Long ago, several lifetimes in the past, my mom would take me with her to a grocery store in Pawling, New York, where my family owned a...

There’s a cult of Richard Thompson among folks in my nebishy demographic. And as a knee-jerk contrarian – meaning, essentially, that I j...

 Angelo Bruschini is an under-the-radar guitarist I was hipped to, by accident, about 20 years ago.   I was browsing through the Richa...

Rick Derringer’s an interesting cat and a helluva guitar player.   He got his start as a teenager with the McCoys, who had a Number One h...

Along with Peter Buck, Johnny Marr did the most to inject jingle jangle back into guitar based music in the 80s.   I have a lot of ambiv...

If I could go back to any time and place I wanted, I would place myself in Los Angeles, mid ’65, when Beatlemania was in full swing...

There are many reasons to love Bob Mould, but the biggest one for me is that he brings the fuzz.   Gimme some good fuzz box, just enou...

I have a certain amount of ambivalence when it come to Lindsey Buckingham.  He’s an amazing guitarist and a very talented songwriter, b...

I guess you could say that the Bob Welch years were Fleetwood Mac’s lost period.   But they were more than this, too. You might reme...

In the early days of Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green and Danny Kirwan made for quite a dynamic axe-wielding duo.   Unfortunately, a lot of the...

In 1979, when I was 11, my step sister married a guy I liked a lot.   He understood me.   We had what I would now call an intuitive unders...

With respect to the question of taste: One of the paradoxes – and/or tragedies – of getting older is that your ear becomes more refined wit...

Punk rock meant different things to different people in the 70s.   For every band like the Ramones, Dead Boys and Stooges, where the music ...

Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain is one of the strangest records you’ll ever hear, not in a way that’s necessarily alienating, but don’t look to t...