IRWIN CHUSID (author, Songs In The Key Of Z): Outsider music is a slippery genre. It’s musicians who tend to be self-taught, untrained, working certainly way outside the channels of mainstream music. There are very important qualifications; they are sincere about it. They mean it. They’re not doing it to be funny. They’re not […]

  As our still-favorite p-rock album celebrates its Gala Anniversary on October the 28th, what better time to examine TEN REASONS WHY THE SEX PISTOLS DIDN’T  (OR COULDN’T)  SAVE ROCK AND ROLL MALCOLM McLAREN Never before in the long and illustrious annals of popular music history has a man been handed so much raw talent atop […]

I first became aware of the man in 1970, as composer of what to this very day remains my absolute favorite Three Dog Night tune, “Out In The Country.” Then, in the years to follow, that same man would somehow become downright ubiquitous upon the 25 living-color inches of the family RCA XL-100. On variety […]

  A Full Disclosure right up front, one and all:   ’Way back in the 1980 hey!day of my funzine The Pig Paper, a certain Kevin Michael Allin sent over a sweetly autographed, stuffed-with-promo-material copy of an album called Always Was, Is and Always Shall Be which had been newly issued on none other than […]

So! You thought he forever shuffled off our mortal coil, via a Parisian bathtub, forty-eight long July 3rd’s ago? Well… have I got a scoop for You !!   Jim Morrison? Yeah. Gary Pig Gold here, from BallBuster Music. Hey! Good to talk to you. How’re you doing? You know, you were surprisingly easy to […]

  As utterly confounding as even I still consider this lil’ factoid to be, Yours Truly honestly did spend the majority of the dreaded 1980s touring Canada’s hepper lounges and ski resorts as one-fifth of the one and only (…ah-hemm: but AUTHORIZED, I’ll have you know) Beach Boys “tribute” act known as Endless Summer.   […]

  If I can just get my mind together, the first “real” concert I ever attended as a wee Canadian tyke was The Jimi Hendrix Experience at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, fifty years ago this very night… on May the 3rd, 1969.   I’d already been a fervent fan for a couple of years, having […]

  In amp-on-at-least-11 tribute to the late, extremely great – not to mention extremely ball- and ear-busting Dick Dale, may I present my Ten OTHER All-Time Favorite Guitarists …in order of their initial phonographic appearances, that is:   BO DIDDLEY Rock ‘n’ Roll is Beat, and Beat needs a Rhythm, and basically… BO KNOWS. Sure, […]

  On the afternoon of March 9, 1969, three guitar-and-drum-beating sisters from tiny Fremont, New Hampshire entered an even tinier recording studio and emerged, just a few hours later, with a dozen original rock ‘n’ roll songs on some quarter-inch tape. These twelve songs were then pressed onto one thousand vinyl records, nine hundred copies […]

  He appeared exactly 87 years ago this month, then left us a mere 71 years later. Even so, I still have   Ten Reasons why JOHNNY CASH Always Matters:   “LUTHER PLAYED THE BOOGIE” Without a red hot and blue band to back it all the way up, even a Man in Black’s powers […]

  Lindsey Buckingham got kicked out of Fleetwood Mac (again), The Monkees made their first-ever Christmas album (!), and I am still waiting for that big Turtles Battle of the Bands Commemorative Special Anniversary Collectors Edition. In the meantime though, I remained happily singing along beneath headphones to (in strictly Alphabetical order)… EDGAR BREAU Edgar […]

  The other day I did something I haven’t done in a while. A long, long while. After taking a break to gulp down my standard late-afternoon frothy chocolate shake, a friend decided to drive us spur-of-the-moment clear cross-town to… a record store. Yes, a record store. Remember those? And there, displayed with obvious care […]

  Ten so long years ago, a random gathering of some of the best musicians from Canada’s greatest musical berg threw themselves onstage as part of the annual Locke Street Festival. Spearheaded by legendary Junkhouse dog Tom Wilson, said ad-hoc combo was busy rocking and rolling things all the way up that street as the […]

  I just want to walk right out of this world, coz everybody has a poison heart (Dee Dee Ramone, Daniel Rey)   Time to go listen to “Wart Hog” again… (musician-actor-fan Robbie Rist)   His speech was inarticulate; His songs were not (Carl Cafarelli, “This Is Rock ‘N’ Roll Radio”)   Dee Dee was […]

  As hard as it may seem today to fathom, there was a time, in the not too distant analog past, when starting up a record company required more – much more – than just a domain name and the nearest GarageBand™ software. Yes, there was a time when starting up a record company required […]

