Music Aficionado
Music Aficionado is the online community for people who are passionate about great music. Quality articles about great music recordings of the past. Jazz, Rock, Prog, Folk, Film Scores, Psychedelia, Pop and more.
53 articles
List of articles in the library
Mose Allison: Who Is... Mose Allison?
Retrospective by Geoffrey Himes, Music Aficionado, October 2016
THE LEGENDARY British organ player Georgie Fame once described his hero Mose Allison as "the jazz version of Bob Dylan." When an interviewer asked Fame's ...
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, September 2016
SO MANY artists in the tsunami of music from the U.K. that flooded America in the mid-'60s went on to make extraordinary albums over a ...
Chet Atkins, Dolly Parton: How Dolly Parton Became America's Sweetheart
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, October 2019
THE LAST SONG on Dolly Parton's My Tennessee Mountain Home, her autobiographical concept album from 1973, is a three-minute story about how she arrived in ...
Burt Bacharach and the Invention of Modern Cosmopolitan Pop
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, March 2020
GENERALLY, SONGWRITERS who aren't also performers don't become celebrities. They don't get to host television specials, or appear in commercials alongside their glamorous wives, or ...
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2018
THE IMAGE OF Los Angeles rock in the '80s is imprinted like a tacky tattoo: bands with poofed-up hair and eyeliner, girls with poofed-up hair ...
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2019
SESSION PLAYERS are usually unheralded, often uncredited. If you bought the albums The Who Sing My Generation or the Kinks' Face to Face, or the ...
The Beatles, Bert Berns, The Isley Brothers: How 'Twist and Shout' Shook the World
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, November 2019
UNLIKE MOST stories, this one begins with a twist. "Come on, baby," Hank Ballard commanded, "let's do the Twist," immortalizing a dance that was catching ...
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2017
WITH THEIR EXUBERANT three-part harmony, chiming guitar riffs, and keen sense of what makes a memorable hook, the Hollies created a signature sound. At first, ...
The Beau Brummels: Were The Beau Brummels America's Unluckiest Band?
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2016
EVERYTHING BEGAN so well. Almost a year after the all-consuming British Invasion began, the Beau Brummels were one of the first new homegrown bands to ...
Bert Berns, The McCoys: 'Sloopy' Hangs On: How a Latin-R&B Song Became a Pop-Rock Anthem
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2016
'HANG ON SLOOPY' is one of the dozen or so songs (along with 'Wild Thing,' 'Gloria,' 'Louie Louie,' 'Twist and Shout,' 'Hey Joe') that make ...
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2017
IF HE'D DONE nothing before or after he dropped by a Bob Dylan recording session in June 1965, sat down at the Hammond organ – ...
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2016
THE LOVIN' SPOONFUL were NYC's Beatles. Lillian Roxon, in her indispensable Rock Encyclopedia, called them "our own little moptops, born, bred and raised right here ...
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2017
GOING SOLO IS an ancient musical tradition. Probably there was a Gregorian monk whose yearning for the spotlight made him think, "I can do this ...
Guide by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, December 2016
JAMES BROWN invented the modern live soul album with the release of Live at the Apollo in 1963, and Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, and Etta ...
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, January 2018
GRAM PARSONS didn't care much for the term "country-rock". And he wasn't thrilled by some of the more candy-coated bands who were able to capitalize ...
Eric Carmen, Raspberries: Why (the) Raspberries Mattered
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2018
THEY HAD TO be kidding, right? "Raspberries"? That's only a few degrees removed from "1910 Fruitgum Company." And then there were the poufy hair, the ...
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2019
THE COUNTRY MUSIC situation in 1985 was so dire that The New York Times published an article that, if not quite an obituary, was a ...
Eric Church: How Eric Church Is Keeping Classic Rock Alive
Essay by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, September 2019
ERIC CHURCH was born too late, and no one knows that better than he does. His music is nostalgic for an era he wasn't alive ...
The Dave Clark Five: Who Put the Thump?: The Deep Footprints of the Dave Clark 5
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, July 2019
THE SONGS OF the Dave Clark 5 were louder, denser, and more raucous than anything else on Top 40 radio, so echo-and-reverb-laden that even a ...
Guy Clark's Triumphant Last Act
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, July 2019
IF YOU WERE watching television after midnight on July 21, 1998, you may have witnessed a musical performance that belongs in the history books. David ...
Count Basie: How Count Basie Brought Big Band Jazz Into the Atomic Age
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, April 2020
POST-WORLD WAR II America was a bleak period for the big-band business. It was the sound that accompanied the country during the Depression and through ...
Neil Diamond Is Not (Just) Who You Think He Is
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, September 2019
THERE'S A SCENE in Ted Demme's 1996 film Beautiful Girls where Uma Thurman strolls into a bar, turns heads, and has all the local guys ...
Donovan: Tripping Out: How Two Donovan Songs Defined the '60s
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, August 2016
'SUNSHINE SUPERMAN' and 'Season of the Witch' each kicked off a side of Donovan's 1966 Epic Records debut, an album that he's celebrating next month ...
Grin, Nils Lofgren: How Nils Lofgren Almost Became the Next Big Thing
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2019
THE ADVERTISEMENT for Grin, the first album that positioned Nils Lofgren front-and-center in his own band, said "until recently, only insiders could be absolutely certain ...
Tim Hardin: The Haunted Saga of Tim Hardin
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, November 2019
TIM HARDIN DIED in December 1980, not quite a week after his 39th birthday, and to the extent that his passing was felt in the ...
Herman's Hermits: OK, Let's Talk a Bit About Herman's Hermits, Really
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, December 2019
THE POP MOMENT that made Herman's Hermits possible, the British Invasion of the mid-'60s, was anything but monolithic. Some of it was surly and aggressive, ...
Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson: The Girls of Rhythm Nation
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2017
THEY COULD have been rivals in a pop soap opera. Whitney Houston prim and buttoned-up, Janet Jackson frisky and up for anything. Whitney was a ...
Jan & Dean & the Rise of L.A. Pop
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2016
AS MUCH AS anyone else, including the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean helped establish the mythology of Los Angeles. When the city was still in ...
Tom Jones Deserves Your Respect
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2019
TO OPEN HIS 2012 album Spirit in the Room, Tom Jones dug into the Leonard Cohen songbook. "I was born like this, I had no ...
Janis Joplin: Janis Breaks the Chain
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2016
NOT COUNTING outtakes and alternates, songs on which she didn't sing lead, and the instrumental she never got around to adding her vocal to for ...
Kris Kristofferson: How Kris Kristofferson saved Nashville
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, February 2017
THERE ARE SO many reasons to be in awe of Kris Kristofferson. He survived Barbra Streisand's A Star Is Born, Heaven's Gate, and the movie ...
The Mamas and The Papas: The Strange Vibrations of the Mamas & the Papas
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2017
THERE WAS a melancholy guitar, and then the voices came in: "All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey." That was the beginning ...
Manfred Mann: Why Manfred Mann Is the Most Underappreciated Group of the British Invasion
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, January 2017
MANFRED MANN were one of only two British groups to have a #1 single in 1964 without a Lennon-McCartney song. They were endorsed by Bob ...
The Mavericks: Why the Mavericks are the Bar Band of Your Dreams
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, September 2019
IT FELT LIKE some kind of a trick, the way the Mavericks seduced the world of country music when they came on the scene in ...
Maren Morris, Kacey Musgraves: Kacey Musgraves, Maren Morris and the Politics of Joy
Comment by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, July 2019
NOT MANY people in the audience at Irving Plaza in New York knew who Kacey Musgraves was when she opened there for Little Big Town ...
Van Morrison, Patti Smith, Them: How 'Gloria' Became the Ultimate Rock Anthem
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2017
'GLORIA', WRITTEN more than fifty years ago by Van Morrison for his band Them, is the simplest song. Just three chords – my musician friends ...
Rick Nelson: Restless Kid: Rick Nelson at the Cusp of Country-Rock
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, September 2016
IT'S TOO BAD Rick Nelson recorded a top 5 single called 'Teen Age Idol', not just because the song is dreary fan-pandering, but because it ...
NRBQ: The Best American Band You Might Not Know About
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, November 2016
FOR DECADES, critics, musicians, and a slew of civilian devotees have testified to the idiosyncratic brilliance of NRBQ, and yet they've had to endure endless ...
Phil Ochs: How Phil Ochs Went from Folk Hero to Rock & Roll Revolutionary
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2017
PHIL OCHS had been on the stage of Carnegie Hall before. He first headlined there in January 1966, armed with incendiary topical material and witty ...
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers: Tom Petty Was the Ultimate Rock Fan
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, February 2018
EVERY NIGHT, on what was never supposed to be their last tour, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers opened the show with side one, track one ...
Elvis Presley: Elvis Faces His Final Curtain
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, June 2019
THE ANNOUNCEMENT of Elvis Presley's shows at Madison Square Garden was startling. It was as though the media were reporting that aliens were about to ...
The Rascals and the Rock-Soul Explosion
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, October 2019
THE SEPTEMBER 2014 event at NYU's Provincetown Playhouse was formally billed as a Songwriters Hall of Fame Master Session, but when it concluded with John ...
Paul Revere & The Raiders: Loud on the Ledge: The Bumpy Ride of Paul Revere & the Raiders
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, August 2016
EVERYTHING ABOUT Paul Revere and the Raiders was contrived and corny, except their music. There's no rational excuse for why they shouldn't be routinely counted ...
Johnny Rivers: When Everything Went a Go-Go
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, November 2019
IT WAS EARLY 1964, a couple of months after JFK was killed, and everyone just wanted the heavy clouds of mourning to lift. A new ...
Smokey Robinson, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles: Smokey Robinson and the Art of Pop
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, August 2019
"I DON'T LIKE you, but I love you." Those eight words, the ones that start off 'You've Really Got a Hold on Me', were the ...
Rockpile: How Rockpile Tried (and Failed) to Save Rock and Roll
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2016
THERE WAS technically only one album released by the band Rockpile, a jaunty, good-natured collection called Seconds of Pleasure that came out in its original ...
The Rolling Stones, Bobby Troup: 'Route 66' is the Quintessential American Tune
Essay by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2016
FOR SIX DECADES, Bobby Troup's '(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66' has been a musical guidebook, transcending styles and fashion, recognizing no boundaries. ...
Linda Ronstadt: Why Linda Ronstadt is the Quintessential "Girl Singer"
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, September 2019
I FIRST SAW her at the Bitter End on Bleecker Street in the early '70s; I was in the second row, sipping on an ice ...
Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels: Mitch Ryder's Bumpy Ride
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2017
FOR TWO YEARS in the middle of the '60s, Mitch Ryder couldn't have been any hotter: the frenetic, soul-inspired frat-rock that he and the Detroit ...
Paul Simon and the Road to Redemption
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, June 2019
YOU COULD ARGUE whether Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years deserved its trophy for Album of the Year when the Grammys were handed out in ...
The Troggs: How 'Wild Thing' Became the Ultimate Rock Anthem
Retrospective by Mitchell Cohen, Music Aficionado, 2017
'WILD THING', as performed by the Troggs, is a perfect distillation of rock 'n' roll's primitive impulses, and became so central to the basic cultural ...
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