriot Act…

Outsider Proto-Punk Reissue Licks, 2003

MICHAEL YONKERS BAND, Microminiature Love St. Paul, Minnesota, 1968. Techie-teen leader of Michael and the Mumbles tires of twanging surf ditties at prom and VFW crowds, so he saws down his Fender and slashes open his speakers and lets his ominous baritone vibrato’s pomped-up medieval-castle Procol Harum poetry fall into black holes of Link Wray-reverbed…

150 Best Albums of 1963/’64/’65

In Winter 1963, it felt like the world would freeze, with John F. Kennedy and the Beatles. Or so claimed London (not a Northern town!) one-(or okay, sort of two)- hit wonders Dream Academy, 22 years later. I guess they meant the winter that ended in 1963, since even though the Beatles’ debut album didn’t…

Double Standard Rock

Written for the two-issue fanzine created by my then-wife, now-ex Martina Kominiarek (then Eddy) and her fellow Philadelphia librarian Kay Wisniewski, a few years before the divorce. Read in whatever foreshadowing you want. Surprised I didn’t include some version of it in Accidental Evolution — it would fit right in. Maybe it’s an outtake. Martina’s…

150 Best Albums of 1966/’67

1966 and 1967, years in which I respectively turned six and seven years old, are often considered the time when rock’n’roll “grew up” and became “rock” thanks to the pointedly unrolling and perhaps theoretically conceptual nature of albums such as Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; when Elijah Wald named his often…

Lou Christie review, 1988

Not that I ever do Twitter Advanced Searches for my name or anything, but if you do, you will almost inevitably encounter a brief excerpt of the below fleeting third-of-a-century-old review of more-than-half-century-old music, which review as far as I know has never appeared on the Internet in its entirety until this very minute. The…

Tom T. Hall review, 1988

Probably the longest piece I wrote about any country artist before I even turned 30, if not ever — Or maybe it just looks long because the Boston Phoenix was so completely fearless when it came to jump pages: Hey, here’s an inch and a half of white space, let’s squeeze in part of that…