John Mayall is, at 75 years of age, tireless. With 56 albums to his credit (not including compilations), he says he will record number 57 soon and, following that, take his new band on the …

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings have a sound on loan from the heart of the ’60s. It is a brassy inner-city soul/funk flavored by the Civil Rights movement and the church, a sound that was …

In the summer of 1983, Dan McLain approached Jerry Raney about forming a band. Raney, a guitarist, was fresh out of the Shames. McLain, who used the name Country Dick Montana both on and offstage, …

Taken as a whole, the real-life history of the Meat Puppets reads like the first round of edits of a James Crumley crime novel. Edits, as in stuff that would have been rated too grisly …

Old punk rockers who are still willing and able: that list would include Mike Watt. But unless you were a fan of the Minutemen or fIREHOSE or ’80s Southern California punk revival in general, you’ve …

At the age of 14, Anna Troy and her 13-year-old sister Lindsey performed as a duo called the Troys. They cut a demo and landed a major recording contract with Elektra. “The Troys were going …

When I read Wayne “the Train” Hancock called himself “the stab wound in the fabric of country music,” I knew that I had to talk to him. What is the problem with country music? In …

Call them guitar geeks. They are mostly middle-aged white working-class guys who have a thing for guitar heroes past and present. After an evening of guitar pyrotechnics, they will crowd around the bar and pound …

My dream list of bands to play at Barack Obama’s inauguration in January includes Bad Brains. Why not? They are controversial, they have a huge reputation, and Washington, D.C., is their hometown. They started there …

It turns out that there are thousands of hours of vintage American jazz, blues, rock, and folk performances dating as far back as the ’50s stored in the videotape libraries of television stations in, of …

The unofficial title of Deerhunter’s first full-length CD was Turn It Up Faggot. Once you’ve made that sort of artistic statement, where do you go from there? Despite the criticism…up, apparently. For example, consider the …

GWAR is a shock-rock band that wears creeped-out costumes on loan from the devil, comic books, and sci-fi. The band is Kiss on steroids. If nothing else, GWAR shows are memorable. They are something of …

The grunge family tree is not complicated. Before there was Nirvana or Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, or even those grand imitators the Stone Temple Pilots, there was a Bellevue, Washington band called Green River. Green …

Ever since their inception during the Carter administration, the B-52’s have been hard at work nailing down their status as the world’s greatest party band. Max’s Kansas City nightclub in Manhattan was a fit for …

At Santogold a couple of weeks ago I met a traveling salesman. He was roughly my age, 50-ish. He confided to my girlfriend that he preferred new rock rather than classic rock. He said that …

Forget everything you knew about Chris Cornell — he’s not the same guy anymore. In fact, Soundgarden is the first thing that you have to get out of your head if his new collaboration with …

It was a comment that my girlfriend made that initially sparked my interest in Black Kids. “They sound…derivative,” she said, searching for the right word. I wondered, after so much rock heritage, is it still …

“Music speaks to us so powerfully,” writes Diane Ackerman in her book A Natural History of the Senses, “that many musicians and theorists think it may be an actual language, one that developed about the …

Peter Wolf aside, the real spark plug in the J. Geils Band was a harmonica player named Magic Dick. His solo blowout “Whammer Jammer,” performed with all of the random energy of a beehive on …

It was at X-Fest at SDSU several years ago — blink 182 was scheduled to headline the evening, but Sprung Monkey, another local band, owned the afternoon. Sprung’s popularity was beginning to soar on the …

The Wedding Present is an old, seasoned British band that you are not likely to have heard of unless you are a devotee of college radio or frequent the sorts of clubs that book indie-rock …

Vains of Jenna is part of the Swedish (yes, Swedish) sleaze-rock revival…sleaze rock being an American phenomenon from the ’80s known for cheap lyrics and fast guitars. Call it glam metal, big-hair rock, whatever. It …

Rolling Stone once wrote that Alejandro Escovedo is his own genre. I agree, with this caveat: Personal as it may be, Escovedo’s music sounds familiar. Not familiar in the way of the plagiarist, mind you, …

“It comes up all the time,” John Gourley says via telephone when I ask him to explain the name of his band. They call themselves “Portugal. The Man.” “It’s pretty off the wall, but at …

He was sitting outside a coffee shop downtown with a shopping cart and a paper sign that read, “Need help/ Homeless/ And ugly.” He had a thick Southern drawl, a friendly face, and a busted …

