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Sunday night in Monterey, I saw a good band, an almost-great band, a could-have-been-great band, that fell short because of what it was missing. Part of what’s missing is tangible and part of it is intangible. The tangible part, is a person. I’ve been a Yes fan for nearly 40 years, as well-chronicled in a recent essay, and a truly ridiculous number of album reviews. The band was, in its day, the most important and successful progenitor of the early ’70s progressive rock movement. Other bands did it later, after turning toward the mainstream, but Yes alone was playing multiple…

Greg Spawton (center) with Big Big Train cohorts Andy Poole (l) and David Longdon (r)For five years now, every time a package has arrived in the mail from Bournemouth, its U.S. Customs stamp cursorily marked “CDs,” this writer’s pulse has quickened. When the first one arrived in summer 2007, I’d never heard of Big Big Train. Today, three full albums and a remarkable EP later, I count myself as an unabashed fan. Progressive rock music is, by its very nature, difficult to pull off well. It can easily come off as overblown or impersonal or esoteric or even predictable in…

Waterslide’s mastermind, the musical chameleon otherwise known as Mark Doyon, has been lurking around these parts for some time now.  Little did I know when I reviewed the 2004 debut of Mark’s previous musical incarnation, Arms Of Kismet, that it would be the beginning of a series of conversations that continues today, with the June 19 release of Waterslide’s debut album Lincoln Signal.  In trying to come up with a shorthand for what makes Mark so special as an artist, I’m left leaning on the words of others.  When Apple encouraged us a few years ago to “Think differently,” they…

I made it.  That was my first reaction upon finishing The Book Of Drugs, the memoir by singer-songwriter and former Soul Coughing frontman Mike Doughty. It was no sure thing for awhile there; after the first 120 or so pages I was pretty sure this was the most infuriating book I’d ever read. The form alone irritated me—a faux-epistolary style where there’s no attempt at building any sort of narrative; one anecdote simply blurs into another for page after page after page. But what really drove me to distraction around page 100 was my strong desire to grab Doughty by…

Alone on a bare stage decorated only with an area rug and a sizable amp rig, two songs into a taut 90-minute set that epitomized words like “intensity” and “masterful,” Lindsey Buckingham paused to contemplate the long, twisting trail that has led the Palo Alto native to the top of the rock world, around the globe and back to Carmel's 800-seat Sunset Center as a still-vital solo act. The “big machine”—the musical juggernaut Fleetwood Mac, of which Buckingham has been a part for 27 of the last 37 years—and the small machine—solo recording and touring—nourish and feed off of one…

Like a math problem I could never quite solve, my teenage years were filled with more variables than constants. Through the changes—and occasional outright chaos—one of the constants was my passion for music. And one of the constants I measured that passion by was Ronnie Montrose.Five years after it came out, that first eponymous album (Montrose, Warner Brothers, 1973) was a staple of my high school years, one of those rare albums that every single member of our group of compadres—Geoff, Tor, Neil, Jason C., Mike, Khal, Andy (RIP)—would always say yes to giving another spin. Songs like “Rock The…