When Ringo Starr recently announced that he wouldn’t be responding to any more fan mail, it occurred to me that he must be completely unaware of the disastrous foibles he’s unleashed on a loving but ultimately unwitting fanbase. Certainly likeable (at one time, anyway), Starr was and is a drive-byRead More

What better way to spend Halloween than with (as it’s lovingly referred to in the liner notes) “this thing“? “The Torture Never Stops” — a 24-song, two-hour blast of almost indescribably brilliant/crazy rock from an Oct. 31, 1981 concert by the equally brilliant/crazy Frank Zappa — affords us a uniqueRead More

That classic album rock group Heart never really left us, but lately the Wilson sisters have reconnected with what made it such a great band back in the seventies. The vintage sounding all-new CD Jupiters Darling (2004) and last year’s live DVD Dreamboat Annie Live meant that the “old” Heart—notRead More

A mere three days after the last Quickies, and here we are back already with another one. It just goes to show how the CD release pace quickens as we round the bend toward the holiday shopping season. With pockets getting emptying rapidly in the face of an economic Armageddon,Read More

There’s so many records just coming out that I’d love to cover but there’s only time for three at the moment; next week promises more. Two of these three are what we like to call “baby boomer bliss,” in that even though they’re new, they conjure up the spirit ofRead More

You’re to be forgiven — even if you were there — for missing this one. Seems, because of lengthy set overruns by the bands that preceded them, the Who didn’t take the stage at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival until the no-kidding hour of 3 a.m. (The bill thatRead More

Missing in the eternal argument embodied in their 1970s lyric — Which one’s Pink? — was my idea that it was neither Roger Waters nor David Gilmour. Maybe there would have been no Pink Floyd, not really, without Richard Wright. That’s what I hear in “Live at Gdansk” with GilmourRead More

It’s been since the beginning of August since we’ve last done a “Quickies” here, so we’re long overdue for another one. There’s been a bevy of music put out during these last eight weeks that our full-fledged reviews don’t begin to cover, and a lot of it noteworthy. Gosh, IRead More

Remembering Pink Floyd’s often-overlooked co-founding keyboardist Richard Wright.

Lodged toward the end of a nostalgic song cycle that attempts (with varying degrees of success) to recreate the soaring pop music of his California youth, Brian Wilson offers a moment of naked, welcome honesty. On “Midnight’s Another Day,” away from the florid orchestrations and dense backing vocals associated withRead More