Rock + Alternative

With a performing career that dates back to the early ‘60s, drummer-turned-guitarist R.L. Boyce has emerged as the modern-day torch-bearer for Mississippi Hill Country blues—a regional style that puts an emphasis on shuffling locomotive rhythms extended to hypnotic, trance-inducing states. His recent record for Waxploitation, Roll and Tumble, is a paragon of the form, with Boyce and his double-drummer tandem of Cedrick Burnside (grandson of another revered R.L.) and Calvin Jackson recorded live off the floor by producer Luther Dickinson (of the North Mississippi Allstars). Here, R.L. shares “songs by people I know or have met or have played with that I like to listen to when I am traveling.”Photo credit: William Burgess

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Loud music ceased to be strictly a young person’s phenomenon a very long time ago. What’s more, if you came of age during the punk and post-punk eras and fervently believe in the prevailing ethos that anyone can do it, then there shouldn’t be anything amiss about continuing to make a racket even if you now qualify for a discount transit pass. Besides, Johnny Rotten said you should never trust a hippie—but he wasn’t so specific about anyone over 30 (or 50).Nevertheless, the warhorses of the era still contend with an ageist tendency that’s unfortunately common. There’s no lack of public enthusiasm or critical acknowledgment of the early musical innovations and successes on which the reputations of the acts in this playlist were staked. Fans are happy to see their aging-but-spry heroes play old favorites on reunion tours, but alas, they typically zone out during new songs that the artists are genuinely excited to play. These latter-day addendums to revered back catalogs somehow feel superfluous, even when they come to outnumber the LPs that already occupy prime real estate in your collection.Now in their 41st year of activity—save for a few hiatuses—Wire are one of the many acts who say bollocks to that. This week sees the release of the band’s 15th album, Silver/Lead, which is just as vital as anything in their history. The same degree of vim and vigor distinguishes a diverse array of songs on this playlist, from peers who emerged alongside Wire in the punk/post-punk era of 1976–1982 and who have recently reunited (PiL, The Pop Group) or rudely refuse to die (New Order, Pere Ubu, Mekons). Here’s to you, magnificent geezers.

The rock band Ratt have said they wrote their best and best-known song, “Round and Round,” using a cassette recorder in a one-room L.A. apartment called Ratt Mansion West, where they survived on top ramen. “You can’t get much less glamorous than that,” singer Stephen Pearcy told Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman, authors of Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal. No doubt. In fact, you also can’t get much…rattier.See, Ratt came from a long line of rodents. Aerosmith, the band they were most often compared to, had recorded songs called “Round and Round” and “Rats in the Cellar” years before Ratt crawled out of MTV with their 1984 debut album, Out of the Cellar; they’d also covered funk progenitor and minstrel-show veteran Rufus Thomas’ “Walking the Dog” a decade before Ratt revolved a self-titled 1983 EP around it. “I was the last child, just a punk in the street,” Stephen Tyler shriek-howled on “Last Child” in 1976, the year punk supposedly happened, though really it had been around for years. Ratt fit into that line, as well.“Out on the streets, that’s where we’ll meet”: That’s how “Round and Round” starts, a line that immediately recalls the MC5, yet is hardly the punkiest thing about Out of the Cellar. Writing about the song in The Village Voice at the time, I noted, “It’s reasonably fast [with] a simple repeating riff that serves (and works) as the hook, and no real guitar showboating to speak of.” I also praised the album’s lack of “keyboards or strings or any of that sissy stuff, and a couple cuts (‘I’m Insane,’ ‘She Wants Money’) that approach Ramones/Motörhead velocity and intensity.”Deborah Frost, writing a metal-revival roundup in Rolling Stone, went so far as to suggest that “Pearcy sounds like a great L.A. street punk who would have been at home fronting the Seeds or the Standells,” then predicted “Round and Round” might wind up someday “on a 1984 version of Nuggets.” No such compilation ever materialized, but Frost’s estimation still rings true. Jon Young, in Rolling Stone Review 1985, similarly praised Pearcy’s “itchy-throated and proud” vocals above “junky