If Rivers Cuomo of Weezer were to walk past you on the street, you probably wouldn’t notice him…if you did, you might think that this stranger kinda looked like Louis Tully, the nebbish accountant played by Rick Moranis in a couple of “Ghostbusters” movie. Chances are he’d be wearing skinny jeans, a t-shirt, a hoody, maybe a baseball cap, indistinguishable from a hundred other short, slight, guys with glasses that you encountered that day…and that’s just the way he likes it. But Rivers Cuomo is an unlikely sort of rock star and is extremely committed to being a rock star—or at least doing the ..read more

This is an episode all about bust-ups and break-ups, those times when tensions within a band get so high that things get weird and violent and—well, let’s just say “regrettable”. Some of these incidents resulted in nothing more than an airing of the grievances…steam was let off, people calmed down, and it was back to business as usual…other times, though, the damage of was irreparable and it marked the end of the group forever—or at least something close to it… You want stories?... You want drama?... You want weird…stand by…i got the stories ---and they are not pretty.   Learn more a ..read more

We would not be sitting here talking about rock music if it weren’t for people of African descent…if you start in the present and begin to trace things backward to important innovations and accomplishments, nine times out of ten, you’ll end up exploring something from black culture… And we can go way, way back—right to 1619 when the first slave ship arrived in north America at the British colony of Virginia carrying about 20 captives… Over the centuries that followed, the people of Africa, consisting of many different communities, nations, tribes, and cultures, were brought to the west by forc ..read more

A year ago, I began what will unfortunately be a regular series of these programs from now on…it’s an annual look back on the musicians we lost in the previous year… Rock star deaths have been on our mind since late 2015 when Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots died, followed a few weeks later by Lemmy of Motorhead…then the floodgates opened in 2016: Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Glenn Frey of the eagles, both Keith Emerson and Greg Lake from Emerson Lake and Palmer, and George Michael—just to name a few… And since then, it seems we hear about a rock star death every couple of weeks…Tom P ..read more

We’re about to get all dreamy and floaty and all blissed out by taking a look at another specific genre…a post-punk genre called “dream pop”…it’s a thing unto itself but it’s also related to other genres where atmosphere, sonic textures, and (in some cases) sheer volume reign supreme…and from its origins in the early 80s, dream pop has had a profound effect on music that is felt even today. It touches on and overlaps with other alt-rock subgenres including shoegaze and anything resembling modern psychedelic material…it has a volume continuum that ranges from barely-there softness to somewhere ..read more

We’ve all sat listening to music and though to ourselves “what does this song mean?...what’s the singer (or the band) trying to say?”. Sometimes it’s nothing…it’s just a bunch of words strung together in a way that sounds fun…other times, lyrics to a song may be just some kind of stream of consciousness thing that somehow made sense to the singer or the lyricist at the time…or maybe it didn’t…lots of songs are written in altered states. A song could be an oblique and opaque form of poetry that’s supposed to resolve itself in the brains of each individual listener…there have been many times whe ..read more

This is an episode about murder…call this a crossover episode with my true crime podcast, “Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry”. For as long as rock music has existed, people have been blaming it for turning impressionable people to the dark side, inspiring them (if not outright encouraging them) to do evil things. My opinion is that an unstable mentally ill person is liable to be triggered by anything…and yes, sometimes that trigger might be a song…there are, however, not that many documented cases of this happening. I call this episode “murder ballads (and other deadly songs ..read more

When Nadine Bailey was 7 years old she woke up terrified of dark figures looming at the end of her bed and an eerie presence all around her. From then on every night was the same, she was visited by phantom-like shadows and no matter where she went, the ghostly encounters followed her. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits and the unexplained have consumed her entire life and for the past 20 years she's been an award-winning guide with Edmonton Ghost Tours  Along the way she has taken people into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness and inside so ..read more

Anyone with a passing knowledge of rock is aware of its origins back in the late 40s and early 50s when blues, rhythm and blues, western, country, folk, and hillbilly traditions began to mix and match, eventually coalescing into what became known as “rock’n’roll”. If you’re an alt-rock fan, you’ve heard the story of how all this began with the garage bands of the late 60s and the punk rock explosion of the mid-70s. The birth of modern electronic music?... It has a rich and complicated origin story that stretches back to the 40s before the technology was cheap enough for young musicians to give ..read more

If you’re a musical artist and you start to do well, the point will come when you need a manager. The manager is the person who looks after all the business stuff so the musician can get on with the business of making music…managers deal with booking gigs, marketing, promotions, promoters, publicity, support staff and road crews. They collect the money and pay the bills…and the oversee all the infrastructure of your career: lawyers, accountants, and all the other people involved in running the business that is you and your music. But it doesn’t stop there…managers can also function as advisors ..read more