The transistor radio was a technological marvel that put music literally into consumers’ hands in the mid-1950s. It was cheap, it was reliable and it was portable, but it could never even approximate the sound quality of a record being played on a home stereo. It was, however, the only technology available to on-the-go music […]
The music industry is notorious for its creative accounting practices and for onerous contracts that can keep even some top-selling artists perpetually in debt to their record labels. In a typical recording contract, a record label advances an artist a certain sum of money against future earnings from royalties. But because the cost of things […]
To paraphrase Shakespeare, that which we call a peach by any other name would taste as sweet. But would it sound as catchy? This was the question that faced Herbert Feemster as he contemplated his future in the music business in the mid-1970s. The answer he came up with led directly to the highlight of […]
To the New York City Police Department and Medical Examiner’s Office, he was John Simon Ritchie, a 22-year-old Englishman under indictment for murder but now dead of a heroin overdose in a Greenwich Village apartment. To the rest of the world, he was Sid Vicious, former bassist for the notorious Sex Pistols and the living […]
In an effort to call attention to the poverty, malnutrition and lack of access to quality education affecting millions of children throughout the developing world, the United Nations proclaimed 1979 the “International Year of the Child.” To publicize the proclamation and raise money for UNICEF—the United Nation’s Children’s Fund—plans were laid for a concert fundraiser […]
It was Marshall Checker, of the legendary Checker brothers, who first discovered them in the gritty blues clubs of Chicago’s South Side in 1969 and handed them their big break nine years later with an introduction to music-industry heavyweight and host of television’s Rock Concert, Don Kirshner. Actually, none of that is true, but it’s […]
A suburban family man with an office job, Declan Patrick McManus was somewhat removed from the revolution being staged in late-night clubs in 1977 London by punk-rock pioneers like The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned. “All these bands were playing in the middle of the night,” he later recounted “so I couldn’t go. […]
On this day in 1977, Hollywood composer Bill Conti scores a #1 pop hit with the single “Gonna Fly Now (Theme From Rocky).” Bill Conti was a relative unknown in Hollywood when he began work on Rocky, but so was Sylvester Stallone. Conti had gained some attention internationally with his work on several early 1970s […]
Thirty years after its release, John Lydon—better known as Johnny Rotten—offered this assessment of the song that made the Sex Pistols the most reviled and revered figures in England in the spring of 1977: “There are not many songs written over baked beans at the breakfast table that went on to divide a nation and […]
The crowd outside 254 West 54th Street in New York City on this day in 1927 would have been waiting for the curtain of a Puccini opera. On this day in 1957 or ’67, they would have been waiting for a filming of an episode of Password or maybe Captain Kangaroo. On this day in […]