I’ve previously acknowledged my fascination for what I consider the secret history of rock ‘n’ roll. When I deploy that term I’m usually thinking of the multitude of bands that created music just as interesting and engaging as the stuff that wound up in the canon of classic rock, but were somehow left behind. There are other facets to that crazy diamond. For example, there are those bands that are the true one-hit wonders, registering a single song deeply into the public consciousness without some much as a glimmer of follow-up success. “Pop Musik,” officially the second single from the … Continue reading One for Friday: M, “That’s the Way the Money Goes”

“This City in Darkness” is one of those tracks in my digital collection that is so obscure I’m not even certain how I found my way to it. To the best of my knowledge, I never played anything from the band Sport of Kings during my radio days, although I suppose it is possible. It seems the band hailed from Chicago, and the entirety of their output was issues only a handful of years before I arrived at my happy bunker with a fully working transmitter. Perhaps I did slip one of their records out of the C Stacks some late … Continue reading One for Friday: Sport of Kings, “This City in Darkness”

Some Fridays I offer up elaborate personal history to accompany whatever song has been selected for the kindergarten-approved act of sharing, or I’ll at least delve into some aspect of the artist’s career that I admire. And then there are the instances when a song merely hit my ear just the right way during the week, somehow asserting itself as the right little gem to join the couple hundred other tracks that have been scattered digitally throughout the years. Franz Nicolay’s “This Is Not a Pipe” shuffled up this week, and it set me gently aswirl. To the degree that … Continue reading One for Friday: Franz Nicolay, “This Is Not a Pipe”

I doubt there’s anyone who considers Tin Machine to be first tier David Bowie. That includes myself. Even still, I hold a great deal of affection for the digression into clattering rock that Bowie made in the late nineteen-eighties. If Bowie dominated the seventies, the eighties proved to be a touch more complicated. For one thing, his remarkably prolific creativity ebbed somewhat. Bowie issued eleven solo studio albums during the seventies, and only four during the eighties. While he still had hits — he never had as strong of a showing with a trio of consecutive tracks on the U.K. charts … Continue reading One for Friday: Tin Machine, “Baby Can Dance”