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. 

Review: 'The Beatles Anthology' 25th Anniversary Reprint

The Beatles never really went away after their epochal breakup in 1970, but they continued to assert themselves with extra splashiness when the Beatles Anthology project landed. It began in 1995 with a three-part, six-hour documentary series on ABC and the first volume of a three-part, two-CD series of outtakes compilations. It continued the following year with the next two installments of the CD series.

Review: 'Tom Petty: The Life & Music'

At a time when traditional rock and roll had seemingly flat-lined, when old-guard bands like the Stones were simply going through the motions and punk seemed determined to burn the very notion of traditionalism to the ground, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were playing the kind of music the old-guard was playing when they were still new. Without any of punk's nihilism or politics, any of Cheap Trick's self-effacing irony, or any of the Boss's overcooked productions and song structures, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers kept the purest essence of Rock and Roll alive while every artist was striding away from it like it was yesterday's rib roast. 

Review: 'The Cure: A Perfect Dream'

The words "The Cure" invoke aural images of despair, of epic, majestic howls into some bottomless grey void. Yet Robert Smith often dismissed his own music as half-assed. He also insisted his band had crafted deliberate pop parodies so often that you might think he aspired to be Crawley's answer to Weird Al. 

Review: 'Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers'

Everyone who says the drummer is the least important member of a band has never played in a band. They may not front the group (unless they're Dave Clark) or write the lyrics (unless they're Neil Peart) or play the solos (unless they're Keith Moon) or sing the songs (unless they're Micky Dolenz or Levon Helm or those guys from the Eagles and Grand Funk), but without a solid drummer, a band sounds like a dysfunctional mess. 

Review: Ozzy Osbourne's 'Last Rites'

No sensible person should expect some rock star to be the next Proust (clarification: I've never actually read Proust), but there is something we are justified in expecting: an accurate translation of the rock star's voice. This is particularly true if that rock star has an iconically distinctive voice. So I was pleased when Brian Wilson's I Am Brian Wilson was clearly written in the naive, not-especially-articulate, not-especially-focused but especially sweet voice we'd come to expect from Chief Beach Boy. Same goes for the very articulate, sweet-and-sour voice of Pete Townshend in Who I Am. 

Review: 'Rocky Horror by Mick Rock'

Mick Rock was a rock star photographer both in the sense that he photographed rock stars and that he was something of a rebel star himself. He gravitated toward the most visually electrifying artists of his time, including Queen, Bowie, Iggy, and T. Rex. So he was the perfect fit to serve as set photographer during the making of that most visual, rocking, and rebellious of seventies cult classic films, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

Review: 'David Lynch: His Work, His World'

Over the course of a lovely but tiring seventeen years of Psychobabbling I've scaled way back on writing anything but reviews here. So I allowed a big, awful milestone to pass without much more than changing the banner at the top of this page. I'm talking about the death of David Lynch, my favorite artist, one who was so versatile, open, and willing to tap into dreams and nightmares, so old-fashioned hardworking, that he has been nothing short of the biggest creative inspiration in my own life. 

I got my start as a writer when my article on the role of dream worlds in Lynch's work was published in the final issue of the Twin Peaks fanzine Wrapped in Plastic way back in 2005. Although I've since published a couple of books, and even got to work on one of them with one of my top music heroes, Dave Davies, the biggest thrill of my career was seeing my name on the cover of Wrapped in Plastic beneath those of Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, star Catherine Coulson, writer Bob Engels, editor Mary Sweeney, and David Lynch. 

Review: 'The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film'

Horror movies are horror movies because they're scary, but there are many more reasons to watch them than the thrill of a good jolt. For the most veteran, and therefore calloused, of horror viewers, the possibility of being scared is a hell of a lot less likely than simply enjoying some rich Gothic atmosphere, cool monster makeup, the fine acting and directing one finds in a good movie of any genre, or, for the baser of us, vats of gore. You know who you are.

