Music videos were amazingly effective for selling recordings. Some had practically nothing to do with the song itself and some made at least a passing attempt at a narrative. Also, an excuse for the band to hang out with very attractive other people. Like in "Hot for Teacher."
Read More
In 2009, Deadline reported that Sean Connery had an "explosion clause" written into his contracts. Any film in which the Scotsman appeared was required to include a bigger and more Earth-shattering kaboom than the last. Even Connery wasn't in the most expensive Bond movie, though.
Read More
"Come Together," by the Beatles, is a true jam, so much so that the Arctic Monkeys's cover was played in the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics ... oh, and it also pulled heavily from Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me," to the point where one could claim plagiarism.
Read More
It's hard to imagine a time before Led Zeppelin existed, let alone a time when songs like "Stairway to Heaven", "Kashmir", and "When the Levee Breaks" didn't grace our radio speakers. It's even harder to imagine what Led Zeppelin would have been like without the band's frontman, Robert Plant.
Read More
The boys of the History Channel show American Pickers go all around the country (and sometimes even to London) looking for long-lost pieces of Americana. And of course, they gotta have somewhere to put it all in, and you see that place a couple of times in the show.
Read More
On April 3, 2015, life caught up with Bob Burns, the original drummer for the southern rock powerhouse Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Read More
However, in 2005, Grohl revealed that he felt a kind of awkwardness as part of Nirvana: "I don't think I've ever told anyone this, but there were times when Kurt was really unhappy with the way I played drums. I could hear him talking about how much he thought I sucked. But he'd never say it to me."
Read More
"My dad was Mr. Charisma," Carlos said in 2014. "I adored him because of the way he carried himself, the way he dressed and smelt. He knew he was magnetic."
Read More
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) stands as a towering achievement of comedy, chock full of absurdities, non-sequiturs, digressive dialogue, and ingenious scenes -- including the "killer rabbit" scene.
Read More
The Red Hot Chili Peppers' kaleidoscopic, acid-washed energy and strange charm emerged onto the eighties Los Angeles music scene like a vision of funk-rock psychedelia. Part slappy bass, part riffy punk, part Run DMC-style rap, they garnered mainstream attention with 1989's Mother's Milk.
Read More
Many people may not know that Petty was greatly influenced by Prince and the musical risks he took throughout his career. In fact, Prince inspired one of the more popular songs Petty wrote.
Read More
"I don't believe in regrets at all," said ZZ Top bassist and singer Dusty Hill. It's a heck of an attitude, and likely something that served him well when -- speaking of agonizing -- he accidentally shot himself in the ZZ Middle with a derringer.
Read More
Though Ozzy Osbourne commands the face of Black Sabbath, it's Tony Iommi who has always been there, with band members circulating around him like planets around the sun. Just as many can't imagine "Iron Man" or "Paranoid" without Osbourne's croon, imagine it without Iommi's guitar. You can't.
Read More
Divorces are often messy, especially when money, and rock 'n roll get involved.
Read More
Guess what? Cloud Atlas has come to Netflix.
Read More
If you have the money to spend and you want a fine wine, you go to a respected sommelier. Looking for the apex of vehicular reliability? You might ask a renowned engineer, mechanic, or one of those Top Gear guys.
Read More
The starving artist stands as a trope, embodying any hope for earning anything with a creative or entertaining pursuit. The world expects these vocations not to make money. However, calling them "slave contracts," the term for a type of contract that's rife in the K-pop industry, is troublingly on the nose.
Read More
Harvey Milk is an icon, the first non-incumbent openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States. Here's the tragic story of Harvey Milk.
Read More
Michael McDonald was part of Steely Dan for a period in the 1970s, providing backing and lead vocals, as well as keyboards, for performances and recordings. In 1975, The Doobie Brothers came calling.
Read More
The Beatles wrote some of the best songs in music history. Everyone has their favorite and least favorite tunes — even the band members.
Read More
The night was October 16, 1966, and the venue was the much-beloved Fillmore West concert venue in San Francisco. Also soon-to-be-much-beloved was the new woman singing lead for Jefferson Airplane, a former floor model for the I Magnin department stores named Grace Slick.
Read More
Steve Perry fronted Journey to its greatest commercial success in the '80s, catapulting the band to arena rock stardom through the likes of "Open Arms" and "Don't Stop Believin'." However, by 1987, despite the triumph of Raised by Radio tour, the band went on hiatus for nearly ten years.
Read More
The beef between 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. (Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace) is not only the most well-known and well-documented in rap history, it has come to embody the West Coast-East Coast hip-hop rivalry that took off in the 1990's.
Read More
Don Henley might look more like friendly uncle than one of the greatest rock stars of all time, but rest assured, the man is most definitely a rock star.
Read More
Hard rock giant Def Leppard has been chugging away since 1977. Through all of it, singer Joe Elliot has been standing at the forefront of his group. Here's how much money he is now worth.
Read More
In one of his last interviews with Rolling Stone, Kurt Cobain intimated that Nirvana may have started its downward trajectory — that after a couple more albums, the band would probably dissolve, because the same people completing the same jobs is rather limiting.
Read More
There is one enduring mystery about Pearl Jam, though: What, exactly, is up with the name? You can sort of understand where band names like "Nirvana" or "Alice in Chains" are coming from, but "Pearl Jam" just seems like Eddie Vedder and his cohorts picked two random words from a dictionary.
Read More