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A Hippie Thanksgiving Dinner With Joy of Cooking

        
Joy of Cooking – two rootsy singing-and-songwriting feminist musicians from Berkeley, California, plus a few male fellow travelers providing rhythmic accompaniment, all of whom apparently took their band name from Irma Rombauer’s eternal Depression-era cookbook classic – might have the distinction of being the most critically acclaimed ‘70s rock band that almost no rock critic who graduated high school in the past 35 years has an opinion about. Their self-titled Capitol debut album finished in sixth place in the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics poll in 1971; Robert Christgau called it “exciting and amazingly durable” and gave it an “A” grade, praising its rolling piano-and-percussion grooves and lyrics about wives victimized at both ends of the economic spectrum. 

Jamey Jasta's Commemorative Metal Playlist

In honor of Headbangers Ball's 20th anniversary, we caught up with Hatebreed/Kingdom of Sorrow frontman and former host of the Ball, Jamey Jasta. "These were really hard to choose," said Jasta when asked to pick his favorite metal songs. "I wouldn't say these are my all-time faves or the order I would would list my top metal songs. This is what I would say right now off the top of my head and I included some metal-influenced hardcore songs, too. Here's my 15 jams. Enjoy and be inspired by them like I have!"

[Click the "Continue Reading..." link to listen to a playlist featuring the music discussed in this post.]

Dee Snider's Commemorative Metal Playlist

This week, MTV2's metal sanctuary Headbangers Ball is celebrating its 20th anniversary. To mark this momentous occasion, we caught up with Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, former host of Heavy Metal Mania -- the Ball's first incarnation in the '80s -- to talk about his top 15 metal songs. We'll let him tell you all about it:

"Top 15 Metal Songs? This is an impossible task. Why only 15? And how do I chose from the decades of great metal that I've lived through, loved and still love? This needs to be broken down into decades, then categories. Deep cuts and hits. THIS SUCKS!

"Alright, I've chosen these songs because of the effect they had on my favorite music. The fact that my list ends in 1985 doesn't mean I don't love a lot of the metal that's come out since then. I LOVE METAL. Don't know what my parents did to me when I was little to f*ck me up ... but I'm glad they did! Here are 15 metal songs that mattered and in my view effected the metal world more than others. I know they're mostly hits -- that's why they reached and affected the masses."

[Click the "Continue Reading..." link to listen to a playlist featuring the music discussed in this post.]

So Long, Soul Man: An Isaac Hayes Appreciation

by Chuck Eddy

Isaac Hayes never could say goodbye. And if few of us anticipated that the Black Moses would finally cross over to the other side -- on Sunday, as has been widely reported, his wife discovered his body next to a still-running treadmill in their suburban Memphis home, and he was pronounced dead an hour later -- maybe it's because he always gave the impression that he could last forever. In fact, that was the main point of some of his best music.

Mash-up Lessons Steinski Taught Us

by Chuck Eddy

Steve Stein (a.k.a. Steinski) did not invent the hip-hop collage – by 1983, when the ad-writing DJ and his studio-proficient engineer partner Douglas DiFranco (a.k.a. Double Dee) stirred up the World Famous Supreme Team, the Supremes, Indeep, somebody doing a Little Richard song, sundry playground and street sound effects, people repeating the phrase “Play it!,” and all sorts of other miscellany into their Tommy Boy Records-contest-winning “The Payoff Mix,” The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel was already two years old. And who knows how many live and radio mastermixes had never even made it to vinyl? Still – as Steinski’s new double album What Does It All Mean?: 1983-2006 Retrospective makes clear – he did maybe take the concept somewhere new.

Bo's Unsinkable Beat: Boom Chucka-Chucka-Chucka-Chucka Boom-Boom's Greatest Hits

by Chuck Eddy

Bo Diddley, who died Monday at 79, inherited a beat that's been traced back through the '30s fieldworker blues chant "Chevrolet" to the millenium-old West African rhythm Kpanlogo, and he helped invent rock 'n' roll, funk, hard rock, disco, heavy metal, '80s pop, new country and rap music with it. (Via talk-rhymed first-person braggadocio in the latter case -- and "Say Man" has to count as one of the original dis records.)

Give Us the Dennis Wilson Re-issue!

by Nate Cavalieri

Some information about Beach Boy Dennis Wilson's lost and lone solo album Pacific Ocean Blue popped up in January in Rolling Stone, and for a brief moment, there was even a video of one of the record's tracks, "River Song," floating around YouTube. Even so, we didn't really understand the full-bore, imminent radness of the re-release until hearing a couple of tracks on Buddyhead (they were swiftly removed). The post justly gushes about the reissue and features an interview with the record's producer Gregg Jakobson. In any case, the anticipation is reaching a fever pitch, and we have the re-release date of June 17 circled and underlined in big, bold marker on our calender.

Kill the oppressive boredom of the days between now and then by observing hirsute MTV personality Mark Goodman interview Brian and Carl backstage at Live Aid in 1985, or listening to Shuggie Otis' once-lost now-rescued classic Inspiration Information.

75 Bands Who Started Great Then Kept Getting Worse

by Chuck Eddy

"Every great band should be shot before they make their Combat Rock," future Rhapsody VP of music programming Tim Quirk facetiously declared in his band Too Much Joy 20 long years ago -- a theory I was reminded of again the other day, when The Onion's AV Club posted "20 Respectable Rock and Rap Acts That Peaked With Debut Albums," a rundown that begins with Rage Against Machine and 50 Cent and works down from there. It's a pretty silly list -- not so much because any of the selections are wrong, per sé, but because, well, what rock and rap acts don't peak with debut albums? I mean, sure it happens once in a while, but it's certainly more the exception than the rule. So I'm somewhat stumped that It took nine critics to come up with a list that pretends the Sundays and Taking Back Sunday are actually respected somewhere. Wow, that's really going out on a limb there, guys! But enough bitching -- I decided to construct a couple far more interesting lists, along similar thematic lines.

Walking Akon Down the Dark Side of Country's Street

by Chuck Eddy

Word is that Akon – already an unclassifiable man of many genres and vices and wives -- says he’s about to make a country move. He claims it will make him the first black person ever to score on the country charts. This is a gross misconception, as others have already pointed out, but it does give me an excellent excuse to recommend some notable country music by African Americans, starting with the late, great Big Al Downing.

The Eat to the Beat

by Chuck Eddy 

The Eat only put out a couple of  7" singles of their giddy pre-hardcore punk rock during their 1979-1985 lifespan, and since South Florida was a long way from where I lived, and the Internets didn’t exist yet, I never heard of them at the time. But once the friendly folks at Jello Biafra's record label Alternative Tentacles unleashed a two-disc, 59-track retrospective called It’s Not the Eat, It’s the Humidity, all that changed. I liked what I heard and you should too!