Review: 'The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told'

The Cars were one of the few bands who arrived fully, 100% formed on their first album. The Cars was so confident, perfectly constructed, and jammed with iconic songs that I wrote that it might as well have been called "The Cars Greatest Hits" in my book 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Minute. I thought I was mildly clever for that.  Except, I wasn't the first person to make that observation (it was something the band themselves often said), as I learned while reading Bill Janovitz's much better book, The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told.

Review: 'Jaws: Memories from Martha’s Vineyard (Updated and Revised Edition)'

While many have accused Jaws of wrecking the serious "New Cinema" of the seventies, many others have celebrated it as the movie that rescued the decade from relentless downbeat antihero drabness. They're both pretty right, though you can hardly say Jaws made cinema dumber, what with its superb script, directing, and acting. The film was so story, dialog, and character conscious that barely anyone noticed or cared that the shark looked like a giant rubber pool toy.

Review: 'A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap'

This year marks the historic forty-first anniversary of This Is Spinal Tap, and as everyone knows, the forty-first anniversary is always the most special. So what are we getting from team Spinal Tap this milestone year? What aren't we getting is more like it![?] There will be a new Spinal Tap movie, a 4K Criterion reissue of an old Spinal Tap movie, a new Spinal Tap album, a reissue of an old Spinal Tap album, and a reissue of another old Spinal Tap album. That's a lot of Spinal Tap!

Review: Chuck Berry's 'St. Louis to Liverpool' Vinyl Reissue

The old line is that the fifties ended when Buddy Holly died, Elvis was drafted, Little Richard found Jesus, and Chuck Berry went to jail. Once The Beatles landed, there was nothing left for rock and roll's original guard but Vegas, the oldie's circuit, or in Chuck's case, a late career number one hit with an awful song about his penis.

Review: The Cranberries' 'No Need to Argue' 30th Anniversary 2xLP

The Cranberries were probably the smoothest band to get swept along in the post-grunge alternative tide of 1993, so they naturally became one of the most successful. In a year with several great debut albums (opening salvos from Liz Phair, Belly, Grant Lee Buffalo, Björk...), Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? was a nice one, going 5x platinum on the strength of its Cocteau Twins-lite love songs. 

Review: 'Elton John With Ray Cooper – Live From The Rainbow Theatre'

It's hard to imagine two more dissimilar pop figures than Elton John, sometimes known to don a Donald Duck costume before pounding his Steinway to bits, and Ray Cooper, that guy often spied hypnotically pumping an egg shaker from behind Invisible Man shades in the stage's deep shadows. But the two shared the spotlight for a historic gig at London's Rainbow Theatre in May of 1977. 

Review: 'The Godfathers of Horror Films'

I've read biographies of Boris Karloff and Peter Cushing. I've read a book about the professional and personal relationship between Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. But I've never read a book like Jennifer Selway's The Godfathers of Horror Films. 

Selway attempts to do a lot in just two-hundred pages. At its most basic, The Godfathers of Horror Films is a triple-duty biography of Karloff, Cushing, and Lee. While the three stars have several significant things in common—they're all British, they all became stars by making Frankenstein movies after many years of toiling away as bit players, they all had major and prolific careers as horror stars thereafter, they were all the faces of studios intrinsically associated with horror, they all fought in world wars—their careers overlapped infrequently enough to make weaving their stories together a challenge. 

Review: 'Frankenstein Lives: The Legacy of the World's Most Famous Monster'

Dracula may be sexier, but Frankenstein is the king of the monsters. His power, pathos, versatility, metaphorical possibilities, and iconic looks are all larger than manmade life. The story of his literary creation is much more legendary than that of Dracula's, and the subsequent tales he has inspired more profound. So it's only natural that this unnatural character has been the topic of many books.

Review: 'The Who Album by Album: Listening to You'

A few decades ago, The Who easily floated in the same atmospheric level as The Beatles, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin. They seem to have spent the subsequent years drifting back to Earth despite the tremendous quality of Pete Townshend's songs and the utter power and uniqueness of his, John Entwistle's, and Keith Moon's musicianship. So it's nice that a fan such as Dante DiCarlo still cares enough to devote a book to the albums this top-tier band made.

