BY MIKE METTLER — JUNE 25, 2015
Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records, signed The Doors after seeing them play four consecutive nights as the Whisky a Go Go house band in Los Angeles in 1966. He went back on the second night out of deference to Arthur Lee of Love, a band that was already […]
BY MIKE METTLER — JUNE 12, 2015
Graham Parker has a surefire way of ensuring his longtime backing band The Rumour understands exactly how to execute the arrangements of his new songs: “You have to kick them a lot, very hard!” he says with a devilish laugh. He is, of course, joking (I think). Parker and […]
BY MIKE METTLER — MAY 28, 2015
For musicians of a certain era, it was either The Beatles, Elvis, or the blues that inspired them to start making their own music. For singer/songwriter Joan Armatrading, all it took was the furniture in her house. “This is what I was born to do,” says Armatrading, who’s […]
BY MIKE METTLER — MAY 13, 2015
How does he do it? How does the eternal Beach Boy Brian Wilson keep composing all-new harmonically gorgeous and sonically seductive pocket symphonies (as he likes to call them), 50-plus years into his career? The answer, he says, is quite simple: “I know in my head — in […]
BY MIKE METTLER — APRIL 29, 2015
Tori Amos has always been an artist who knows what she wants, and knows how to get it. “Music was always first,” she says. “The records you hear, whether you like them or not, you can blame me for, because I was fighting all the time that the […]
BY MIKE METTLER — APRIL 9, 2015
Chances are you know the name Michael Des Barres, but just exactly how most likely depends on your entry point. If you’ve read I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, then you know him as the ex-husband of Miss Pamela, Pamela Des Barres. If you’re a devout fan […]
BY MIKE METTLER — MARCH 25, 2015
To borrow a song title, things can only get better for Howard Jones. Known for such indelible synth-driven ’80s hits like “What Is Love?,” “No One Is to Blame,” “New Song,” and “Everlasting Love,” Jones has focused his efforts in recent years on his inherent talents as a […]
BY MIKE METTLER — MARCH 12, 2015
To modify a phrase, fingerpicking guitar maestro Jorma Kaukonen just keeps on innovatin’. For over a half-century, Kaukonen has followed his own path and applied his folk roots to variations on psychedelia with Jefferson Airplane and free-form blues with Hot Tuna, not to mention his own solo rock and unplugged […]
BY MIKE METTLER — MARCH 2, 2015
Al Kooper has been a mastermind behind the board of many a storied session over his half-century career (for artists such as Mike Bloomfield, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the Tubes, to name but a few), but his prowess as a multichannel mixmaster has been largely […]
BY MIKE METTLER — FEBRUARY 25, 2015
Being appointed one of the queens of the alternative music scene was never one of Juliana Hatfield’s goals. But there she was, right in the thick of the then-burgeoning movement — first in the alt-rock trio Blake Babies, then as a titular solo artist known for meshing expressive vocals with […]
