Discover our selection of music documentaries, featuring The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bon Jovi and Nirvana! Qello Concerts is the perfect gift for Father's Day.
In the '80s, back when both the music and hair were big, you could swing your long locks while playing air guitar well before the game Guitar Hero came along. Pull on your spandex, spray on the aqua net, and read up on the history of the gods of hair metal.
It’s too easy, because it’s too true: Tom Petty, the Heartbreaker, died of a broken heart and, in doing so, broke a world of hearts, of friends, peers and fans who just assumed he’d be here forever.
In 1987, the San Francisco Chronicle noted the 20th anniversary with several articles, including this one, which I’ve edited for space. I have not updated it but should note that since then, we’ve lost three of the people I spoke with: Bill Graham, Jerry Garcia, and Paul Kantner.
It doesn’t sound right, but on June 18, Paul McCartney turns 64. Will you still need me? Will you still feed me? When I’m 64? Plus ten. That’s right. The perpetually youthful Macca was born in 1942 in Liverpool, England. And, as you well know, he’s still rocking.
In the way he’s accepted his Nobel Prize for literature, by seemingly not acknowledging it for so long that one of the awards committees called him “rude” and “arrogant,” Bob Dylan was being himself.
Only a few weeks before the news broke about his death, Leonard Cohen was the subject of a piece in The New Yorker, which detailed the ailments that had kept him off the road the past couple of years.
On his 69th birthday, which took place on July 20, he should embrace his age. Now doing a residency at the House of Blues in Las Vegas, he recently issued a reunion album, Santana IV, with most of the original band members playing together for the first time in some 45 years.
To play the Hollywood Bowl. For any musician, that has to be a career highlight. The Doors performed in that revered venue in 1968, and Ray Manzarek, in his interview for Qello Concerts, articulated the import of such an occasion.
It’s not a sexy, round-number anniversary, but I bet Deadheads know that July 9 was the date of the last Grateful Dead concert with Jerry Garcia. That was in 1995, at Soldier Field in Chicago.
This week in rock history, Hank Williams made his debut on the live radio show, Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. That was on June 11, 1949, and it says somewhere that he got an unprecedented six encore calls from the audience at the Ryman Auditorium. Must’ve thrown the radio show clear off its schedule.
