Tag Archives: Alternative Rock

Green Day lived the irony of being real working class punks from the wrong side of the San Francisco Bay, who became labeled by cooler-than-thou punkers as “inauthentic” after the tremendous success of their third album, Dookie. Barely out of their teens, singer-guitarist Billy Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt, and …

U2 was the greatest group of the ’80s because its members – singer Bono, guitarist the Edge, bassist Adam Clayton, drummer Larry Mullen – like perhaps only Bruce Springsteen in the U.S., still believed that rock ‘n’ roll could save the world, and had the talent to make that notion …

Kevin Ayers’ The Confessions of Dr. Dream is a lost classic, a spunky amalgam of pop and rock styles (recorded at Air in ’74) filtered through Ayers’ avant-sensibility and sung in his startling bass, sounds remarkably modern even today. “Day By Day” opens the album funkily, with Hine on clavinet …

Joy Division was formed in the fall of 1976 in response to the first Sex Pistols appearance in Manchester. Guitarist Bernard Dicken (later Albrecht, then Sumner) met bassist Peter Hook at the show and formed the Stiff Kittens with Ian Curtis on vocals. Soon they were called Warsaw and made …

Formed in 1981, Belgian industrial group Front 242 helped pioneer aggressive electronic “body” music throughout ’80s with Skinny Puppy and Ministry. Front 242 produced two of the genre’s most important albums (Front By Front, Tyranny For You) and arguably, the genre’s most important single, “Headhunter.” The machine-only Front 242 sound …

In 1970, Shep Gordon, who managed Alice Cooper, was wandering the streets of Toronto, killing time as he awaited the arrival of funds to pay the band’s hotel bill after the Strawberry Fields Festival. His wanderings led him to the door of Nimbus 9 productions, producers of the Guess Who, …

Pat Collier was a member of the Vibrators, one of the earliest British pop-punk bands in the late-’70s. As the ’70s became the ’80s Collier turned to recording, owning and operating the Greenhouse Studio in London, and over the course of working with dozens of young bands he developed Collier’s …

With guitars and their wielding very much on my mind, I tossed the new Chris Duarte Group (Duarte, John Jordan – bass, Ed Miles – drums) CD on the player and let it rip, er romp. Romp is the hairy, Band O Gypsies-clad, Austin-based fret-feeler’s fourth album, and if you …

While Mike Chapman had a mess of hits as a songwriter (with Nicky Chinn) for Sweet and Suzi Quatro, his great effort as a producer is a cornerstone of the new wave era, Blondie’s Parallel Lines. “I saw Blondie three nights in a row at the Whiskey in L.A. in …

I have my music collection filed alphabetically by artist (and then chronologically, but no need to get that granular), and have done a pretty good job over the years of staying on top of it: pretty good until last year, that is. I have just started to file 2002, and …