Tag Archives: Hard Rock

For a well-executed mix of goofball and straight-ahead rock, Wammo is hard to beat.

Vince Neil (who had some surgical facial rearranging, note the banner above) clearly has an anger management problem, as his periodic (and apparently effective) pummeling of those who displease him indicates. Marty Dodge reports on Neil’s latest incident with a Dallas nightclub soundman who was a bit too slow on …

Brad Wilson is a proud practitioner of the wall-of-sound variety of blues-rock. His first solo CD opens with a straight blues, “Black Coffee At Sunrise,” but most of the LA rocker’s songs (he wrote all thirteen) are in the blue-eyed tradition of the Allmans and Lynyrd Skynyrd, with a solid …

In which our travelling Blogcritic agrees with Eric Olsen. . .

Back in the early and mid ’70s when Cleveland’s WMMS was a revolutionary radio station, a record came in by a glammy sort of hard rock band called the Pretty Things. The album Silk Torpedo, on Zep’s Swan Song label, wasn’t super consistent but had some hot songs in “Dream/Joey,” …

Slade was one of those bands huge in the U.K. – somewhat like Sweet, Suzi Quatro, and even David Bowie to a certain extent – that we kept hearing were going to break huge in the U.S. at any moment in the heart of the glam era of the early-to-mid …

Essential Cheap Trick, the new 36-song, 2-CD career retrospective from America’s greatest power pop band, finally gets it right. Authorized Greatest Hits and Greatest Hits both focused too much on the later records and pop hits, neglecting the first album entirely and underrepresenting the classic In Color and Heaven Tonight …

Okay, in the face of gale force winds of Rush-mania , I address the mighty threesome via The Spirit of Radio: Greatest Hits 1974-87 collection that came out last year. I realize the very notion of singles and radio and Rush is anathema to devotees, but since I’m not one, …

I’ve been in a Bowie mood. Yesterday I discussed Bowie’s “plastic soul” period – today it’s Bowie’s extremely fruitful musical partnership with the great guitarist Mick Ronson. Ronson was born in 1947 and grew up in Hull in the north of England. As a child Ronson played violin, recorder, harmonium …

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, …