PODCAST · music
the riley rock report
by Tim Riley
listen smarter rileyrockreport.substack.com
Episodes
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Yo La Tengo's Textbook Snoot
Drummer Georgia Hubley turns 66 on February 9, a convenient excuse to plug a favorite covers album that vies with the best. Fakebook's map points every which-way but weak, done respectfully but without pretense or caution, and shared like a favorite quilt. I wrote it up for the Phoenix in 1990,...
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Something Is Happening
Musicologists have avoided Dylan longer than most other academics, in part because of how folk culture enters intellectual frames only gradually. Academics also need to invent new terms to deal with vernacular speech and how recorded sound differs from written notation. I took aim at this in Hard...
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John Ono Lennon 1940-1980
John Lennon would have turned 85 on October 9, cue the holiday box set. Some Time in New York City (1972) still gets underrated, as does Rock and Roll (see this), and Lennon’s vocals win those arguments handily. (Some young turk should re-mash “Luck of the Irish” to omit that cringe Ono bridge.)...
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Springsteen Between Flesh and Fantasy
Peter Carlin and I met while checking out that cringey Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show LOVE way back in the olden times before Obama, and we’ve kept in touch. He was working on his Paul book while I was working on John, and he gives good blurb. Carlin worked his way into Springsteen’s crew when…
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Owsley Stanley III's 80-Ton Brain
Grateful Dead books now rival those about Springsteen, Dylan, and the Beatles in the rock publishing market. Brian Anderson’s Loud and Clear chronicles its quest to create a Wall of Sound concert experience that reproduced the clarity and separation of home stereos. Stanley Owsley, the audiophile...
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Taboo Sex Jingles
The January inauguration has thrown everything into twisted new context: trauma gloat turns prosaic, overstimulation mocks innocence. Suddenly, Severance’s cult of Kier feels cartoonish, like a miniature theme park. The many sex-driven scripts that wrapped in 2024 now feel like quaint throwbacks,...
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Hearing Elvis Presley's Memphis
Historian Preston Lauterbach works the backstreets of rock’s story, the many accidental and circuitous paths the music takes before congealing into a popular style. With Before Elvis, he lands a major statement about how Presley immersed himself in the Memphis of 1948-1945, what he heard on the...
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From Sweden With Hidden Costs
When you watch the Netflix Playlist series you get a standard-if-sturdy startup story with legal hurdles and tech geeks coding outside the lines. The labels carry all that golden booty, and they will make Daniel Ek pay. Ek accomodates the gatekeepers and takes over the world; it’s almost weird he...
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Garth Hudson, The Mighty Wurlitzer
Moondog Matinee, The Band (Capitol, 1973) Garth Hudson, the last living member of The Band, turned 88 on August 8. Hudson’s Lowrey organ gave the Band regal colors, and he wove in synthesizer lines as if he had three hands. In songs like “Wheels on Fire,” his flourishes evoked the church, the...
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Democracy Is Coming
The Boys, Amazon Prime original (based on the Dynamite Entertainment comic book series written by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, developed by Eric Kripke) With events in the saddle, even this RNC update suddenly feels dated: WATCHING THE NEWS break in real time on July 13, it almost felt like...
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Cynicism Is for Suckers
Two years ago, this Woody Guthrie piece ran on his birthday (July 14, 1912) to boost awareness and renew anti-fascist history. Given Biden’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” moment, Guthrie imparts yet more wisdom: beware cynicism, the right’s lethal stealth tactic. And lo, our first rerun… This is…
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The Thin Side of Led Zeppelin's Heavy
John Bonham (1948-1980) would have turned 76 at the end of this month (May 31). As a drummer he had chops beyond his years, and ears as big as any Page riff. When I covered Led Zeppelin’s mandatory box set release in 1990, it changed how I heard all those albums… This is a public episode. If you...
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College Radio Dropouts
When I spoke with Jewell about her lucid and engaging history of college radio, my Covid case had grown pronounced enough that it bled straight onto the tape. She makes a smooth narrator, though, so the few places I do croak through you can hear just how ill I felt. I started by asking her what...
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Grandiosity Incorporated
Academic presses now fixing holes and taking risks where giants stutter, and the rest of us await the Big Leap Forward in long-form digital narrative… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit...
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Stick Dancing
The quote that leaps out at me now comes from a violinist, who requested anonymity: “He tries very hard with Mozart and Haydn… But he doesn’t know the meaning of the word elegant. He doesn’t have classical ideas about sound. Elegance and charm—he doesn’t know from that. That’s a terrible thing to...
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Randy Newman
Watching an episode of Black Mirror ("Fifteen Million Merits," 2011), I looked up the song that Jessica Brown Findlay sang (“Anyone Who Knows What Love Is”), and reeled back to find Randy Newman’s name next to Jeannie Seally. I started going through discogs.com and finding a buried history of...