but succinct” playing. Even Creem’s John Mendelsohn, ranking Ratt among his least favorite new bands of the ‘80s, zeroed in on Pearcy’s “petulant whine.”Here’s the thing about mid-‘80s MTV metal (pop-metal, that is—later indelibly dubbed “hair metal,” since my far more evocative labels “Nerf metal” and “shag metal” tragically never caught on): As myriad more extreme meanies will forever point out, it wasn’t really all that metal. In the ‘70s, when genre distinctions were fuzzier, most of these bands would’ve been filed under hard rock, if not glam rock—the New York Dolls (via Hanoi Rocks) and Alice Cooper (whom Twisted Sister swiped their look from) and Slade (whom Quiet Riot swiped their hits from) plus The Sweet, T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, and above all Kiss were unmistakable inspirations, both sonically and visually. The Dead End Kids, a sort of late-‘70s suburban Jersey/Philly answer to the Dolls, more or less sired the Pennsylvania-to-Sunset Strip bands Poison, Cinderella, and Britny Fox. W.A.S.P.’s and Quiet Riot’s earliest L.A. shows, circa 1975, had them opening for Dolls bassist Arthur “Killer Kane” and Stooges (not Joy Division!) spinoff The New Order. Great White covered Ian Hunter. Ex-Runaways were everywhere. And all the pretty boys wore scarves, Spandex, striped low-cut tank tops, shiny necklace baubles, flamboyant eye makeup, and Vaselined cheekbones.But ‘70s glam didn’t beget only hair metal; it also, earlier, begat ‘70s punk. There’s a fine line, and barely a year, between The Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz” (revived in ’84 by Swiss cheese-metallers Krokus) and the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Poison borrowed guitar chords from the Sex Pistols, who’d in turn borrowed them from the Dolls. Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider slipped into Johnny Rotten snarls over the shouty Slade stomp of “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Van Halen, who made L.A. hair metal inevitable, had a song called “Atomic Punk” on their first album and one called “D.O.A.” that sleazed like The Stooges on their second. Duff McKagan banged bass for Seattle punks The Fartz and Fastbacks prior to Guns N’ Roses. And so on.Ratt, like Mötley Crüe a couple years before—and so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands like glam-rock obsessives Def Leppard a couple years before that, and actual punk rockers on both sides of the pond a couple years before that—put out their first vinyl on an indie label. Punk was already speeding metal up, weeding out pomp, and making it more D.I.Y. well before thrash rewrote the rulebook. New wave magazine-readin’ super freaks in 1981, especially the type drawn to heavy-riffed hardcore bands like Flipper and the Angry Samoans, might’ve noticed an ad for Crüe’s original Too Fast for Love, on Leathür Records. Ratt’s 1983 EP came out on Time Coast, a label run by longtime rock and comedy manager Marshall Berle—nephew of Milton Berle, who wound up co-starring partly in pre-glam drag along with several actual rats in the video for “Round and Round.” Time Coast also put out a single by spoofy Malibu clan the Surf Punks and a couple releases by L.A.’s excellent (and X-like) co-ed trio The Alley Cats; Ratt seem to have been the only alleged “metal” band on the imprint.So…cats and rats, how ‘bout that? The model on the cover of both Ratt’s first EP (with a rat scaling her stocking) and first album was kittenish Tawny Kitaen, later of Whitesnake video fame. Back in the ‘70s, when Ratt were still struggling under the moniker Mickey Ratt, a similarly somewhat Aerosmith-inspired Irish band called The Boomtown Rats took out-in-the-streets tunes like “Rat Trap” to the top of British charts; by 1984, their singer, Bob Geldof, was leading charity supergroup Band Aid, trying to cure Ethiopian famine. One of the first punk albums released in England, in early 1977, was The Stranglers’ ‘60s-garage-infused Rattus Norvegicus.Speaking of thematically titled albums, it’s worth noting that Ratt’s 2010 Infestation, featuring mostly original members, was arguably their most rocking since Out of the Cellar a quarter-century before. In 2002, Austin bluegrass cow-punks the Meat Purveyors recorded a highly entertaining and energetic alt-country cover of “Round and Round.” And by 2017, hip young German speed-metal troupe Stallion were channeling early Ratt riffs on their own second album, From the Dead. What comes around goes around, as Stephen Pearcy would say. I’ll tell you why—or maybe I already have.

