Feature

When you go see the Carnival Of Madness tour in 2013 as it weaves across the USA to your town, you need to remember to note the starting time. If you do not, it’s possible you will miss the first band, We As Human. Don’t blink. In Cedar Rapids, they got 30 minutes and played five songs, including the well received “I Stand” and “Strike Back.” This quartet is the best band you’ve never heard on your local rock station. Because they are first, they get a small stage, but it was big enough for Skillet’s vocalist to come out…

Jon Anderson will always and inevitably be best known as the co-founder, lead voice and lyricist for iconic progressive rock band Yes. The group’s flights of musical fancy, tenacity, and rough-and-tumble internal politics have all become legend over the past very eventful 45 years. Those at-time bruising politics resulted in Anderson’s replacement in 2008 by a tribute band singer, since replaced himself by current Yes vocalist and Anderson soundalike Jon Davison. Anderson himself seems to have taken this tumult in stride; there were a few understandably bitter words in the immediate aftermath of his ouster, which took place while he…

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…

7:00: And off we go, the list of musicians and CBS stars goes on and on. Who would have thought Neil Patrick Harris and Wiz Khalifa would ever be on the same bill? And a promise of a performance from LL Cool J? I cannot wait! 7:01: A terrifying clown with a bicycle and flame torch delivers the intro for Taylor Swift and the rest of Cirque Du Soleil... if this is how all of her breakups go it’s no wonder they lead to memorable songs. 7:05: After not understanding what was going on for a couple minutes, making his…

It was winter – cold and a little windy – in Moline, IL, on Friday, February 1st, 2013, which meant going to a rock concert with hard rock's hottest bands, Shine Down and Three Days Grace, was a fantastic way to spend the evening. After hearing from Joe Winters, Chief Meteorologist at KCRG-TV9 that it didn't look like the weather would turn into a blizzard, I began the journey to Moline. Opening band POD took the stage first and played with a lot of confidence. They are a Christian band but did not preach anything but rock ‘n’ roll. The…

In his 40-years-later look back at the year 1970, Rolling Stone writer David Browne takes us on a trip back to a year that looms large in rock memory but—unlike 1964 (the British Invasion) or 1967 (the “Summer Of Love”)—does not capture the collective imagination. Yet Browne argues that 1970 was the year everything shifted: the year that signaled that the ’60s were most definitely over, and the comfort of the mainstay bands everyone was accustomed to was yanked out from underneath. His tome with the phenomenally long full title of Fire And Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James…

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…

The magic number at the Exit.Emergency / Into It Over It / Make Do And Mend / Polar Bear Club / Bayside gig at Gabe’s Oasis was not five (the number of bands playing would be too obvious) nor was it one (the number of Aleve pills used to battle my 15 year-old daughter’s headache). Rather, the magic number, per my daughter, attending her first real rock show with her dad, was 37. That was the number of times the F word was used during the second act. But that’s getting ahead of the story. As I walked into the…

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…