Review: Deluxe Edition of Elliott Smith's 'Figure 8'

One of the most subtly interesting things about his thoroughly fascinating career was how Elliott Smith gradually built up his sound from album to album. From the bare-bones guitars of Roman Candle to his additional embellishments of drums and bass on a few tracks of his eponymous sophomore album to the more consistent use of such band-like arrangements on Either/Or to the full-blown Revolver's-been-turned-over sound carnival of his masterpiece and Dream Works debut, XO. 

Smith's second album for Dream Works was even bigger and more polished than XO. Yet, as extroverted as it sounded, Figure 8 continued to express the inner life of a troubled and deeply introverted artist. That push-and-pull is what makes Smith's "big-production" period so appealing. Many artists make deliciously enjoyable music and many plumb the depths of their souls and dredge up dark stuff. Very, very few are capable of or willing to do both simultaneously. 

So, even more so than XO, Figure 8 is a record that's just as appropriate to blast at a barbecue as it is to meditate on through headphones by candlelight. And though the nearly hour-long album feels a bit like it should have been trimmed down, there's not too much any reasonable editor could justifiably cut. Even something as seemingly slight as "Everything Means Nothing to Me" is sweeping and grand and overwhelmingly moving (and it's my personal favorite track on the album).

Review: 30th Anniversary Vinyl Edition of the 'Clueless' Soundtrack

Saturday Night Fever's pivotal spot in the seventies notwithstanding, the nineties was the decade in which soundtrack albums really became as important as the visuals they accompanied. Chuck five seconds of a sellable pop song in a film, dump the entire song on a five-inch plastic disc, and a label just might move a metric ton of CDs. If those five seconds belong to an alternative rock group, you might even sell discs to kids who wouldn't be caught dead watching the visuals in question. No joke: Melrose Place may be stupid, but the Melrose Place soundtrack is unironically awesome!

Review: The Eyes' 'My Degeneration'

The Eyes are often lumped in with the freaky British mod groups like The Who, The Creation, and Small Faces, and their best-known tracks do sort of crib the riff from "I Can't Explain" and Townshend's pickup-flicking from "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere". But with their sneering R&B vibe, The Eyes owe as much to the The Pretty Things. Tracks like the "I Can't Explain"-cribbing "I'm Rowed Out", the "Anyway, Anyhow"-cribbing "When the Night Falls", the "My Generation"-cribbing "My Degeneration", and "The Immediate Pleasure", which just might not crib anything at all, have the echoey, mysteriously seedy vibe of the Pretties during their "Can't Stand the Pain"/"£.S.D." heyday. The Eyes certainly sounded much tougher than their uniforms of stripey shirts affixed with pics of their own faces in eye-shaped fields might have suggested. I guess they would have to.

Review: 'Pink Floyd: Behind the Music'

Mike Evans tends to pen the kinds of rock and roll books in which visuals take prominence over text. When some of his previous subjects include The Who and David Bowie, two of rock's most electrifyingly visual artists, the formula works as it should, and that Evans doesn't exude a ton of personality as a writer is not super consequential. 

Pink Floyd: Behind the Music is as visually oriented as Bowie Treasures or The Who: Much Too Much, but since the subject is a quartet of nondescript guys in t-shirts and jeans who tended to hunch motionlessly over their instruments, Evans has to haul more weight. 

Review: 'Buzz Me In: Inside the Record Plant Studios'

What do Electric Ladyland, There's a Riot Goin' On, Black Sabbath Vol. 4, Innervisions, Rumours, Cheap Trick '77, Parallel Lines, a spiffy 12-track machine, a room-size Moog, a suite of sex-fetish rooms, and 162 tons of cocaine have in common? They're all among the ingredients that made the Record Plant THE Record Plant. 

Founded by engineer Gary Kellgren, the Record Plant was the first successful studio by and for hippies. He decked the place out with high-tech equipment (a board capable of recording twelve tracks...twelve!) and, inspired by the perpetual skinny-dipping party at Peter Tork's house, an atmosphere of sexual and chemical malaise. It's where rock and rollers could escape the sterility of their grampa's recording studios to rock out, experiment, snort, and screw as much as their bodies and labels' budgets could bear.