These days, Christian music and pop culture are so deeply intertwined, it’s easy to assume that it’s a marriage tested by time. In fact, it’s a relatively new phenomenon, and like many things that are now a part of our society’s status quo—the internet, meditation, health food—it reaches back to the hippie revolution. As scholar and writer Erik Davis points out in the liner notes to the Wanted: Jesus Christ compilation, “Many acidheads had ‘Christ trips’ in the sixties. Some went on to become Jesus People: hippie born-agains whose faith offered ‘One Way’ out of the chaos of the times. While rejecting the hedonism of the hippies, these long-haired converts also epitomized the countercultural dream of personal transformation through ecstatic and collective spiritual encounters.”Jesus People—or Jesus Freaks, as they proudly called themselves—initially were a California-based movement. As a result, their formative sounds are rooted in the Golden State’s utopian mix of wispy folk-pop and psychedelia. Larry Norman’s 1971 anthem “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” is a fragile meditation laced with strings and the singer/songwriter’s Neil Young-like cry. On the other hand, Agape’s “Wouldn’t It Be A Drag/Change Of Heart” is fiery, funky acid rock packed with soul-jarring organ and smoking guitars. Especially sublime is Azitis’ “Judgement Day,” which boasts Byrds-style harmonies, jazzy flute, and a freak-out middle section drenched in wah-wah.America’s older Evangelicals were perplexed, troubled, and often hostile to far-out hippie preachers like Lonnie Frisbee and their shaggy followers, who tended to eschew traditional worship and living for natural settings and communal homes (this issue is covered in great depth in Larry Eskridge’s engrossing tome, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America). Nevertheless, over the course of the ’70s, the two groups did become one. This evolution is mirrored in how Jesus music gradually became less eccentric and weird and more professional and mainstream. By the decade’s end, the movement was churning out polished hits like “You Put This Love In My Heart,” a deliciously infectious tune from soft-rock tunesmith Keith Green, and “At The Cross,” from Maranatha! Music—slick, blue-eyed praise featuring the voices of Harlan Rogers and future solo star Kelly Willard.Nowadays, a good deal of the early Jesus music is only known to those older converts who were a part of the movement or to hardcore record collectors who specialize in hippie obscurities. But it has to be noted that the massive, global industry now labeled contemporary Christian music—or CCM—certainly wouldn’t exist were it not for the long-haired visionaries found on this playlist.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

My father passed away on May 4, 2017, in Milwaukee, where he’d been living with my older brother Zac. I got out of work late that night, and after I returned my brother’s call and heard the news, I felt a little numb, too far physically removed from the personal significance of what had just happened 800 miles away. Driving home, I put on Little Feat’s “Easy to Slip,” a song I’d heard in Dad’s car a thousand times, and it helped me feel something that night when it was all almost too slippery and abstract to grasp.Three weeks later, Zac and his family flew out to Baltimore, with our father in an urn, to hold a memorial in his hometown. Richard David Shipley was born in Baltimore and lived most of his life there, selling his house of 25 years a month before his death. He wasn’t a religious man, so we celebrated his life in a secular fashion that seemed fitting, enjoying the earthly pleasures of music, food, and good company. We took over the upstairs of his favorite Fells Point bar, Kisling’s, for a few hours, and enjoyed some beer and the best bar food in Baltimore while a playlist I assembled of his favorite music blared in the background. “I can’t believe I’m listening to Michael McDonald,” my brother told me after I sent him a link to the playlist.Dad, like many other baby boomers, loved rock’n’roll ever since he saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan as a teenager, and he sang in a band in college. One night when his group was performing in Baltimore County, Dad met a musician who was in town recording an album. Lowell George invited my dad to come by the studio, where he saw the eccentric California band Little Feat run through songs for their fourth album, Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, a chance meeting with one of the great cult bands of the ‘70s.I grew up with my mom and saw Dad on weekends, when we’d spend hours in the backseat of his car