Bloggerhythms

Merriam-Webster defines mojo as " a seemingly supernatural power, influence, or ability.   Mojo, the UK's excellent, popular music magazine may not have supernatural powers, but it possesses both influence and ability in abundance. The monthly publication easily keeps up with current artists and trends - this month Courtney Barnett, Mumford and Sons, and The Hold Steady are spotlighted - but the magazine has also targeted Baby Boomers ever since it hit the newsstands in 1993. That's why you see articles on The Beach Boys, Johnny Cash, The Kinks, David Bowie, NRBQ and a tribute to Bob Weir. April's cover story celebrates the 100th birthday of Miles Davis with a twelve-page spread. The entire issue is 122 pages in total, so you can see that Mojo offers their readers a lot of content. April's  Mojo Filter is "Y our guide to the month's best music."   It offers readers 147 reviews of new albums, reissues, music books ...

Even with all the knowledge I've acquired about pop and rock music over many decades of listening to it, and I do mean many - I still remember watching The Beatles' American debut live on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 - there are still genres and artists that I never had much exposure to. Both British pub rock and Graham Parker are among them. I only enrolled in my Parker 101 course recently, and I hope to pass the final exam. On the other hand, author Jay Nachman has been a huge Parker fan since his college days living in the dormitories at Philadelphia's Temple University in the 1970s, and his fandom of the British star has never wavered. His love inspired him to write this uncommon biography. It's unique because it doesn't tell Parker's complete story. Instead, the book begins with his childhood, education and family. It moves through his adolescence and teen years, his journeys to Guernsey and Morocco for self-discovery, and...

I'm sure it's a good bet to say that Rob Bowman's Soulsville U.S.A. is the most comprehensive book ever written about the legendary Stax Record company of Memphis, TN. Many people consider him the ultimate authority on this long defunct label that closed in 1975 due to bankruptcy. Bowman is a Canadian born music writer who completed a PHD in ethnomusicology at the University of Memphis in 1993. In addition to this detailed history of Stax he won a grammy for his lengthy liner notes written for a box set of Stax-Volt singles in 1996. The book tells the tale of how Jim Stewart, a white, country music fan started a record company that in the 1960s became second only to Motown as a label offering rhythm and blues almost exclusively. The company's name came from combining the first two letters of its founder's last name with the first two letters of his sister's last name. She was Estelle Axton, who eventually became a major Sta...

Terry Chimes - born July 5, 1956 in London, England and credited as Tory Crimes on The Clash's eponymous, debut album - was their original drummer and is a member of the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame with the rest of his former bandmates. Chimes is a very fascinating individual who is not your proto-typical punk-rocker. In his short, 167-page autobiography, The Strange Case of Dr. Terry and Mr. Chimes , the teetotalling vegetarian and spiritual rocker relates tale after tale about the rock 'n roll lifestyle and great insights about his famous band. He also tells us why he left the music business for a totally new, unrelated career. Unusually for a punk-rocker, Chimes grew up in a loving, stable family with two parents. That difference immediately set him apart from Joe Strummer and his mates, so Chimes often felt like he didn't fit in. In addition, Chimes was not aligned with the angry, political left as the other members of The ...

Just Backdated (Melody Maker: Seven Years In The Seventies)   - the brand new memoir by former Melody Maker writer and editor Chris Charlesworth - is a well-conceived, honest, first person history of what it was like to write about, befriend, and travel with the biggest bands in the world from 1970 until 1977. For four of those years Charlesworth was the weekly British music magazine's American editor. He worked briefly in Los Angeles before transfering to New York City for the remainder of his time here. Among the many acts Charlesworth toured with were Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and his favorite of them all, The Who, a band he saw in concert twenty-seven times. He shared airplanes, taxis, limousines, restaurant meals, and bar tabs with the most famous names in rock. In many ways, the book is really a truelife account of Cameron Crowe's 2000 hit movie,  Almost Famous , that is a fictionalized version of Crowe's life on the r...

I was among the many visitors who went to see the now closed Paul McCartney photography exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum featuring 275 pictures the former Beatle took with his 35mm Pentax camera from late 1963 through early 1964. As it turns out I didn't have to take the train to Manhattan's Penn Station and then the subway to New York City's most populous borough because all of the photos shown at the exhibit can easily be found in 1964: Eyes Of The Storm , a perfectly executed, hard cover, coffee table book McCartney released in 2023. The star had a front row seat to everything that was happening to him and his newly world famous bandmates, so his photos were taken with an entirely personal perspective - one we rarely saw - as opposed to those with journalistic or business motives. It all began when the photos were discovered in the ex-Beatle's pe...

