Your Sound Choice
Bios and stories about the artists we feature
Ronnie Montrose died in 2012 after a prolonged struggle with prostate cancer and that is what music fans everywhere were led to believe. Later reports indicated that he had taken his own life, but in that he had resolved to battled the disease without chemotherapy or invasive procedures, one undoubtedly led to the other. […]
It is the summer of 1967. Herman’s Hermits and The Who are touring the United States. Which band is the opener and which is the headliner? This is a trick question because technically, the opening band was The Blues Magoos with The Who second on the bill and Peter Noones’ lightweight pop band Herman’s […]
Joan Baez was a big part of the 1960s and played a major role in defining the entire protest singer genre. I didn’t like her. I liked Donovan, Dylan and Arlo Guthrie, all artists who were supporting causes and writing songs very similar to Baez, but I could never quite get past her often prickly, […]
In the fall of 2016, we spent two editions of FTV discussing the end – as in “when a band comes to an end” and not “The End of the world” (9-28-16 and 10-5-16 if you care to backtrack a little). A couple of months ago, we spent sometime talking about the sudden end, and […]
After many months of teasing – Jack Spann’s new CD hits the streets on June 16th! We have been sent frequent updates on the new album by Spann’s producer Gary Tanin at Daystrom Records in Milwaukee. We will be going on summer hiatus about the time Beautiful Man from Mars hits the street, but […]
It is always interesting to hear the sound bites that the news media gather in the graduation season. Every person tabbed as a graduation speaker will put their spin on “Oh the places you will go”, with some resorting to reading the whole tome of the same name written by the late Dr. Seuss. […]
For the purpose of this two parter, we are defining ‘Celebrity Sightings’ as casual encounters with persons who have a reason to be widely known to the public. Getting to see the Black Crowes first at the Hollywood Palladium and later at the Wiltern Theater don’t count as ‘encounters’. Seeing a celebrity standing five feet […]
You read that right: “Gigs in the Round”, not “Getting Around to Gigs”. Transportation to and from gigs is a different chapter. This one will discuss gigs where the band is not on a traditional stage but literally surrounded by the crowd they are playing for. The name more than likely is a play […]
What were you listening to during the Summer of Love? Listening to the radio then meant AM Top 40 as FM was just getting to be the next big thing. At 13 going on 14 years old, I was listening to a lot of pop songs and chumming around with a new piano playing […]
James Brown lived by “The One”. He learned his rhythmic chops from drummers who learned them from the African traditions of their ancestors. The emphasis on what Brown referred to as “hitting the one” gave him his unique brand of music. Whether it was called “soul” or “funk”, it was a pulsing, drum propelled […]