What kind of crazy world do we live in where Jefferson Starship is remembered and Jefferson Airplane is not? SOMEBODY TO LOVE This is where it all began. Actually, it isn’t, there was a previous album with a different singer, but “Surrealistic Pillow” featured Grace Slick who was cool and tough and the girls adored […]

Brian Wilson gets all the respect and Jan Berry’s been forgotten and I’m gonna try to rectify that right now. “THE LITTLE OLD LADY (FROM PASADENA)” Because it’s the one you know. When I first heard this in the summer of ’64 I had no idea where Pasadena was, but I was enraptured nonetheless. I […]

The Allman Brothers were our EDM. Too much has been written about the Grateful Dead, but the dirty little secret was they were lousy, they’d play for four hours, one would be completely unlistenable, two mediocre and one great, and I know, I was there, the first time around, before they became an oldies act […]

IF THERE IS SOMETHING I was fingering the albums at Virgin Records in Notting Hill Gate long before everybody knew who Richard Branson was, a year and a half before “Tubular Bells,” and I heard this over the in-store stereo and bought it. Roxy Music was the band being hyped in the weekly music newspapers, […]