listening to him sing along with the radio and tapes of The Eagles and Tori Amos. He loved Tears For Fears’ ‘80s records, but it was their last U.S. hit, 1993’s “Break It Down,” that uniquely stuck with both him and me as a masterpiece. As a teenager, I got my first turntable and started to pore through the boxes of vinyl that Dad hadn’t touched since he got a CD player—all his Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac records. (I always thought it was unusual that he seemed to prefer Tusk to Rumours.)Dad and I continued to bond over music in his later years, and we’d go together to see Little Feat, Michael McDonald, and Jackson Browne. (He met my mother at a Jackson Browne concert in 1978.) But he remained open-minded to all sorts of music in ways that sometimes surprised me. When I was 17, I needed a ride to go see Boredoms and Scarnella at the 9:30 Club, and in retrospect it’s pretty remarkable that a 50-year-old dad actually really enjoyed Vision Creation Newsun-era Boredoms. I invited the Baltimore post-rock duo The Water to perform at my 30th birthday party, and Dad became a fan, buying their album and returning to see them live again.So much of the music here is “dad rock” in every sense of the word, but it’s never felt like a pejorative to me. I never loved everything Dad loved, and certainly I didn’t agree with him that Sting was as good solo as with The Police. But I learned how to love music partly through him, and I’ll never hear any of these songs, or a hundred other songs, without thinking of him.

After the 1980 death of John Bonham brought Led Zeppelin to a crashing halt, Robert Plant honored his band’s legacy by letting go of it. After all, the ultimate way to respect what Zeppelin accomplished—and Bonham’s crucial, inimitable contributions to it—was to lay the band to rest, and make no attempts to recapture their uncommon alchemy and ungodly roar with some ringer. (And when you consider The Who’s middling post-Keith Moon albums from the early ‘80s, who could blame him.) So on his first couple of solo records, Plant remodeled himself for the ‘80s, the shirtless golden god of old reborn as a suave, tidily coiffed, synth-pop sophisticate, leaving the blooze-metal regurgitation to the Whitesnakes and Kingdom Comes of the world. But by 1987’s Now and Zen, the specter of Plant’s former band had become unavoidable—not only did Jimmy Page guest on the hot-rod-revving single “Tall Cool One,” the song climaxed with a barrage of Zeppelin samples. And through 1990’s Manic Nirvana and 1993’s Fate of Nations, Plant tried to put a modernist spin on Zeppelinesque bombast, before just saying “fuck it” and hooking up with Page for a reunion that yielded an MTV Unplugged special and an album of new originals, 1998’s Steve Albini-produced Walking Into Clarksdale.But while he spent the first two decades of his solo career running away from his musical legacy and then gradually inching back toward it, Plant has spent the 21st century establishing a new one. Starting with 2002’s Dreamland, Plant has seemed less like a solo artist fronting hired guns who are not Led Zeppelin, and more like a co-pilot taking direction from an amorphous cast of intriguing collaborators, including bluegrass queen Alison Krauss (his partner on 2007’s Grammy Award-winning Raising Sand) and folk-rock veteran Patti Griffin (with whom he communed—professionally and, for a time, romantically—on 2010’s Cajun-cooked Band of Joy). And then there’s his recurring backing band the Sensational Space Shifters (formerly Strange Sensation), an exploratory, stylistically dextrous ensemble centered around guitarists Justin Adams (who’s played with Jah Wobble and Brian Eno) and Liam Tyson (formerly of Britpop chancers Cast), bassist Bill Fuller (also of Geoff Barrow’s Krautrockin’ trio Beak), and a pair of Portishead associates, John Baggot (synths) and Clive Deamer (drums).Collectively, these musicians have encouraged Plant to dig deeper into Zeppelin’s roots—American blues, British folk, Middle Eastern textures—but instead of blowing them up to into a proto-metal pomp, they throw them into a frying pan and melt them down into a mercurial elixir that’s reformulated in fascinating ways. That’s not to say he doesn’t occasionally get the Led out—the 2005 track “Tin Pan Alley” may be steeped in eerie Radiohead-esque atmospherics, but it eventually explodes into a Viking wail that echoes back to “Immigrant Song.” However, for the most part, Plant is entirely at home in his lower register, turning in some of the most graceful, beautifully understated performances of his career on the piano ballad “A Stolen Kiss” and the jangle-pop gem “House of Love.” And we’ve seen greater evidence