My (And Many Others') Back Pages
Reading about music, believe it or not, used to be almost as much fun as listening to it. And when I want to read about music, my favorite recent source has been Rock's Backpages, an online library containing several thousand interviews, reviews, and features, from hundreds of magazines both current and defunct, published in rock's Paleolithic era through today.
Our thirteen-year-old daughter is studying Janis Joplin for a school project, so I pointed her to this unique British archive. There we found a remarkable 1972 David Dalton interview with the female James Brown: "I always did have a very heavy attachment for the whole Fitzgerald thing," she tells him as they discuss Zelda Fitzgerald in a hotel bar. "That all-out, Full Tilt, Hell Bent Way of Living, and she and F. Scott Fitzgerald were the epitome of that whole trip, right?"
The week's top ten searches on the site include Mick Farren's extensive 1975 New Musical Express feature on Buddy Holly, Don Snowden's 1986 interview with "Gimme Shelter" screamer Merry Clayton, MP3 audio of Barney Hoskyn's extensive 1993 interview with Van Dyke Parks, and a snarky 1974 review of Bob Dylan's Planet Waves. "'Forever Young' is a terrible song (particularly for Dylan who convinced a whole generation that nothing was forever)," wrote Mick Gold.
Many an entertaining hour could be spent in the Backpages library. Not to mention that it also gives me the opportunity to wax nostalgic, and often cringe, over my own greatest hits and misses. Not that I was so much older then.