-
1 week ago | 
thevinyldistrict.com | Michael Little
Celebrating Andy Shernoff in advance of his 70th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.You can’t judge a book by its cover, but LPs? A whole different story.
-
1 week ago | 
thevinyldistrict.com | Michael Little
What’s all the fuss about this guy? And does anyone listen to him for pleasure? Between that sepulchral voice and the black attire and the overheated Gothic death dirges, which split the difference between folk music and lurid (and despite his rep as a “poet,” not very well written) and lugubrious blues melodrama, I just don’t see (or hear) the appeal. His “dark vision” is verbosity for verbosity’s sake and might work as comedy, but the man ain’t in it for the laughs. He’s for dead real serious.
-
1 week ago | 
thevinyldistrict.com | Michael Little
Celebrating Ritchie Blackmore on his 80th birthday. —Ed.If I’ve never come forward publicly about the indelible mark I made on rock history at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1971, it’s because I’m still peeved that Deep Purple saw fit to slander me as “Some stupid with a flare gun” in their big hit single “Smoke on the Water.” Firing that flare gun into the roof of the Montreux Casino may not have been the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but STUPID?
-
1 week ago | 
thevinyldistrict.com | Michael Little
Garage rock primitivists and noise rock provocateurs Pussy Galore will always occupy a special place in my black heart thanks to their gleefully shambolic 1986 desecration of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. It’s ugly, incoherent, and a reckless and hilarious foray into the beyond incompetent, yet still manages to sound like a homage rather than a piss-take. Lots of bands commit to vinyl first takes—none I can think of, aside from Pussy Galore, use first tries.
-
2 weeks ago | 
thevinyldistrict.com | Michael Little
Many decades have passed since Arizona’s Meat Puppets first arrived on the hardcore scene, and they’ve finally become what they were always destined to be—grizzled but cheerful desert prophets just returned from panning for psychedelic gold in some dry gulch in the remote reaches of a fantastical place you won’t find on any map. They know things you and I don’t, they’ve seen and learned things you and I haven’t, and they have a mystical gleam in their eyes.
-
2 weeks ago | 
thevinyldistrict.com | Michael Little
Celebrating Fred Smith, born on this day in 1948. —Ed.Sometimes I flabbergast myself. I think I know what I like and what I don’t like, only to find out I don’t know a damn thing about anything, least of all my likes and dislikes. Take KC and the Sunshine Band. I hated them with a passion for like 30 years and now I think they’re great.
-
2 weeks ago | 
thevinyldistrict.com | Michael Little
I successfully de-programmed myself from the Cult of Frank Zappa at the tail end of the seventies, when I finally realized he was a smug, smarter-than-thou anal-retentive with bad classical and jazz tendencies and a proclivity for 13-year-old potty humor who held everyone, including his own fans, in contempt. I finally realized the only reason I was listening to him was for the guitar solos. And in the end they just weren’t enough.
-
2 weeks ago | 
thevinyldistrict.com | Michael Little
Remembering Spencer Dryden, born on this day in 1938. —Ed.For your illumination, a shameful tale of gross and inexplicable prejudice. To wit, I spent most of my life refusing to give the Jefferson Airplane a break, because of what they would in time become—namely first the fishy Jefferson Starship, and then plain old loathsome “We Built This City on Rock’n’Roll” Starship.
-
3 weeks ago | 
thevinyldistrict.com | Michael Little
The hit you know, and for a reason (it’s vintage Lennon), the rest you probably don’t know, and for a reason (they vary from fair to middling to awful), and one thing is clear–1973’s Mind Games is the work of a John Lennon who’d lost his way and would never find it again, unless you count 1980’s Double Fantasy, which was tanking until he was assassinated outside the Dakota, at which point grieving critics and fans alike decided (because the story had to have some kind of redemptive ending)...
-
3 weeks ago | 
thevinyldistrict.com | Michael Little
Remembering Richard Manuel, born on this day in 1943. —Ed.When I think of The Band, which just happens to be my favorite group in the whole wide world, it’s not “The Weight” that first comes to mind, or “This Wheel’s on Fire” or “Rockin’ Chair” or even the brilliant body of ramshackle demos they recorded with Bob Dylan in the basement of the rented house they dubbed Big Pink in West Saugerties, New York in 1967.
