Mojo Flucke, Ph.D.

Mojo Flucke, Ph.D. is still trying to live down the fact that he once declared ABC’s Beauty Stab the best album of the 1980s in an article for his college paper. Around that time, he met Stryper, Sinbad, and Max Weinberg while interning at Billboard. (Not at the same time. That would have been bad for everyone involved.) Still trying to live that down, too.

An obsessive-compulsive music critic, Mojo feels the Hammond B-3 (yeah, bass players, you read that right) is the only musical instrument beautiful and versatile enough to be right at home in church, Aretha’s living room, jazz groups, deep funk, and in Deep Purple’s metal machine music. He also freely tosses out props to bands featuring that great organ’s low-rent keyboard cousins such as Farfisa, Vox, Wurlitzer and Rhodes. His keyboard fetish may partially explain his fixation with obscure garage rock and psychedelia, as well as the blues: They come from a musical epoch when men were men, women were women, sheep were nervous, and keyboards weren’t wussy computerized sample player-backers. The other part can be explained by pure excellent taste in hard-to-find tuneage.

His fuzzed-out, soul-jazz band, Billy Preston’s Hair, still remains unformed. Figures.