A fabulous history of the cultural trends that became punk, tracing the underground cultures of 20th century Europe (and with a great soundtrack, if you can find it). Marcus has presented us with a significant contribution to cultural history at two levels - he has traced the 20th century history...
came on the radio. Like the Doors, they get a lot of airplay on a lot of stations—though everything you hear is from one year, 1983, and one album, Eliminator. It’s hard, funny, with Billy Gibbons’s guitar as a guide to the network of caves that runs below the entire surface of the earth, even if...
On January 21, at Barack Obama’s second inauguration, following James Taylor’s rendition of “America the Beautiful,” Kelly Clarkson’s of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” a strong inaugural address, a poem by Richard Blanco, and a benediction by the Reverend Luis León, she closed the ceremonies with “Th...
Gleason. Bob Dylan had come to San Francisco with his new backing band, the Hawks. The noise they made was stupendous, and most eyes were focused on the center of the stage, where the action seemed to be, with Dylan and lead guitarist Robbie Robertson facing each other for the choruses, playing h...
J. Albany, “Low Down,” in Tin House (Winter 2002) The music issue of this adventurous literary magazine leads off with the extraordinary memoir of a now 40-year-old woman who grew up as the daughter of Los Angeles jazz pianist Joe Albany (“Albany’s jumbled, idiosyncratic sense of time is almost a...
1997 The black-and-white photo that appears on the face of The Healing Game—and on the disc itself, and on the back of the CD box, insisting that you look at it again and again, that you think about it—shows a short, very stocky middle-aged white man on the street, and a taller black man behind h...