Mr. Furia explains that in Barcelona, an invitation to dinner before nine in the evening is considered early. This is in response to my question about Spain’s late-night club scene. “Our daily clock,” he says, …

Not a good sign, I suppose, when tales of drug abuse crop up in the third paragraph of a press release — and when thrown such a bone, most of the rock press will take …

Halfway into the evening, Buddy Guy — wearing an electric-blue jumpsuit, his black Stratocaster covered with those trademark white polka dots — is playing a solo, a real ripper. Without interruption he walks off the …

When the members of Los Lonely Boys, a trio of brothers from West Texas, began writing songs, they didn’t stray far from their roots. It would be fair to assume that when they became a …

Good Charlotte came to be during a time when rock was in post-grunge misery and feeling about for new direction. Dozens of bands emerged thereafter in the ’90s — bands such as blink-182 and Lit …

Jack Johnson may be the new sound of surf rock, but it wasn’t always that way. The pop music that was pumping out of Southern California radios during surf rock’s first incarnation in the early …

The Smithereens spent the first few years of their career developing a formula and the next two decades touring behind it. Some have correctly identified the celestial hierarchy of their harmonies as a postcard to …

There’s jazz, and then there’s jazz — there’s traditional jazz that has not changed since the ’50s, and there’s a newer breed of jazz informed by pop. Hiromi is a jazz pianist who fits into …

Firewater’s first album, 1996’s Get Off the Cross, We Need the Wood for the Fire, introduced the public to an agitated blend of world music and the sometimes brutal sense of humor of Firewater’s founder, …

I first heard Sonny Landreth when he was playing behind John Hiatt. The Goners, of which Landreth is a member, have logged a lot of road time as Hiatt’s backup band. Landreth is a hired …

Grunge fixed a lot of rock’s problems in the early 1990s. Much as Van Halen led us back from Euro-synth hell in the ’80s, grunge overtook the wimpy pop rock of the day and found …

The best of the Kooks’ material has teenage lust and drama written all over it. Singer Luke Pritchard wrote some of the songs that ended up on their debut recording Inside In/Inside Out when he …

Cory Oliver lives in Pacific Beach and attends High Tech High Media Arts in Point Loma. He is 16 and plays guitar in Oden’s Fist, a band he formed with school friends a few months …

New Orleans drummer Stanton Moore’s jazz has more to do with the rowdiness of rock than with free-form intellectual explorations of melody. That’s not to say that Moore is a failed rocker turned jazzman or …

When I tell Allison Russell that I think her band Po’ Girl has a slightly sloppy feel to it, I am instantly sorry for not having chosen a better adjective. “We’re much more driven by …

In loudQUIETloud, a film about the Pixies’ 2004 reunion tour, you get to see one of the most influential bands of all time play your beloved favorites, and you may ask yourself: Why is this …

It wasn’t enough that the Los Angeles band Dengue Fever took ’60s Cambodian pop as their main architecture. They had the random good fortune to chance upon a Cambodian vocalist working in a Long Beach …

New Monsoon came with so much of rock’s past in their sound and performed with such accuracy that at first listen I thought they might be a cover band. They are not. Redolent of Southern …

The release of The Last Sucker last September was heralded as Ministry’s final studio album. Al Jourgensen’s announcement of semi-retirement coincides with the coming retirement of his current muse/nemesis. George W. Bush is also on …

I tell Justin Sullivan that without rock, I might not have survived adolescence. I tell him that my 1960s teenage alienation was overwhelming, that rock lyrics put better words to my black anger than I …

Cheryl Wheeler’s voice runs the table in terms of emotion. A singer/songwriter in the new-folk tradition, she teeters on the edge of a full-throated country sound but misses no opportunity to accent or put an …

“Their music isn’t revolutionary,” says my friend of Vampire Weekend, “but it’s light and silly, and it makes me smile listening to little blips of it.” There is an impressive shock wave of fan-driven hype …

From the beginning, Bad Religion, a Los Angeles band, thought they had a plan for the world. “Don’t you know the place you live is a piece of shit?” Greg Graffin sang in 1982. “Don’t …

“The initial thing was just to have a fun time one night,” says Luther Hughes via telephone from his L.A.-area home. Hughes is speaking of his current group, the Cannonball-Coltrane Project. What began a few …

“I don’t mean to be nosey,” says David Letterman during an interview with Marilyn Manson, nonplussed by the vampirish figure seated before him, “but do you have chrome teeth?” Marilyn Manson, a stage name combining …