Review: 'Stupid TV, Be More Funny: How the Golden Era of The Simpsons Changed Television-And America-Forever''

When a schoolmate convinced me that The Simpsons was more than just some fad prime-time kid's cartoon/T-shirt sales device, and I actually watched the show, I was hooked and I was amazed. Even three decades later, having watched all of the episodes from its eight-season "golden age" countless times, The Simpsons still seems like magic to me. How did the writers pack so many jokes into those first 178 episodes? How did the rhythm seemingly never go slack (especially when we're talking about seasons 2 through 7)? How did it pile in so much wit, originality, and genuine hilarity when every other comedy on TV was lucky to squeak out a couple of good laughs over the course of an entire season? Were its writers some sort of alien beings like Kang and Kodos? Had they been enchanted like some sort of pacifier-producing monkey's paw? Were they the biggest men in the world and covered in gold...14-karat gold?

Review: '501 Essential Albums of the '80s'

Late last year we got a swollen tome determined to canonize 501 albums from the 1990s. Alas, such a project was doomed to frustrate because by the 1990s pop music had wandered off into such disparate directions that simply enjoying nineties music in general signals a lack of personal taste instead of broadmindedness. In other words, anyone who'd go straight for the entry on Exile in Guyville could only suppress their barf reflex when seeing that Baby One More Time followed several pages later. In other other words, in attempting to please everyone the book seemed aimed at no one.

Review: Audiophile Vinyl Reissue of Donovan's 'The Hurdy Gurdy Man'

The press loved to cop out and make trite Dylan comparisons, but Donovan was always a much more eclectic creature than that. Even during his early "folkie" days he was playing with jazz on things like "Sunny Goodge Street" that could never be mistaken for Bob. And once he remade himself as a sort of psychedelic-pop mystic, his albums started taking on unique and cohesive flavors quite unlike his initial solo acoustic guitar dominated albums. With his break through, Sunshine Superman, he crafted a fine and florid folk-raga record that made more extensive use of the sitar than The Beatles ever did. With "Mellow Yellow" he committed to coffee-house jazz for much of the record, and with A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, he created a children's record hippie parents surely stomached better than they would The Best of Burl Ives. 

Review: 'Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock'

Talking Heads are one of the few truly big bands that one could credibly describe as "enigmatic." Despite selling lots of albums and having four members recognizable enough that you don't have to be a super-fan to name them all, Talking Heads are a group that raises a lot of questions because they followed a path very different from any other band. Most of the band came from extremely privileged backgrounds; so how did they end up as residents of a dog shit-strewn club best known for spawning punk? How was the band's novice rhythm section capable of playing such angular art rock? How did someone as defiantly geeky as David Byrne become one of the most recognizable rock stars of the eighties? How did a stripped down four-piece swell into a veritable orchestra of percussionists, vocalists, and other supplementary musicians who played more like front-liners? What did the members of the band who weren't really calling the shots feel about all that?

Review: 'Their Generation: The Who in America 1967-1969'

In 1961, Pete Townshend was a sixteen-year-old kid who played in a band part time while attending Ealing Art College. It was there that he met his flat-mate Tom Wright, a visiting American with a taste for jazz and blues and pot. The pot got Tom kicked out of the UK in 1963, but the jazz and blues records he'd left behind blew little Pete's mind, influencing his still developing taste in music and guitar skills.

Review: 'Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia'

As a place for me to babble about my favorite rock music and horror movies of a century that only exists in the rearview, Psychobabble is nostalgic by definition. So a book like Ghost of an Idea, which ostensibly studies and derides the tendency of the horror film to look back with both fear and longing, probably isn't aimed at me. Nor is the almost willfully dense academic voice that dominates the first third of the book. 

