When news of Bruce Springsteen’s decision to record an album of Pete Seeger-inspired folk covers leaked on to the Internet this February, the earth didn’t exactly shake. Reactions among the Boss’s notoriously rabid fanbase were decidedly mixed, ranging from mere disappointment (“I thought he already did the folk thing with Devils & Dust last year”) to something altogether more ghoulish (“he should reunite the E Street Band before Clarence Clemons gets too ill to tour”). But the common denominator, from the casual fan to …

Conventional wisdom says that the ’80s weren’t kind to rock. For the most part, that’s a bit of an exaggeration; any decade which managed to yield classic albums like Fire of Love, Rain Dogs, Imperial Bedroom and Surfer Rosa couldn’t be all bad. What the ’80s really weren’t kind to, however, was Rock with a capital “R”: those graying, fading superstars who had seemed so hip and dangerous in the 1970s, only to be revealed ten years later as charlatans in banana-yellow slacks. …

As our Stax tribute week plows on, it becomes even more conspicuous that Stax was a label full of legends, soul masters and trend setters. The most cursory trip through the Stax catalogue yields the usual characters: Otis Redding, Albert King, Wilson Pickett… you can probably fill in the rest. And the thing that bound these artists together, bundled them up into an identity and place in history under the banner of Stax, was the sound of the recordings themselves. Yeah, …

We, the collective audience, love pop culture dynasties. Perhaps the appeal is in the idea that the level of talent that allows one to rise to the heights of stardom is not something that can be learned or even a matter of universal randomness. Rather, it is a genetic trait – something that can only be passed from the blessed few on to their blessed children. So sayeth the gospel of LA. Whatever the case, our entertainment history books are littered with the names …

Babies in America usually have their choice of a million dangling toys of all shapes and sizes. They can range everywhere from platinum shiny to electric colors invented in the ’80s. These toys can do anything from playing melodies to imitating animal noises to producing the most irritating flatulent squeaks. Yet despite the hundreds of dollars spent on these toys, these aren’t the things babies prefer to see. Most scientists agree that what newborn babies most prefer seeing is the human face. …

Lately I’ve been reading Bob Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles. It’s fascinating stuff, of course; a vivid, evocative portrait of the artist’s formative years. But what really gets me is the way he tells it. Dylan’s prose — the breathless rush of words, the exuberant citing of influences from Hank Williams to Balzac — perfectly captures the feelings of a young, hungry, and unbelievably talented poet, hurtling forward to his artistic peak.
At times the youthful folksinger seems literally aflame with a kind of Biblical portent: …

Moondog was quite a character. A busker who often lived on the same streets where he played, his claim to fame was the head-to-toe Viking costume he’d wear while banging homemade instruments and selling books of poetry – kind of like The Naked Cowboy, only not lame. It was this colorful addition to New York City’s monochrome 1950s milieu that earned Moondog his initial notoriety, with namedrops by the likes of Bob Dylan and even a cover by Janis Joplin’s Big Brother & …

Over the course of her almost fifty year performing career, Nina Simone was a lot of things to a lot of different people. She was the husky-voiced, primitive blues goddess of “See Line Woman” and “Feeling Good,” the fearless Civil Rights crusader of “Old Jim Crow” and “Mississippi Goddam,” the sophisticated “High Priestess of Soul” who gave her definitive 1966 album its name. She was, of course, all of these things; more often than not, she was all of them at the same time. …