Once again, Chuck Prophet, Kurt Lipschutz, and the Mission Express have created an album that casts its net wide across the decades and brings it all back home into thirteen jukebox-worthy tracks. This is road music, a time-traveling journey to the heart of Post-War Americana and back. Put a dime in the Rock-Ola, take the ride.
Robert Gaston “Bobby” Fuller endures as one of the great prototypes of the guitar outlaw. He was a Texas boy who died young and with his boots on, just on the cusp of fame. But he’s mostly a guitar outlaw because of his synonymy with the great rock and roll maxim, “I fought the law, and the law won.”
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The early 1970s were angry times. From Kent State to Watergate, from Vietnam to Patty Hearst, society was polarized, and arguably no figure was more polarizing than mild-mannered, bespectacled singer-songwriter John Denver. By the late ’70s Denver had found mainstream success as a Hollywood leading man and a new life’s hobby–flying experimental aircraft…
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In 1980, album oriented rock was high art, radio was king, and music videos were mere novelty items featured on an obscure cable program called Video Concert Hall. There was no better embodiment of these ideals at the time than Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and their breakthrough album “Damn the Torpedoes,” particularly the single “Here Comes My Girl,” which stands out as a great love song as well as a breakout music video from before there was even MTV.
January 2016. Two travelers prowl the wet surface streets of San Francisco like soldier ants working a freshly scrubbed countertop, looking for the greasy crumb trails that they knew were once there, and are now gone. That’s how the City…
City Hall 100 was ostensibly a celebration of the century mark of the San Francisco City Hall structure itself, but the reason people came out on this June 2015 evening was not for events that happened 100 years ago, but for what started 50 years ago when San Francisco entered the rock and roll era: People were there for the live music.
For the first time all decade, I went out on New Year’s Eve. To the Starry Plough, where I saw Chuck Prophet and the Mission Express ring in 2014. After the show, I introduced myself to Chuck, and also got…
* * * It’s almost impossible for anyone currently living to appreciate the scope and breadth of Pete Seeger’s life and the legacy it encompasses. He is one of the last public figures whose career began before the bombing of…
I would like to take a minute to talk about a man who would have turned 70 today had he lived, a man whose iconic bowl cut and moon pie face conjured up earthenware pots of apple-cinnamon oatmeal in whole…
(In Part 1 of this essay we explored the rise of the rock star in popular culture as a function of television. Part 2 touched on the ascendance of album rock. In the third and final installation, we look at…