Thirteen 90s Albums Psychobabble Would Like to See on Vinyl

I devote a good deal of my energy and wallet to vinyl, but even I have my limits. In fact, I'm pretty satisfied with my collection, currently bubbling under 1,000 LPs. However, there is still a healthy handful of albums I'd love to have on vinyl that currently aren't easily or affordably available (it takes a lot to get me to pay more than $40 for an album). 

Almost all of these albums were originally released in the nineties, when vinyl was viewed as hopelessly antiquated and inferior to the utterly futuristic compact disc, when only novelty-level quantities of new releases were pressed on PVC. 

Now that we're nearly two decades in to the so-called "vinyl revival," most of my personal favorite albums of the nineties have been released as LPs. But there are still quite a few that have yet to show any signs of ending up on our turntables any time soon. Here are a baker's dozen of my most coveted no-shows, presented alphabetically by artist for your enjoyment:

1. Bettie Serveert- Lamprey

Review: 'Decade of Dissent: How 1960s Bob Dylan Changed the World'

Bob Dylan has been narrow-sightedly lionized for his idealism, misrepresented as a protest singer, and denigrated as a disappointment for embracing beats and electricity. But despite his almost compulsive self-mythologizing, Dylan probably never wanted to be anything more than a successful songwriter, and no one's going to say he didn't achieve that. The number of powerful or timeless songs he wrote in the sixties alone is staggering. That so much of his autobiography was bullshit seems to matter little when you consider that the guy wrote "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and "My Back Pages" and "Positively 4th Street" and "Visions of Johanna" and so on and so on. 

Review: Bruce Vilanch's 'It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time'

Bruce Vilanch is the scribe behind such widely reviled pop-cultural specimens as The Star Wars Holiday Special, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, and Can't Stop the Music, starring the Village People. That Vilanch didn't toss himself out of the nearest fifth floor window sometime in the early eighties could be a consequence of his mythical acceleration-powder intake or his equally legendary propensity for self-deprecation. 

Since Vilanch dispels the myth that he was some sort of incorrigible coke receptacle in his new book It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time, and goes above and beyond to remind us of his self-deprecating sense of humor, we can assume that the latter is responsible for him still being with us. One must surely need a prodigious ability to laugh at oneself to take a full-on wallow in their greatest failures for two hundred pages, which is basically what Vilanch does in It Seemed Like a Bad Idea. He takes us on a tour through the terrible variety shows, awful feature films, and crappy stage performances he wrote, mostly as an excuse to drop a lot of corny jokes one might expect from the guy who wrote that alien cooking show Chewbacca's wife loves to watch.

Review: 'The Yardbirds'

Despite never making a widely revered LP and hammering out only a handful of truly enduring 45s, The Yardbirds will always be remembered as one of the key British bands because they were the petri dish from which the country's three top blues guitarists—Clapton, Beck, and Page—sprouted. Of course, for those who care to really listen to what the group left behind, The Yardbirds are more than the sum of two truly innovative and electrifying musicians and one would-be B.B. King clone so overrated that acolytes proclaimed him "God" in graffiti all over London. And really, the majority of the Page-led era is pretty execrable. But the Beck-era Yardbirds were indeed one of the best rock bands of mid-sixties Britain, as a listen to "Heart Full of Soul","The Train Kept A-Rollin'", "Over Under Sideways Down", or "Roger the Engineer" will settle. For the quality of such records alone, The Yardbirds would be deserving of a biography of their very own.

Review: 'Star Wars: Complete Locations'

Perhaps more so than any other world-building enterprise, the never-ending Star Wars saga is largely dependent on its worlds, some of which aren't even deserts. Sure, you're likely to spend most of your time getting sand in your boots on Tattooine or Jakku or Jedha (that sand gets everywhere!), but you can also freeze your Tauntaun-straddling butt off on Hoth. You can slop around in the mud of Dagobah. You can even get all metropolitan on Cloud City or Coruscant. And if there's a location to be located in the Star Wars universe, it can likely be located in Star Wars: Complete Locations. 

