Feature: Artist Overview

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• Weekly Artist Overview: Link Wray

  As legend has it, Wray's signature tune, "Rumble" was largely constructed on the spur of the moment, mid-set, when audience members requested he play a stroll. Having none prepared, he improvised, birthing the first classic power chord in rock history.

  Review by uao — on Aug 25, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: Buffalo Springfield

  Buffalo Springfield is on the short list of bands that had great influence on rock's evolution despite a brief tenure together. Buffalo Springfield's repertoire of folk-rock, country-rock, and psychedelic hard rock were all state of the art in their day; their classic songs remain in frequent rotation on classic rock stations. Perhaps even more important than their music is the assemblage of talent within the band. Retrospectively, Buffalo Springfield was the launching pad for A-listers who went on to even greater heights afterwards. Birthing the subsequent solo careers of Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Richie Furay (Poco), and Jim Messina (Poco, Loggins and Messina), Buffalo Springfield's legacy continued robustly through the 70's and 80's and still can be felt now. California rock owes a lot to these guys; only the Byrds rivaled them in Los Angeles in the 1960's.

  Review by uao — on Aug 09, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: R.E.M.

  It's easy to underestimate the impact R.E.M. ultimately has had on the evolution of rock music. Originally an underground cult band, little known beyond college radio, they built their audience the old fashioned way; a little at a time, album by album. By the end of the 1980's they were experiencing their first taste of mainstream success; by the early 1990's they had become the biggest rock group on the planet. Their star has receded since their halcyon years, but they remain respected elder statesmen; still active 25 years after their initial formation, they are also one of the longest-lived bands of the post-punk era.

  Review by uao — on Jul 19, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: The Barbarians

  Sometimes the story is better than the music. Rock 'n' roll has always been rich in good stories, and some of the best come from bands whose legacies are slim, or whose talents were ordinary. Collectors of 60's garage bands are well versed in many of the stories of very ordinary musicians whose moment in the spotlight was brief, but whose story contained the nuggets of a mini-heroic epic; bands whose triumphs and failures played out in miniature. One band whose famous story outweighs any real impact they had on the evolution of music is the Barbarians, from Provincetown, MA. Still, they did manage to leave a small musical imprint as well.

  Review by uao — on Jul 13, 2005

• Bonus Artist Overview: The United States of America

  One of the great virtually unheard bands of the sixties, a prized trophy for obscuro collectors, a groundbreaking electronic album, hardcore psychedelia that makes Jefferson Airplane sound like teetotalers, a snapshot of student radicalism, an album with one of the most alluring unknown female singers in rock history, a source of samples for trip-hop bands, a band about 30 years ahead of its time, take your pick; The United States of America were a lot of things to a very small number of people. They vanished without a trace, and their album with them; it wasn't until The United States of America was reissued in the 90's that they even have begun to to get their due; they remain a band known only to the rarified fringe where geek meets hipster.

  Review by uao — on Jul 04, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: Pavement

  Pavement, in some respects, are the quintessential slacker band. Their music was textbook lo-fi, their lyrics were sardonic and indecipherable, leader Stephen Malkmus' jaded vocals recalled Lou Reed, their songs were often fragmentary and seemingly half-finished, they lit feedback bombs in unexpected places, and they took a whatever's-handy approach to production, tossing in virtually anything that might seem to make an interesting noise.

  Review by uao — on Jul 04, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: The Sex Pistols

  There are few bands in the history of rock that have left a greater impression in such a short time as the Sex Pistols. The band was together for about two years, they never charted a single in America, and they never recorded an album together; their lone album was a singles collection.

  Review by uao — on Jun 28, 2005

• Artist Overview: Jefferson Airplane

  Jefferson Airplane was the first of the 60's San Francisco bands to hit big, and their photogenic, modern, countercultural, psychedelic, light-show-backed image appeared on magazine covers and the Ed Sullivan Show.

  Review by uao — on Jun 22, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: The Ramones

  If bands like the New York Dolls and Stooges represented the first stirrings of punk as a musical form and an attitude, the Ramones get credit for being the first undeniably punk group, no "proto-" needed.

  Review by uao — on Jun 20, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: My Bloody Valentine

  My Bloody Valentine's moment was a very brief one, lasting about three years, largely under the radar of the mainstream. Their reputation rests primarily on two albums, Isn't Anything and Loveless, the latter work a masterpiece they never released a follow-up to.