of the ravenous record collector who’s fond of chatting up his current musical obsessions in interviews. Plant’s post-millennial catalog is loaded with exceptional covers, from an apocalyptic interpretation of the traditional gospel spiritual “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down” to the dreamy drift through Low’s “Silver Rider” to a reverential reading of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” that suggests Plant is well familiar with This Mortal Coil’s definitive version.The shadow of Led Zeppelin will forever loom large over Plant’s career, and so long as Plant, Page, and John Paul Jones are all still alive, murmurs of a reunion will refuse to die. But as Plant sets out for another voyage with the Sensational Space Shifters on his new album Carry Fire, let’s celebrate the 21st-century renaissance of an artist who should be regarded alongside Bowie, Peter Gabriel, and Neil Young as one of the most restlessly adventurous artists of his generation.

Once upon a time, Americana musicians dismissed synthesizers, drum machines, vocal processing, and programming as soulless products of our modern technological state. Where archaic, time-tested instruments like banjo, guitar, and drum kits express authentic human experience, these newfangled gizmos, with their myriad robotic zaps and pulsating repetitions, are cold and artificial. This was some deeply ingrained thinking, and let’s not forget: It was just over 50 years ago that, according to legend, hardline folk revivalist Pete Seeger attempted to take an axe to the cables amplifying Bob Dylan’s infamous electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. And that was over nothing more than some electricity!Times sure have changed. You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting an Americana, blues, or other roots-flavored artist who isn’t plucking a banjo over bubbling drum machines or weaving acoustic fingerpicking around club grooves. Currently, one of the biggest bands in the U.S. is Judah & the Lion, whose omnipresent mega-hit “Take It All Back” is high-energy bluegrass filtered through the digital production qualities of hip-hop. The same goes for The Avett Brothers’ “Ain’t No Man” off of True Sadness, which is laced with flickering synthesizers.Sonically speaking, some of this stuff ventures pretty far out. Where Judah & the Lion and The Avetts are fairly subtle in their digital flirtations, singer/songwriter Justin Vernon—a.k.a. Bon Iver—sounds like an Auto-Tune-drenched cyborg on his critically acclaimed 22, A Million, a full-length album that’s a million light years removed from the rustic indie folk that launched his career. Then there’s the Gazzo remix of American Authors’ “Best Day of My Life,” which turns the bouncing, folk-pop ditty into a bass-thumping banger perfect for sets at the Electric Daisy Carnival. Can you imagine what Pete Seeger would think of roots music mixed with EDM? We shudder to think.

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.When disco emerged as a dominant cultural force in the mid-to-late ’70s, regressive cultural forces converged under the banner of rockism to decry its ascendance. Racists, homophobes, and garden-variety closed-minded reactionaries started stirring up impressionable music fans with apocalyptic visions of disco taking over the world and crushing good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll into the dirt beneath its platform heels. Mass record burnings, graffiti, and sloganeering were all part of the benighted Disco Sucks movement. But if anyone ever bothered to ask actual rockers about the issue at the time, they would have gotten a very different perspective.Between the late ‘70s (when disco was at its zenith) and the early ‘80s (when it began to peter out), a remarkable number of high-profile rockers decided to take the plunge and adapt their sound to a disco groove, even if only for a song or two. Granted, it may not have been too huge a shock when try-anything types like The Rolling Stones and David Bowie turned out discofied tracks like “Miss You” and “Fashion,” respectively, especially since the no-disco movement was less prevalent in their native U.K. than in the U.S. But even some American bands you’d never expect to hit the dance floor were having a go at it.Hippie heroes The Grateful Dead got down with the four-on-the-floor feel for “Shakedown Street.” America’s Band themselves, The Beach Boys, put on their polyester (at least figuratively) for “Here Comes the Night.” And hard-rock demons Kiss stepped up to the plate with the ooga-ooga bass lines of “I Was Made for Lovin’ You,” ending up with one of the biggest hits of their career in the process.