Review: 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs'

Ian Leslie is not a rock writer. His first three books are all psychology texts apparently (I haven't read any of them). So his decision to tell The Beatles' story for his fourth will likely arch a few eyebrows. Why does this story need to be told again? Why is a guy with Leslie's particular credentials the one to tell it?

Leslie's format, in which he uses particular songs as entry points to discuss particular points along the Beatles timeline and beyond it, is not original. Neither is his focus on the relationship between John and Paul. Oddly, it's his background in psychology that makes John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs a compelling new entry in the massive Beatles library. The author didn't perform any new interviews for his book. He did all his research in the pages of other authors' works. But unlike most of those writers, Leslie really manages to make us feel the intimacy of Lennon and McCartney's relationship. 

Review: 'Queen: As It Began (Revised Edition)'

Queen became megastars by making bombastic, genuinely funny rock and roll that was full of personality. Behind the fist pumping, satin, and unitards, Brian May, Roger Taylor, John Deacon, and Freddie Mercury were three science nerds and a shy guy, respectively. They apparently didn't indulge much in noxious chemicals and valued their privacy. 

Review: Vinyl Reissue of The Temptations' 'Psychedelic Shack'

When conservative Motown decided to dip its toes into the spiked waters of psychedelia, its LPs rarely committed fully to the genre's artiness and spaciness. For every "Reflections" there was a cornball cover of something like "Up, Up and Away". So it isn't surprising that Berry Gordy had some trouble wrapping his head around the more committedly conceptual works that artists like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder served up in the seventies. 

Reviews: 'My First Holly Golightly Album' Vinyl debut

Emerging at the peak of the brit-pop boom, Holly Golightly was a bit of an odd duck. Like Damon Albarn, she did nothing to scrub the big black smoke from her vocal cords. Unlike Blur, Oasis, Charlatans, and the rest, she otherwise sidestepped the most Union Jacky, tea-sipping mid-sixties references to dredge up the swampy blues of the early Stones and Animals. Hard riffs, harder backbeats, and 1-4-5 progressions were her stock-in-trade, and she began to prolifically grind out raw records beginning with 1995's The Good Things. 

Review: 'Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival'

Lollapalooza didn't begin as the only annual rock festival that mattered. It was to be nothing more than Jane's Addiction's farewell tour, with, at Perry Farrell's behest, the added novelty of several genre-spanning guests, booths with political activists of all stripes, and burritos. It was only after that first tour bucked all logic to become an actual financial success that Lollapalooza became a brand. In came Pearl Jam,  the freak shows, The Smashing Pumpkins, Courtney Love,  a highly unpopular Ferris Wheel, Sonic Youth, and eventually, people like Metallica and Korn.

Review: 'Eternal Flame: The Authorized Biography of The Bangles'

The Bangles phenomenon was the perfect storm for getting under the skin of serious musicians. The serious musicians in question were sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson, who started jamming and writing songs out of a serious love for UK and LA rock of the sixties. Enter Susanna Hoffs, who shared the Peterson's adoration of sixties rock and musical talents but radiated star-power a little more radiantly and was more malleable in her definition of artistic integrity. 

Review: 'God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys, and the California Myth' (Remastered edition)

In 1977, The Beach Boys were still a going concern, but one that had recently released fluff like 15 Big Ones while playing the oldies festival circuit. The group's reputation was not strong. Mike Love was flapping his chicken wings and croaking "Fun, Fun, Fun" for the billionth time. Brian Wilson was shattered. His history of making progressive, futuristic music was not what the average person thought of when confronted with the name "Beach Boys."

Review: 'Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning' (revised edition)

Tod Browning is not usually considered among the great directors. Although he made over sixty films, only a half dozen or so are regarded by film historians, and the public at large are mostly familiar with two. But they're both doozies. However, although Dracula is among the most iconic films ever made, it's also often dismissed as lazily directed. The other big Browning film, Freaks, is widely considered potent, but it's use of actual circus performers, many of whom are differently abled (a term that really applies here... anyone who'd call Prince Radian disabled couldn't have been paying attention to the film), has been attracting controversy for over ninety years.