The Entroporium

I am a Sweeney Todd geek. I’m not entirely sure why I begged my parents to take me to the original Broadway production in 1979 with Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, but I did and it was a major event in my life. That was the first time the power of theater was really brought [...]

In the Summer Of ’77, Star Wars and disco mania took hold over America’s youth, and Meco provided the perfect combination. Each time we sat in the back seat, we hoped and prayed that Meco’s “Star Wars Disco” would come on the radio. The most highly anticipated part of the song, of course, was The Cantina Band segment, leading to a whole lot of gleeful car dancing and spastic behavior. For those of us lucky enough to own the 45 (to bring to classroom parties, natch), everyone knew exactly the place visually on the record where the needle needed to go to get to that “good part.”

Rodney Bingenheimer, long-time DJ at Los Angeles’s KROQ, is all confidence and smiles as an “expert witness” in The Ramones: End Of The Century. As the main character of George Hickenlooper’s excellent documentary, Mayor Of The Sunset Strip, an entirely different picture emerges of a lonely man living on the tail end of his time [...]

The Ramones: End Of The Century had a limited run in theatres last year and should be turning up on DVD any day now. It tells the band’s fascinating and sometimes harrowing journey from formation to its induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Wattstax catches Soul and the Black Power movements at a critical time of transition. The Sound of Black America was shifting away from indie labels like Stax and Motown, while majors like Warner and Columbia were quickly muscling their way in with money and “distribution deals.” Soul artists, meanwhile, were finding it harder to reach a white mainstream audience – and the Afrocentric styles and attitude of the day probably didn’t exactly help either. The money was shifting into the major media centers, radio was re-segregating and so was the rest of the culture industry. As urban Americans of all races were more & more forced by law and by economic circumstance to live closer to each other, their lives ever more intertwined, American culture was rapidly re-balkanizing after the halcyon days of ’60s soul – “The Sound of Young America.”

Susie and I finally got to see Ray last night. Despite the fact that Ray Charles is one of my favorite all-time artists, that his story is endlessly fascinating in the same way that Elvis’s is and that the movie was generally well-reviewed, I still approached seeing this with trepidation. I had a terrible feeling [...]

[Soundtrack] The Brian Jonestown Massacre – Spun.mp3 (If you like this track, BJM has posted all of its albums for free at their home page.) Hey, rock n rollers, run don’t walk to your local indie movie palace to check out Dig!, the new documentary comparing and contrasting the incredible, amazingly self-destructive Brian Jonestown Massacre [...]