THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

I've been teaching the History of Rock & Roll Era class at NCMC for over a decade, and as each year goes on, I'm more and more convinced that Revolver , the 1966 classic from The Beatles that's 50 years old this year, is the best start-to-finish album in history. It's pretty much perfect, for all the reasons that have been discussed by dozens of writers better than me, and -- when paired with Pet Sounds -- it's the point where rock & roll forever shifted from the dance floor to the studio, where the soundtrack to teenage groping was elevated to art, at least for the white artists who were allowed the keys to the sonic kingdom. When we get to this point in class, I typically do two different things, but I wasn't able to do those two things this semester due to some technological snafus in my class room. (I was able to break down "A Day In The Life" along the three themes -- dreams, drugs, death -- so it wasn't a total loss.) The first t...

When I'm asked to think of my first concert, I have to first define my personal parameters of "concert" and whether or not that's the same as a Rock Show. If we say that a concert isn't the same as a Rock Show, then I would have to say that my first concert was seeing pre-"Don't Worry, Be Happy"  Bobby McFerrin, although the details -- mid-'80s, some college auditorium in southern lower Michigan -- are a bit fuzzy. (I do remember that he did a Wizard Of Oz bit where he sang some of the songs and did some of the voices. Yes, he was pretty awesome.) In general, I wasn't interested in seeing live music for some time, as I had a weird belief that the recorded performance was the more "real" and definitive version of a song; however, in time I learned to understand the subjectivity of that belief, that there were different pleasures to be extracted from recorded music and live music, so in early 1992, I decided to drop my defenses and ...

During the '70s and '80s, if you lived in the middle of nowhere and you wanted to know about the popular culture of the nation at large, you watched movies and television (the big three -- ABC, NBC, CBS -- as well as PBS) and you read magazines, especially the reviews sections. The monoculture loomed large back then, with no clear avenues into nearly anything counterculture, so I happily lapped up mainstream films, shows, and music recommended by middle-aged white men of the establishment, hoping to one day do what they did. The first time I was paid for reviewing anything was as a grad student at Central Michigan University, working for the college newspaper CM Life in the early '90s under a variety of editors. (And there was talent in that editorial pool, too; one editor later worked for the Wall Street Journal and a D.C. insider enclave, while another editor co-created Robot Chicken for Adult Swim. I even dated one of the other editors, but that's another post.) ...