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Taylor Swift's Multiplex
You feel flattered watching Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film, and not just because you catch a contact high from her adoring audience. In a field of immaculate divas and country popsters, Swift creates her own rainbow fingernail category: rural Pennsylvania prom queen sets her diary to…
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If Smiles Could Sing
The master guitarist Ali Farka Touré died in 2006 at the age of 67, widely praised for developing an “African desert blues,” woven from his Malian roots. This Earthworks domestic debut rode the Graceland world music wave alongside Salif Keita. He probably made his highest-profile album with…
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Waiting To Be Forgotten
Big fat media blip for the Replacements, a band with a casual brilliance that chafed hard against success. Make sure to read Bob Mehr’s pungent book (Trouble Boys) and crank up the Ed Stasium remaster. I caught a smashing Boston Opera House gig in 1988 when we were still scratching our heads…
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Memories Can't Wait for Living Colour
When Living Colour reached No 13 on the Billboard album chart with its fourth album, Stain, in 1993, a lot of seasoned observers talked about watching the Jimi Hendrix phenom play out all over again on a twenty-five year loop. Seeing this band in a small club remains a high point of writing for…
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Blow-Up
To celebrate the anniversary of Help!, released this month in 1965, I talked with Steve Matteo. Matteo’s 33 1/3 title on Let It Be had a big influence on my 2011 Lennon biography, and his new book, Act Naturally, talks to fresh sources who worked on these projects. Turns out A Hard Day’s Night...
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Rebounding With Hooks
Kristin Hersh tours Europe in September after celebrating a birthday on August 7. So I went back to where I first tried to make sense of what made her Rhode Island band so compelling, and so fragile. just as they crested into alt-rock prominence. Sleater Kinney soon dominated the hipster crowd…
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Ending in the Middle
One of the few drawbacks of attending Oberlin College between 1979-1983 had to do with that small Ohio town’s lack of a record store. The bi-annual student vinyl swaps were both heavily attended and fiendishly idiosyncratic.B ut it’s still embarrassing to think that this 1988 Phoenix review was…
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Reason to Believe
This week’s newsletter features an excerpt from my book review of Deliver Me from Nowhere for the Los Angeles Review of Books, plus an interview with author Warren Zanes. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit...
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Leon Russell Learns How to Boogie: An Interview With Author Bill Janovitz
Buffalo Tom guitarist Bill Janovitz has written a couple books on the Rolling Stones, and his new book talks to over a hundred sources to tell the Leon Russell story, which overlaps with the Stones in some telling ways. Here’s our interview. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss...
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Elizabeth Samet on American Amnesia
Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021) 80 years ago on June 10th, 1943, the Allied forces invaded Sicily in Operation Husky, a battle that lasted six weeks and drove the Axis forces off the island to open up the...
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God's Comic
Happy to report that the West Coast progressive sheet truthdig has returned, and ran this book review recently… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com
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Style Into Sarcasm
Why Steely Dan Doesn’t Suck, Radio Silence, April 2014 The Countdown to Ecstacy vinyl reissue, remastered by Donald Fagen for Geffen/UMe for release on May 26th, makes a good peg for this Steely Dan overview. Dan Stone had me write it up for Radio Silence, that handsome Bay area journal. (In the...
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Jena Friedman Punches Up
I first caught Friedman on Stephen Colbert talking about her deathless live 2016 Election Night barb (“I just wish I could be funny… Better get your abortions while you can…” she says). She seemed tentative with Colbert, but grateful. No surprise, he’s a gentleman. Somebody urged her to pitch a...
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All-Consuming Yet Inscrutable
EXPANSIVE YET FORBIDDING, imperious yet embracing, pianist Rudolf Serkin mixed gravity with guilt to build a towering legacy. His recordings confirm him as a titan of the old school, a European who branded piano’s core repertoire with an air of authenticity. His philosophy of interpretive...
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"C'est La Vie" Say the Old Folks
FEW ROCK BIOGRAPHIES rise to the level of their subject. But this past year has already seen extraordinary titles like Lightning Strikes, by Lenny Kaye, a musical memoir lived out in a beguiling new history, and Dilla Time, Dan Charnas’s life of rap producer and beat-meister J Dilla, (which has...