  Review by uao — on Jun 14, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: Black Sabbath

  Few bands were as critically reviled in their day as Black Sabbath. And still fewer have seen their reputation rehabilitated as much in the years since their peak. Black Sabbath had once earned the nearly universal scorn of the rock critic establishment for their oppressively heavy, simplistic riffs, the bad rhymes of their lyrics, their melodrama, their lumbering, plodding tempos, their sludgy sound and their Christian/Satanic/Druggy/Magical iconography. In other words, they were despised for essentially the very things their fans loved them for.

  Review by uao — on May 31, 2005

• Artist Overview: Smashing Pumpkins

  Their sound was layered, textured, fairly sophisticated and intricate, but capable of reaching the central nervous system. Corgan's lyrics were angst-ridden almost to the point of ridiculous; this was actually a drawing card. Unlike most alternative-rock groups, they played the larger-than-life role of rock stars; they never came across as anti-hero in the Kurt Cobain sense.

  Review by uao — on May 26, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: The Velvet Underground

  It is nearly impossible in a discussion of alternative, indie, or punk music to avoid invoking the name of the Velvet Underground. In their short heyday, 1967-1970 they cut four brilliant studio albums that consistently broke new musically ground. They did so without being virtuosos, although John Cale was an accomplished musician, and Lou Reed was a decent guitarist. They also did so without selling many records; their debut was their biggest seller, peaking at #171. Their music seemed indifferent to the trends of the day; they weren't hippies, they weren't blues, they weren't folk, they weren't country, they weren't heavy metal.

  Review by uao — on May 16, 2005

• Artist Overview: Big Star

  The saga of Big Star, and member Alex Chilton in particular, is one of the more compelling stories in rock history. Big Star was a quartet from Memphis, who included a young Chilton, formerly the teenaged lead singer for The Box Tops. It's a story of naivete, disillusionment, bitterness, and redemption, the first three of which come through in succession on their first, second, and final albums.

  Review by uao — on May 12, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: The Seeds

  The Seeds, from Los Angeles, only had one top-40 hit in their career, the primitive, fuzzed-up, organ-driven "Pushin' Too Hard", which reached #36 on the pop singles chart in early 1967. They never had an album chart better than #87. None of the members went on to greater success, few paragraphs have been devoted to them in the history books.

  Review by uao — on May 03, 2005

• Artist Overview: Tortoise

  An alternative band that wasn't punk or metal, they instead plundered the vaults for sounds, drawing upon kraut-rock, ambient, avant-garde jazz, electronica, and a wide array of other influences, Tortoise, from Chicago, played a music most akin to cool jazz more than anything else and displayed virtuoso playing, which often featured a droning guitar and two vibraphone players.

  by uao — on Apr 28, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: Gram Parsons

  Almost universally considered the father of country rock, Gram Parsons left a relatively slim but immensely influential body of music in the six years he was active, from 1967-1973. In it, you will hear the genesis of the Eagles, much of Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt's classic work, bits of one of the Rolling Stones' greatest albums, the work of the Long Ryders and Uncle Tupelo, and literally a thousand others. Never a star himself in terms of sales (he was never featured on a top-40 album or single as a performer, and only one album he appears on broke the top-100), Parsons was a musicians' musician; everyone he worked with, from Roger McGuinn to Keith Richards, changed their musical approaches considerably from that point forward, incorporating country conventions into rock music with a new confidence. The mainstream was saturated with country rock for nearly a decade in his wake. He's still a reference point for many young musicians now.

  Opinion by uao — on Apr 25, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: Love

  The 1960's produced no shortage of idiosyncratic, quirky bands. Bands that never quite transcended cult status, bands who produced work that stands among the best of the decade but remains little known, bands who never rose above underground status, bands who still elicit positive responses from those hearing them for the first time.

  Opinion by uao — on Apr 18, 2005

• Artist Overview: Chuck Berry

  Rock 'n' roll begins with Chuck Berry. His only real competition would be Elvis Presley. Berry's legacy, in terms of inventing the style that informed the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys and their contemporaries and that of their progeny; in terms of his songwriting legacy, his invention of rock guitar, his marriage of juke joint blues and rockabilly, is even greater than the King's himself. He is the most indispensible rock 'n' roll artist of them all.

  by uao — on Apr 14, 2005

• Weekly Artist Overview: Nirvana

  Last week marked the 11th anniversary of the passing of Kurt Cobain. It seems as good a time as any for an Artist Overview for Nirvana, easily the singular most important alternative rock group in history.

  by uao — on Apr 11, 2005