Ryan Adams’ latest record, Prisoner, contains a profoundly affecting and relatable story of personal overcoming that is beautifully filtered through a hard-hitting kaleidoscope of ‘70s and ‘80s sounds and techniques. Yet despite the ever-present ghosts of his influences, the album is an original, organic fulfillment of what he’s been aiming at for most of his career.The sonic ascent to Prisoner began with his 2014 self-titled album, a misty, midnight ride through his neon mind where echoing drums, glowing guitar riffs, and shadowy organs refract The Replacements and Tunnel of Love-era Springsteen. The following year’s 1989, a song-for-song cover of the Taylor Swift album, went even darker, gesturing toward The Smiths and Springsteen’s moodier moments—try to tell me Adams’ version of “Shake It Off” isn’t a luminous, slow-burn cousin to “I’m on Fire.”Prisoner completes the trajectory of these records. Many have called it a breakup album, which in many ways it is, but it’s also full of hope and power thanks to the strength it draws from Adams’ spiritual predecessors. The lightning-quick guitar outbursts of “Do You Still Love Me?” gesture back to Black Sabbath (Vol. 4 is an Adams favorite), Kiss, and AC/DC. The title track evokes the shiny jangle of Johnny Marr, while “Doomsday” imagines what would happen if The Cure had a harmonica player. “To Be Without You” harkens to the joyous, swaggering folk of The Grateful Dead, and “Outbound Train” is vintage Springsteen, complete with suspended chords and lyrics about cars, loneliness, and boredom.The album’s masterful closer resides at the top of the class of Adams’ grand finales, repeating its mantra of “we disappear” with production so crisp and transparent it sounds like Adams is actually disappearing. And yet, throughout the images of fading taillights and haunted houses, beyond The Smiths and Springsteen, Ryan Adams is doing his own thing. And he nails it.Click here to add to Spotify playlist!

Writing another memoir, hiring replacement Wilburys, or actually bothering to show up to collect a Nobel Prize—these are just a few of the ways Bob Dylan could spend his eighth decade on Earth. Instead, he’s undertaken a rather different endeavor, one that on the surface may be as peculiar as any of his most inscrutable artistic gestures in the last half-century or more. But to just about everyone’s surprise, Dylan’s quest to perform and record his own versions of dozens of songs made famous by Frank Sinatra and others has yielded some unexpectedly marvelous music thus far.This week sees the release of Triplicate, the unfeasibly large follow-up to 2015’s Shadows in the Night and 2016’s Fallen Angels. The new three-disc set adds 30 more songs to the Nobel Laureate’s newly expanded repertoire of classics. Though most of them were initially made famous by Ol’ Blue Eyes, all are part of a canon that has become loosely known as the Great American Songbook, and also includes the handiwork of songwriters like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, and the team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. These songs transcended their own era—one that roughly spans the glory days of Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s to the artistic peak of Broadway musicals in the 1950s—becoming pop and jazz standards for many generations up to and including this one.As tired as these tunes may seem in slavishly retrograde renditions—with Rod Stewart and Michael Bublé being regular offenders, though we must never forget Seth MacFarlane’s big band jazz album—their lyrical wit, melodic sophistication, and sheer malleability mean that they’re forever ripe for reinterpretation and hardy enough to withstand the occasional act of desecration. To mark the arrival of Dylan’s latest venture into the Great American Songbook, we provide a survey of renditions by other artists—Bryan Ferry, Joan Jett, The Roots, and The Bonzo Dog Band, just to name a few—who clearly love this canon, but whose own approaches avoid those easy conventions.