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Please Change Your Mind
I got friendly with Bob Moses (RIP), a guitarist for Busted Statues, when I profiled the band for the Phoenix, and we stayed in touch. He asked me to write up a mid-decade navel-gazer for InfoPlease Entertainment Almanac, where he edited, and we worked hard to cover a lot of ground. Nobody saw…
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Rick James Parties All the Time
This Boston Phoenix piece ran in the fall of 1988 as James toured behind his Wonderful Comeback. It was a barometer of how much had changed since his earlier days, with both Prince’s stardom and Terence Trent D’Arby’s upstart energy. James would have turned 75 on February 1st; he died in 2004.…
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There's no place like post punk... the Embarrassment gets doc'd
IF WE LIVE IN A GOLDEN AGE of documentaries, too many of them go on for too long without revealing much. In “We Were Famous, You Don’t Remember,” directors Daniel Fetherston and Danny Szlauderbach approach the Embarrassment, punk's great left-of-center act, with earnestness and care, detailing…
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Hero Blues: Bob Dylan's Twisted Philosophy of Song
Throughout his sixty-year-plus career, Bob Dylan has combined an “incredible skill with a wildness of spirit,” as magician Penn Jillette recently put it. He towers above others—Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell—through volume, range, and brash unpredictability. In…
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rerun: rockcritics.com talks with Tim Riley about the Beatles bibliography, 2008
The latest rockcritics podcast features Tim Riley, author of one of my favourite Beatle books, Tell Me Why: The Beatles: Album by Album, Song by Song, the Sixties and After. A couple weeks prior to our chatting, I asked Tim — currently completing a large-scale John Lennon biography — to submit a...
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Pagan Holidays, Rock'n'roll, and Our Long Tunnel
Ten years ago NPR had me on to rant about pagan rituals, from the vault. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com
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Jason Gross and Perfect Sound Forever
Jason Gross has edited PSF since 1993, overseeing an important venue for critics and passionate listeners. Like all the good editorial conversations, one topic begat another, so the links can help you figure out some of the sounds we reference. This is a public episode. If you would like to…
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Pianists and Vampires: Igor Levit's Transcriptions, and Symphonies as Trios
Igor Levit – Tristan (Sony, 2022) Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, Yo-Yo Ma – Beethoven for Three, Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5 (Sony, 2022) Why listen to symphonic music stripped of strings, winds, brass, and percussion...? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other…
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Devin McKinney, Get Back, and the Beatles in Context
A few weeks after Get Back aired last year, I spoke with Magic Circles author Devin McKinney about the film and its many quirks. As we take stock of the Revolver box set, the timeline sharpens: January of 1969 happens only three years after they record that 1966 breakthrough. Visit...
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Pick a Career: John Lennon Grieves the Beatles
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon. Apple, 1970. THE 1970s DAWNED with a blistering hangover. On September 13, 1969, just before Abbey Road began dominating end-of-’60s radio, John Lennon sang at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, an early 1950s festival. He called his pickup group the...
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Too Much to Dream: Bowie's No-Context Daydream
Brett Morgen extends Bowie's dislocation by spinning out his lack of context Moonage Daydream, Brett Morgan, director (Universal) IN A GLUT of music documentaries where overlong counts as serious and talking heads sling clichés, we should be glad about Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream. It lets…
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Lars Vogt, Janacek, and Alternate Realities
To die in the midst of a thriving career at 51 exacerbates the loss of this quietly gripping pianist. This piece ran last fall when I fell in love with his Janacek recording, music I hadn't known before; Vogt drew me in and made me listen closely. I'll also miss his chamber music collaborations...
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Reverse Cool: Buddy Holly, John Lennon, and Four-Eyed Rock
Buddy Holly looms over the Beatles catalog, and his influence gets harder to overstate the more history recedes. A celebration of the songwriter and record-writer pegged to his birthday... This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus...
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Unlike a Tramp
Unlike a Tramp Intro to Madonna: Illustrated by Tim Riley. Hyperion, 1992. When I wrote this book, Madonna's command of pop's cosmos felt unprecedented. Now in her fifth decade, triumphs like "Papa Don't Preach" and "Justify My Love" have lost their bang sooner than expected, and her Dick Tracy...
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Childlike Wisdom
Soviet Pianist Maria Yudina Converses With Greatness “Cats Are Indescribably Wonderful, Shostakovich’s Fugues Less So” Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin’s Russia, by Elizabeth Wilson, Yale University Press, 352pp Los Angeles Review of Books, August 4, 2022 This is a...
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Reconsider Baby: On Baz Luhrmann's Elvis
Among other things, Elvis Presley invented the rock ’n’ roll comeback. Up until 1968, ”coming back” from a career break barely existed in the new style since most fell short, or failed... This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus...
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Woody Guthrie at 110: This World Was Lucky
To mark Woody Guthrie's 100th birthday, this issue reprints a Radio Silence (RIP) essay pegged to the second volume of Mermaid Avenue and several other releases. Guthrie's words keep on inspiring, and as his shadow lengthens, most of Wilco's and Bragg's catalog now takes place inside this new...
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MADE FOR TV: Watergate at 50 and Arkansas Elvis
During another summer of congressional hearings, fights over national memory and history itself, Watergate can feel further than five decades in the past. In retrospect, Richard Nixon’s story feels both sealed off from our modern squabbles and a little pathetic; the petty cover-up President may...
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#HBD Prince: Shame About the Lyrics
Prince' Graffiti Bridge, a double album originally billed as a film soundtrack, ran on some very fine fumes (Sign O The Times, Batman). And the guest-stars made the party hop. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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rileyrockreport.substack.com
HOSTED BY
Tim Riley
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