  With the endless summer again upon us, I hearby take it upon myself to compile a Consumers Guide of sorts to the sort of sounds every discriminating listener, both old and new, should first consider when diving into the vast, sonically daunting Brian Wilson audio catalog. In other words, in strictly chronological order that […]

  It was two score (that’s forty years) (I think) and several tens of thousand dollars ago (of that I’m sure) that I decided to get into the Record Business. For real. (Sort of.) I mean, Frank Zappa, Frank Sinatra, even those Beatles had their own labels. Why not me ??! So armed with nothing […]

  To celebrate James Newell Osterberg Jr.’s 71st (!!) Birthday on April 21st, I popped into the trusty ol’ Pig Player a DVD whose opening credits state, and I quote, “On September 3, 2010, Iggy and the Stooges performed Raw Power live in Monticello, New York. Six fans filmed the concert and interviewed Iggy and […]

  In the summer of 2005, a package arrived at the Hollywood offices of Highway 61 Entertainment from London with no return address. Inside were two mini-cassette audio tapes dated December 30, 1999 and labeled The Last Testament of George Harrison.   A voice eerily similar to Harrison’s tells a shocking story: Paul McCartney was […]

  The first Friday of most every month throughout 1967 and into ’68, I was formally excused from school so that my mother could take me all the way into Toronto for orthodontic appointments. As due reward afterwards, I would be treated to a tasty french-fry-and-chocolate-milk lunch in the sumptuous Eaton’s Department Store cafeteria, then […]

  DATELINE: Lubbock, TX (February 2018) –   Yessir, that last tour, exactly fifty-nine years ago, was sure a sumbitch, wasn’t it? “Winter Dance Party” my lone starred ass! More like a near month hauling all across those snow-crusted heartlands in the back of a school bus, sleeping with our guitars and our Jack Daniel’s […]

  Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie released a new CD, Chuck Berry released his last CD, and Jan & Dean’s REAL Filet of Soul finally arrived …after a quite, well, fishy 52-year delay. Nevertheless, I still found ten more vintage-2017 gems to recommend to all you B-Busters out there. In, as always, strictly alphabetical order […]

  Yes, it’s actually THAT time of Year again, when your snowbound B-Buster loads up on the virtual Yule to ask…   1) Which seasonal / Christmas recording do you never tire of hearing? What’s special about it? 2) Which seasonal / Christmas recording irritates you?     Morley Bartnoff as Cosmo Topper 1) It’s […]

  The 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act required that the millions of pages, many of them contained in CIA and FBI documents, be published in 25 years – by Thursday, October 26, 2017. Over the years, the National Archives has released most of the documents, either in full or partially redacted. But one final […]

  In honor of The One And Only Jerry Lee Lewis who, believe it or not, just turned 82 (!!) we take a little trip back. Sixty years back to be exact, to an unassuming little building at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee where something called “Great Balls Of Fire” has just been brought, red […]

  Good morning, campers!   It’s your old pal Keith Moon here. You know, “Moonie,” “Moon the Loon” …or, as I very much prefer, The Greatest Rock and Roll Drummer that Ever Was, that is. Or was. I think… But I digress.   Anyroad, we meet today so that I may bring your undivided attention […]

  It’s Elvis Day again this month. While this fact usually only piques the interest of a few graying octogenarians at this terribly late stage in the game, August 16th got me to thinking, probably for the first time ever, Why Elvis? I mean, Why should anybody, ANYWHERE care anymore? Well, in a word or […]

  Your humble columnist is proud to have been one of the esteemed contributors to Harvey Kubernik’s grand new 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of The Summer Of Love book. Whilst doing so however, I made sure to keep the trusty Pig Player fully loaded at all times with this especially time-worthy setlist…   […]

  A Summer’s Coming Songfest for putting the Top Down and the Volume UP:   “I GET AROUND” by THE BEACH BOYS (1964) Instrumentally (the arrangement and production effectively trounced all comers that summer of ’64), lyrically (though one can safely interpret “I’m gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same old strip, I gotta […]

  There’s Brian Wilson and his Beach Boys, most obviously. Then there were Crosby, Stills, Nash and sometimes Young, the Eagles, and my own personal favorites the Turtles, Byrds, Mothers of Invention and possibly even those Runaways. Not to mention Lindsey Buckingham’s Big Mac. However, whenever the songs and stories of California are sung and […]