Back in the mid-60s when I first listened to top 40 radio I considered The Mamas and The Papas the greatest vocal group I ever heard. I never tire of listening to "California Dreamin'," "Dedicated to the One I Love," "Twelve Thirty," "I Call Your Name," and a lot of their other wonderful songs. Cass Elliot  (born Ellen Naomi Cohen in 1941) was my favorite female singer for a long time, so I was immediately interested in My Mama, Cass , the new memoir written by her daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell. The star's life story is told in the first half of the book and the more interesting chapters are found there. The second half is mostly about Elliot-Kugell's life and how her mother's early death from a heart attack in 1974 at age thirty-two when the author was only seven years old (She's now fifty-six) affects her life even today. Elliot's family tree is discussed, so are her formative years as a sing...

In a July 2023 blog post I discussed an alternate history of the most famous rock band of all time. It's Real Life: An Alternate History Of The Beatles was written in 2022 as a short story and radio play by Professor Paul Levinson of Fordham University. Since then, the author has expanded it into a full length novel that includes his original story as chapter one. Below my original post you'll find a link to a fascinating  podcast where Levinson discussed his book with NBC's Chuck Todd followed by an  intriguing  email question and answer session that Levinson graciously gave to Bloggerhythms. _______________________________________ In 2005, novelist, playwright and rock musician, Larry Kirwan - best known as the leader of New York City's renowned Celtic-rock band, Black 47  - used his vivid imagination to write  Liverpool Fantasy , a novel about what could have happened to each of the four Beatles if they hadn't hit the ...

Until Mark Lewisohn came out with his massive and magnificent tome, All The Years: Volume 1 - Tune In ,  in 2013 Philip Norman released the best Beatles biography, Shout! The Beatles In Their Generation way back in 1981. Lewisohn's book is a must read for all Beatle fanatics but Norman is a Beatles scholar too. In addition to Shout! and his brand new George Harrison biography he has also written separate books about the lives of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Is Ringo Starr next? Norman's  George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle  starts off slowly for anyone who has read earlier, more detailed histories of the world's most famous band. To me, the first half is mostly a collection of warmed-over facts that are only marginally pointed in Harrison's direction. If you've never read a Beatles biography before this book serves as a good introduction to their story, but for a full dose of Fab Four history you...

Although Bloggerhythms  spends the bulk of its web space offering its opinions on music, I don't consider myself to be a real critic because I mostly write about music that I like. It's much easier and a lot more fun to write about the good stuff. I get numerous requests from artists and publicists to review new releases, and I only reply back to them if I want to feature their work. I also don't have a desire to trash or destroy somebody's up-and-coming career. Just because I dislike an album or a song doesn't mean others won't think it's the greatest thing they've ever heard. I'm currently reading a 2006 biography - Billy Joel (The Life & Times Of An Angry Young Man) by Hank Bordowitz that spends more time than most books of its kind discussing how music writers/critics influence - or try to influence - the public's tastes. It's probably because Joel has always been more sensitive to their words than most musicians ...

I recommend reading  Making Records: The Scenes Behind The Music - the late Phil Ramone's collaborative memoir with writer Charles L. Granata - even though this 2007 autobiography of the legendary record producer received mixed reviews. Some readers complain the book doesn't provide enough technical information so they never actually learn how records are made, and others say the author offers too much of it. To me, Ramone struck a nice balance between the technical details of how music is recorded with the human side, and that's the way it should be. There is so much more to know about making good records than highly detailed explanations about microphone placement or how certain pieces of recording equipment were used. Ramone possessed instinctively great people skills. It gave him the ability to work with many of the world's biggest egos. That extraordinary trait enabled him to provide the stars with what they wanted from their recording dates while ...

Paul McCartney has repeatedly turned down requests to write his autobiography. Instead, he said we can get a good accounting of his life through " my songs, hundreds of them, which I've learned serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life."   In his own excellent foreword to his newly published, voluminous anthology the seventy-nine year old icon wrote , " Fans or readers, or even critics, who really want to learn more about my life should read my lyrics, which might reveal more than any single book about The Beatles could do."  The result is  The Lyrics , a huge, two volume book set that discusses 154 songs McCartney wrote throughout his life -  from 1956 to the present -  with The Beatles, Wings, and as a solo artist. There is also an introduction written by Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, who helped edit and assemble the book for McCartney. Muldoon is not his ghostwriter, the prose all belongs to the talented man listed as the author.  Song...