“I hope I die before I get old,” sang Pete Townsend, never meaning that for a second — no right thinking person ever would! But rock magazines — and songs, albums, groups, videos, hairstyles and fashions — do get old, some very old, and, like the inevitably doomed nasties in The Raiders of the Lost […]
The 1970 famed Monty Python Flying Circus sketch “Election Night Special” featured political parties ranging in silliness that ran against each other for local elections. The bit had two main parties: the sensible and the silly, but there were also other independents such as the slightly-silly and the very-silly. Full of ridiculously long candidate names […]
As part of our 35th-anniversary, we’re naming the most influential artists of the past 35 years. Today, we’re at #35. From Anaheim, California, here’s No Doubt. CREDIT: Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images Disneyland, the Angels, NAMM, Orange County — for most people, that’s all that came to mind when thinking of Anaheim, and even that was a […]
The first time I heard Van Halen was in my friend David Farmer’s garage. We’d had football practice, and I went over to his house after. His uncle was playing this music I’d never heard before, and I remember thinking, ‘What IS this?’ It made me want to move. It made me curious. It made the […]
Growing up in a house with musically obsessed parents ended up being a gift, but when I was 7, it was a nuisance. Car rides packed with blaring rock music (what’s now classic rock) were annoying, especially for a kid who was only interested in baseball. Dylan, Springsteen, the Dead, the Allmans and even U2 […]
“If I died in a meadow, I don’t think they’d ever find me at all,” Bartees Strange belts on “Stone Meadows,” a cathartic indie-rock centerpiece from his debut LP, Live Forever. It’s a grim thought — but one that often crossed his mind as a young Black person in his native Oklahoma. “I knew people who […]
A little over three years after releasing their atmospheric masterpiece OK Computer, Radiohead set the tone for the rest of their career with Kid A: a radical and beautifully bizarre collection that relied less on guitars, more on fragmented electronics and ambient experimentation. As writer Zev Borow observed in SPIN’s November 2000 issue, Radiohead’s fourth […]
I’ve met Robert Plant four times. First as a punky grade-schooler, sitting cross-legged on my friend’s worn-out shag carpet, carefully slipping LPs out of their dust jackets for fear her older sister will wring our necks for touching her records. Houses of the Holy, Led Zeppelin IV, I, II. Aside from not leaving fingerprints on […]
By the mid-80s, Prince was a global superstar thanks to the worldwide success of 1984’s Purple Rain. So when he started work on his follow-up — eventually released on March 31, 1987 as the double-LP Sign O’ the Times — it came amidst a creative tsunami that saw two more classic albums with his longtime band the Revolution […]
Gus Dapperton isn’t about the facade that musicians — or anyone famous, really — are superheroes. And like everyone else, they deal with mental health issues. “[Musicians] are usually afraid to portray … to a large audience if they’re suffering or if they’re feeling depressed,” Dapperton tells SPIN. “I think it’s important to just express […]