Shaw/Blades – Hallucination (1995) Though his work with Night Ranger and/or Damn Yankees never has or will win any awards for originality or subtlety, Jack Blades is, to me, sort…
Music
9,227 Articles
Jeff Giles
2 Min Read
Mike Stern – Odds or Evens (1991) The words “jazz fusion” have become a sort of sneering code phrase for crappy instrumental music, but once upon a time, the genre…
John C. Hughes
1 Min Read
Like many a budding homo, I was quite the little fashion plate in high school. Yes, that’s me with the grey pleather pants, white nylon vest, white leather skinny tie…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
I apologize for the current mp3 outage:we’ve been heavily linked this week, our traffic spiked, and our host noticed what we’ve been up to, so plasticmusicsociety is under involuntary lockdown…
Jeff Giles
5 Min Read
Eric Clapton – Back Home (2005) It’s been a long time since the world sat up and paid attention to a new album from Eric Clapton, and I guess he…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Oh, goddammit. Hi, my name is Jeff, and I’m a Bee Gees fan. Not a “cool” one, either — I’m not down with all that disco shit and I don’t…
Jeff Giles
13 Min Read
“The radio, that was my big influence … Bands that were faceless, that didn’t really have anything other than what you heard on the radio. And I liked the real…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
I don’t know whether or not they still publish it, but when I was a kid, Marvel Comics had a title called What If? that answered questions like “What If…Spider-Man…
Jeff Giles
5 Min Read
Hey, have you read this book? Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts — The Definitive Biography, 1972-2003 by Dave Marsh I’m a sucker for rock biographies. Well, I’m a sucker for lots…
Jeff Giles
6 Min Read
Darden Smith – Sunflower (2002) Having spent large chunks of my life around musicians and other assorted music geeks, I’ve grown accustomed to a certain amount of bitterness with regards…
John C. Hughes
1 Min Read
Joe Strummer was not a very popular guy when 1986 rolled around. The year previous, he, alongside a new crew of imposters, had taken a nice healthy dump all over…
Jeff Giles
6 Min Read
No Idiot’s Guide this week, amigos — as the list of artists about whom I am qualified to expound at length continues to dwindle, I will be required to plan…
Jeff Giles
4 Min Read
I’ve just finished reading the most informative and entertaining biography of Stephen Foster ever written: Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture – Ken Emerson (1998) The…
Jeff Giles
4 Min Read
Hootie & The Blowfish – Looking for Lucky (2005) Once, when asked to explain his fondness for Beavis & Butt-Head, David Letterman remarked that there was something comforting in knowing…
John C. Hughes
2 Min Read
“Contentious” is probably the word I’m looking for to describe the recording of the third (and at the time — har har — final) album from The Time. While “Ice…
John C. Hughes
1 Min Read
Kissing the Pink. Yes, that’s totally what it means. Ahem. Now that we’ve dispensed with all that, Kissing the Pink formed in 1980 in London and never really broke through…
Jeff Giles
10 Min Read
Let’s talk about the blues. It only seems appropriate, after all, given that it’s Tuesday, the bluesiest day of the work week — last weekend a distant memory, Friday a…
Jeff Giles
7 Min Read
As Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith once famously noted, everybody wants to rule the world. In the literal sense, they were imagining some dystopic Orwellian society, but on a deeper…
Jeff Giles
3 Min Read
I love artists past their prime. As I’ve repeatedly mentioned here, I derive endless fascination from the things musicians do after they’ve been forgotten by the public at large. They…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
King Sunny Adé and His African Beats – Juju Music (1982) I’m not quite sure what to say about this album. If you know about King Sunny Adé, you’re probably…
Jeff Giles
8 Min Read
I’ve been working up to a Ry Cooder Idiot’s Guide for awhile now. He’s one of my longtime, all-time favorites, but he’s released so many albums in so many different…
Jeff Giles
5 Min Read
So, I heard the news this morning — David Foster is splitting from his wife of over a decade, Linda Thompson-Jenner. I read it about it first over at ohnotheydidnt,…
John C. Hughes
2 Min Read
In a nice bit of blog synergy, it seems everyone is talking about blue-eyed soul”¦which leads me to one of the sadder stories of the also-rans (at least in the…
Jeff Giles
3 Min Read
The Refreshments Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy (1996) Here’s a little gem I stumbled across the other day while dusting my CD collection. You remember CDs, right? They were all…
Jeff Giles
9 Min Read
Talk about a guy who should have been huge. An accomplished guitarist and songwriter who paid his dues playing for established artists, worked his way up through the ranks, and…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
I haven’t been writing every day lately, on account of a few things: 1. Summer = disruption of my carefully constructed schedule 2. Full-time self-employment = less time for aimless…
John C. Hughes
2 Min Read
Talk about DIY — when club promoter and all-around Paris-Hilton-famous-for-merely-being-famous trailblazer Steven Strange didn’t like that there weren’t enough good songs to play on his club night, he grabbed some…
Jeff Giles
6 Min Read
I just got back from a last-minute business trip to Los Angeles (otherwise known as “my least favorite city in the world”), so I’m dealing with all the fun of…
Jeff Giles
2 Min Read
Indigo Girls – Rarities (2005) They don’t get as much attention as they used to, but I think that’s more a function of short attention spans than a drop in…
John C. Hughes
1 Min Read
Pete Wylie – “Sinful” It’s sinfulIt’s tragicIt’s sinfulIt’s tragic Hey Joe! I got the news tonightwell, should I laugh or should I cry or should I stay and fight?It’s sinful,…