ike turner
The 100 Greatest Rock Stars Since That Was A Thing
Three of the 100 are in this picture! The Rolling Stones, in 1964, from left to right: Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Brian Jones. The problem with lists like this is they are invariably bullshit. So our prime objective was to make sure we didn’t do a bullshit list. I’m not saying we did a scientific one either. Because that isn’t possible — actually, it is, if you wanted some compilation of who sold the most records/concert tickets/has the most fans/got the most death threats, etc., and someone could come up with a bunch of very empirical metrics and create a “heat index” or something, and could deliver an actual scientific ranking! But we, um, didn’t do that. In fact we didn’t even, technically, do the “we...
The 50 Best Live Albums of the 1970s
The concert industry exploded in the 1970s, and the live album, a stopgap project once reserved for only the biggest artists, became a compulsory ritual and a pivotal moment for many artists. Live albums captured legendarily loud bands like The Who and The Ramones in their natural element. Once obscure regional acts like Bob Seger, KISS and Cheap Trick exploded into the mainstream with live albums. The Band, The Stooges, and Velvet Underground put their final gigs on vinyl. Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young (as his ongoing archive series shows), and Jackson Browne recorded entire sets of new songs onstage. The Grateful Dead released several official live albums (and continue to do so) that only made fans want to bootleg shows on their own more. With the 50th anniversary of a landmark live album, Th...
How Ike Turner Invented Rock ‘N Roll
Ike Turner wasn’t born in a crossfire hurricane, but he more or less died in one. He passed away at 76 in 2007, from a cocaine overdose, but by then he was very sick anyway, with heart disease and emphysema. In the last 30 years of his life, he was mostly broke, mostly disgraced, drug-addicted, sometimes homeless and, for 17 months, in jail. A few years before he died he released a record of new music, Here and Now, which was well received and nominated for a Grammy and went some way towards reshaping his legacy as first and foremost a gifted musician. Notice of his death really just reminded us how much we had forgotten him. An inauspicious end for the creator of Rock ‘n Roll. As even some primitive tribes in the Amazon know, “rock ‘n roll” was first coined to describe the genre by legend...
