by Fred Gardner
In 1976 The Band staged a farewell-to-the-road concert, “The Last Waltz,” at Winterland in San Francisco. Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson played a dozen of their own great songs — starting with “Up on Cripple Creek” — and backed performances by Ronnie Hawkins, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, [...]
Provocative Korean-born violinist Hahn-bin pranced and preened his way across the wood floor of the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks last Sunday as a part of the NDMA’s annual concert series. “American classical music audiences are half asleep,” the unusual prodigy said in a recent interview, adding that it is the performer’s [...]
by Steve Heilig
How many musicians can really be seen as revolutionaries — in not just musical terms but political ones as well? Fela Kuti is one such figure, and Americans are finally learning about him. The award-winning play Fela! was a sensation on Broadway last year and has now come to the West coast, playing at the [...]
by Steve Heilig
The Doors might have been the first musical discovery of my own youth; after glomming onto my big sister’s Beatles, Stones, and yes, Monkees records, I bought all I could by The Doors. My choice might not have been a healthy omen. “Manson’s shadow is everywhere,” recalls Greil Marcus in his new book about The [...]
For an American musical expatriate with ample means and the right connections that money brings, a musical tour of Europe might include Wagner in Bayreuth and Verdi at La Scala. Tickets for these two houses are impossible to get unless you inherit them or know the right people, and/or can buy your way in. A [...]
by Todd Walton
A couple years ago I created a catchy blues tune enti tled Whoopsie Doopsie, and after I performed the song to the apparent delight of my wife Marcia, I thought I might make a recording of the tune and see how the world liked it.
by Steve Heilig
I’m a music festival veteran; was too young for the original Woodstock but wound up going to many others, and even working at one for over a decade — the legendary peak years of Reggae on the River. My tolerance for crowding, mass madness, noise and food poisoning has decreased, but I make sure to [...]
Everything did change, not all at once, not in an obvious, visible way, at least at first, but the wheels were already in motion. Life on Spy Rock unfolded peacefully and quietly through the rest of 1988 and into 1989. I barely noticed winter that year; spring was bright and full of promise. The Sweet [...]
My after action report on the annual Rockabilly in the Redwoods Festival is tardy this year since I was taken back to Tulsa right after the festival to help my frantic kid sister, Eunice, deal with her indolent, entitled, parasitic, sociopathic 22-year-old daughter, Blubber Butt, whose father flew the coop on the day she was [...]
by Steve Heilig
Is addiction a “disease?” Depends on who you ask, it seems, but if you ask those with the most experience and training — including doctors and scientists in the field — the answer is yes.
