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How The Other Half Lives: The Best of Girl Group Rock
GIRL GROUP ROCK flourished between 1958 and 1965, and though, with the passing of the Brill Building and the coming of the sophistication of the soul beat, the tradition thinned out, it’s still around. I don’t mean Shirley Alston puffing her way through greatest hits medleys on late-nite TV, the Three Degrees flashing pubic hair inside their latest offering, or even an authentic throwback like Spring – I mean the songs are still in the air, and sometimes even on the air: they’re at the heart of the Dolls, all over any John Lennon vocal, and of course there’s Bette...
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Neil Young
(b. 1945) In a career spanning five decades, Neil Young has earned wide admiration as an iconoclast who’s taken full advantage of Rock’s capacity for endless reinvention. His idiosyncratic career path has found him alternating superstar smashes with staunchly uncommercial and/or highly personal projects — a pattern that he set early in his career and has maintained in the decades since. The Canadian-born singer, songwriter, and guitarist achieved his first major recognition in 1966 as a member of the Los Angeles-based Country Rock band Buffalo Springfield, which established Young as a distinctive, prodigious talent. He had already launched a solo career when...
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James Brown: Mister Messiah
JAMES BROWN will die on the stage one night, on the moving staircase of his own feet in front of a thirty-piece band; and then who knows what may be unloosed between black Americans and white? In Baltimore or Washington or Detroit, cities where the very peace between them has a quality of angry breathing, merely the presence of Brown has been reckoned to equal 100 policemen. Harlem, on the sweltering night after an atrocity, he can cool by one word. At the end of each performance he sings the chorus "Soul Power" over and over again with bass guitar...
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Freddie’s Dead
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Roxy Music: The Sound Of Surprise
PAUL THOMPSON's tom-toms ground slowly to a shuddering halt as Eno's synthesiser simulated the sound of Firestone Wide Ovals being pushed past their limit around a fast curve. The short final chord was almost obscured by the cheers and clapping. This was last Sunday night at the Greyhound in Croydon, South London's answer to Manhattan and Spaghetti Junction rolled into one. But it could have been several places over the past few weeks, because almost everywhere they've been, Roxy Music have been greeted with the kind of warmth that all new bands crave, but few ever achieve. To those who've...
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The Sun King: Sam Phillips
BACK IN THE MID-'50s, the Sun Records studio at 706 Union Avenue was the epicenter of a sudden, wrenching shift in world consciousness. Tremors had been felt for several years, and then, one afternoon in early 1954, Sam Phillips was busy with routine work in the tiny studio when Destiny walked in. Actually, Destiny, in the person of a handsome, painfully shy but flashily dressed young man with longish hair and greasy sideburns, paced up and down the sidewalk outside for some time before summoning the courage to actually walk in the door. Phillips, a thirty-one-year-old radio engineer from Florence,...
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The Soul Stirrer: Sam Cooke
FEW ENTERTAINERS have fallen quite so far from grace as Sam Cooke did when he died, 30 years ago, at the Hacienda Motel in south-central Los Angeles. Whatever the doubts and suspicions surrounding the shooting – and there are still many – it is hard to see it as a martyr's death. Yet think of Sam Cooke and you think: Grecian good looks, irresistible charm and style, and a voice that rings out like a glorious, golden peal, cooing ‘You Send Me’ down the corridors of eternity. For the best part of 15 years, Cooke was an archangel, a black American...
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Gram Parsons: GP
GRAM PARSONS is an artist with a vision as unique and personal as those of Jagger-Richard, Ray Davies, or any of the other celebrated figures. Parsons may not have gone to the gate as often as the others, but when he has he's been strikingly consistent and good. I can't think of a performance on record any more moving than Gram's on his 'Hot Burrito No. 1', and the first album of his old band, the Flying Burrito Bros.' Gilded Palace of Sin, is a milestone. The record brought a pure country style and a wrecked country sensibility to rock,...
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Unravelling the Legend of Robert Johnson
IN THE short space of seven months in the 1930s, a slender youth from Robinsonville, Mississippi, recorded twenty-nine blues sides in madeshift conditions, and a year later he was dead. But these two sessions, in Dallas and San Antonio, contain the greatest legend the blues has ever known, and precipitated a whole string of tales, theories, fancies and fabrications about the man which present such a incongruous pastiche when woven together that indeed Johnson’s life, his sudden fame and immediate death, is reminiscent of the kind of mysteries usually recounted exclusively in black magic anthologies. But as that great authority...