Review: The Creation's 'Biff Bang Pow: The Singles'

Some bands were born to make artful albums. Some were singles acts through and through. Monster mods The Creation were the latter, slamming out one killer seven inch after another from 1966 through 1968. Their one LP, We Are Paintermen, was basically a singles comp, and not an especially well programmed one. Filling out the platter with middling covers of "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Hey Joe" that made no one forget Dylan or Hendrix didn't help either.

Review: The Rolling Stones' 'Black and Blue' Super Deluxe Edition

After the Stones machine had ground down Mick Taylor enough for him to finally quit the band, they once again had to find a second guitarist. The process amounted to a series of jammy auditions with such axemen as Wayne Perkins, Harvey Mandel of Canned Heat, Robert Johnson (no, not the Robert Johnson...don't be daft), and one Ronald David Wood. We all know who got the job.

Not to miss a trick, The Rolling Stones decided to build a whole record around these auditions. Consequently, Black and Blue is the jammiest of Rolling Stones records, although it yielded a couple of their songiest songs: the lightly jazzy "Melody", featuring Billy Preston, and the wistful and cleverly structured "Memory Motel", which is long without ever getting indulgent. The record also boasts a couple of pleasingly concise rockers in the standard Stones mode: "Crazy Mama" and"Hand of Fate". 

Review: 'Wings'

The band Wings was an entity distinct from Paul McCartney the solo artist, but a lot of retrospective stuff released under the guise of Wings wasn't too dogmatic about that. 1978's Wings Greatest included a couple of singles released before Paul and Linda started playing with Denny Laine, the only other consistent member of the group. 2001's Wingspan included songs from before and after the actual Wings era. Even the recent Wings oral history plays loose with that distinction. 

Review: Jimi Hendrix Experience's 'Bold As Love"

The last note recorded for Are You Experienced had barely decayed before The Jimi Hendrix Experience were back in the studio to begin work on their second album. Any other group might have been creatively spent after making a debut as consistently spectacular as the Experience's, but the Experience seemed even more fired up on their second album, not just to play with their usual exuberance and imagination but to fully explore the possibilities of the studio. They still mostly kept the arrangements down to the usual power-trio stuff, but the tape and effects manipulations on things like "If Six Was Nine", "Castles Made of Sand", and the daffy "EXP" showed how much Hendrix enjoyed playing the mixing board like a fourth instrument. 

Review: 'George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door'

John may have been the one who sang "I got a chip on my shoulder that's bigger than my feet," but that line could have just as easily applied to George. Why was he so sour? George Harrison hadn't tragically lost a parent at an impressionable age, as John Lennon and the far more affable Paul McCartney had. He did not spend his childhood fatherless and infirm, as Ringo Starr had. Little George was loved by a doting family. He was not well-to-do, but he did not want either. He was a healthy, happy kid, and one who genuinely seemed to look up to his future bandmates John and Paul.

Reviews: The Cramps' 3 Vinyl Reissues

According to the mass of oversimplified punk histories, punk was the oversimplified backlash against the overcomplicated progressiveness that grew out of late sixties rock. It brought it all back home to a pre-Dylan/pre-Beatles age when words were monosyllabic, melodies were mono-melodic, and singers had mono. A lot of punk bands made the connection explicit, whether it was the rockabilly wallop underlying a bunch of Clash classics or the pre-British Invasion pop songs The Ramones chose to cover. But few bands of the punk era were as indebted to the garage spirit of early rock and roll as The Cramps. Head honcho Lux Interior swept his mane up into an altitudinous pompadour to hiccup trash about gooey monsters, human flies, voodoo, werewolves, and cavemen. But this was no Famous Monsters of Filmland-fit horror show for the kids. There was also real danger in the sex and drugs swamp all those creeps cavorted in. And with the swaggery rhythms that eschewed punk's usual sixteenth note onslaught, twang-a-billy guitars, and the total lack of a bassist to drive the whole mess forward, The Cramps were really their own thing, a sort of bespoke branch of the punk tree.

Review: 'Alternative for the Masses: The '90s Alt-Rock Revolution '

2025 has been a pretty good year for acknowledging that the nineties alternative rock scene was something that actually happened. In previous years (and this year) publishers couldn't pump out enough pages about sixties rock, seventies rock, and Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. Meanwhile the era of Nirvana mostly boiled down to, well, Nirvana. But what about Shudder to Think? What about Helium? What about Belly and Urge Overkill and Primus and Arrested Development and Throwing Muses and Pixies, Pixies, Pixies?

Review: 'Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run'

As I recently noted, 2000's The Beatles Anthology did a very good job of imparting the story of John, Paul, George, and Ringo from the personal, not necessarily historically reliable, perspectives of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Of course, the guys' stories did not end there, and for those who want to know what came next for Paul, at least, might justifiably expect the new oral history Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run to be a sort of unofficial sequel to The Beatles Anthology. After all, it is credited to Paul McCartney, just as the 2000 book was credited to Paul and the rest of his ex-bandmates, even though that book included the occasional comment from other players in The Beatles' story. 

Review: 'Futuristic'

A new Mark Voger book is always a big event in my house. His books are like Santa sacks loaded with all the best vintage Christmas presents: toys and comics and TV and movie box sets, all devoted to a particular mid-twentieth century theme. Having put together lavishly visual and warmly personal odes to monsters, superheroes, the British invasion, Christmas, and hippie-esque culture in the past, Voger now sets his scopes on the future... at least the future as seen from the fifties and sixties. Robots and rockets and aliens and big-helmeted cosmonauts orbit Futuristic. 

Review: 'Rewinding the '80s'

When I think of the movies of the eighties, I tend to think of a really fun filmography, whether we're talking about horror, teen movies, sci-fi, or fantasy, the genre that tended to most bleed into all the others. Following a decade in which the defining cinematic style was bleakness, eighties cinema seems like a toy box of action, loud music, product tie-ins, and welcome silliness.