Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner dies at 74
Friday, January 29, 2016
One night in San Francisco changed everything in B.B. King’s life — in amazing and unpredictable ways.

Jefferson Airplane founder Paul Kantner, a giant of the San Francisco rock scene, died Thursday afternoon after suffering a massive heart attack in his sleep two days earlier. He was 74 and surrounded by his three children at the time of his death....sfgate

Dead offers paint-by-numbers show, but fans provides color
Sunday, June 28, 2015

No rock band in the world boasts an audience as devoted and engaged as the Grateful Dead, and it was the Deadheads who brought the party Saturday to Levi’s Stadium for the first show on the five-concert “Fare Thee Well” tour featuring the four living members of the Dead back together for one last roundup.....sfgate

A night at the Fillmore changed B.B. King’s career forever
Saturday, May 16, 2015
One night in San Francisco changed everything in B.B. King’s life — in amazing and unpredictable ways.

B.B. King, the greatest bluesman of his generation, who died Thursday at 89 in Las Vegas, had played the Fillmore Auditorium many times before that night in February 1967. It had been operated by Charles Sullivan, a ghetto entrepreneur who ran jukeboxes and cigarette machines up and down the coast, as well as producing rhythm and blues concerts at the 1,100-seat upstairs dance hall in the middle of a black neighborhood that had thrived prior to urban redevelopment, a well-known stop on the so-called chitlin circuit....sfgate

Music: Ron Nagle’s ’70 album, popular flop and cult hit, returns
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Ron Nagle, a longtime curmudgeon of the San Francisco art and music scene, was swimming upstream in 1970 with the release of an album of dark, melancholy pop songs at the height of the San Francisco hippie psychedelic era. “Bad Rice,” his lone solo album, is a long-lost cult classic about to be issued on CD for the first time in a two-disc deluxe set....sfgate

On tour with Janis Joplin — an insider’s view
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
John Byrne Cooke strides across Washington Square, a place familiar to him because he lived around the corner of 45 years ago when he was road manager for Big Brother and the Holding Company.

“The guys in Big Brother all wanted to know why I didn’t live in the Haight,” he says, “and I told them 'I’m a beatnik, not a hippie.’” ...sfgate

Emmylou Harris touring for reissue of cult classic 'Wrecking Ball'
Friday, March 28, 2014
The country music career of Emmylou Harris was already finished when she set foot in the studio in winter 1995 to make "Wrecking Ball" with producer Daniel Lanois. Country radio had stopped playing her records, and her label had no idea what to do....sfgate

Jeff Beck, Brian Wilson review: perfect harmony
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Brian Wilson and Jeff Beck have lived their lives in parallel musical universes, but in the wide, wonderful world of rock 'n' roll, parallel lines do meet. At the Paramount Theatre in Oakland on Tuesday, in an unforgettable tableau, the exquisite British blues-rock guitarist drew out Wilson's sunny melodies in silvery, wavering guitar lines as the combined forces of his band and the Beach Boys founder's backing group stitched together the complex harmonies and orchestrations from Wilson's lost masterpiece, "Smile." ...sfgate

Rascals' show revisits era of good lovin', playin'
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
How did Little Steven find the time?

He tours the world playing guitar with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. He maintains a thriving acting career launched by a long-running part in "The Sopranos." He hosts a syndicated weekly radio show and runs his own record label, among other enterprises....sfgate

Fillmore's Poster Room filled with walls of sound
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
They ran out of space on the walls of the Poster Room at the Fillmore Auditorium years ago. The most recent addition advertises a Black Keys concert from 2007. Every available inch of the wall space in the upstairs bar and restaurant as well as the adjacent balcony room is covered with framed posters from sold-out Fillmore shows of the past ...sfgate

Giving credit to Woodstock hero Alvin Lee
Friday, March 8, 2013
His frantic, flashy guitar playing on the nearly 10-minute "I'm Going Home" made British rock musician Alvin Lee, who died this week at age 68 in southern Spain, one of the heroes of Woodstock, both the music festival and the subsequent movie....sfgate

Singer Rick Stevens embraces 2nd chance
Monday, January 28, 2013
Wearing a glacial-white suit and tie, set off by a blood-orange shirt, the compact, dark-haired vocalist Rick Stevens leaned into "You're Still a Young Man," his signature song as lead vocalist of Tower of Power, when the band burst out of the East Bay funk scene 40 years ago and Stevens had a promising future. ...sfgate

Review: Johnny Cash Columbia boxed set
Monday, December 3, 2012
Johnny Cash had to disappear from the skyline before it became obvious how tall a tree he truly was.

If any doubts remain, the newly released 63-disc boxed set, "Johnny Cash - The Complete Columbia Album Collection" - takes the full measure of the man's recorded legacy. With the addition of a single disc covering his first three years of recording for the Sun Records label - and Cash's absent latter-era sessions with producer Rick Rubin notwithstanding - this unwieldy set is an American treasury along the lines of....sfgate

2 Generations of Hoodoo Rhythm Devils
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
A son who grew up barely knowing his father and a musician who still misses his partner more than 30 years after his death will team up to bring back to life the music of the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils, a little-remembered band that was one of the great almost-was, hard-luck stories of the '70s San Francisco rock scene....sfgate

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival ends
Monday, October 8, 2012
As Emmylou Harris walked out on stage Sunday to close the 12th annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park, as she has every year, a light ocean breeze picked up, signaling the end of a great musical weekend....sfgate

New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival review
Monday, April 30, 2012
Seven years later, New Orleans is back and hotter than ever.With record-breaking attendance at the first weekend of the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival - highlighted by appearances from Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the re-formed Beach Boys - the town's many restaurants, bars and clubs packed with patrons and the French Quarter overrun with visitors, Jazz Fest has finally equaled and exceeded pre-Katrina prosperity. ...sfgate

Saxophonist Bobby Keys rolls with rock's royalty
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Keith Richards likes his pal's book better than his own. " 'It gets to the meat of the matter faster' is what he said," says Bobby Keys, saxophonist for the Rolling Stones for the past 40 or so years and pirate mate to swashbuckling Richards. ...sfgate

Levon Helm: an appreciation by Joel Selvin
Saturday, April 21, 2012
At the heart of the clapboard honesty that made the Band sound so revolutionary when it emerged on the rock scene in 1969 was the impossibly dusty voice of Levon Helm. Everything he sang was the truth - an unmistakable sound. ...sfgate

Fete for a King: Dan Hicks at 70
Monday, April 2, 2012
Dan Hicks is feeling the pressure, as he inspects a piece of scenery being painted at the studio above Mill Valley's Throckmorton Theatre. It is a giant cutout of a '40s automobile, all fender and tires, which he calls "Hicksville ambience." He regards painter Joan Reynolds balefully......sfgate

Big Brother & the Holding Company live CD review
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Bear's Sonic Journals Presents Big Brother and the Holding Company Featuring Janis Joplin Live at the Carousel Ballroom 1968: Columbia/Legacy, $9.99.

A new compact disc of old live recordings by Big Brother & the Holding Company captures not only that band at its enviable peak but perhaps the entire San Francisco '60s Haight-Ashbury thing in one of its last shining hours. ....sfgate

Chubby Checker awaits reward for life of twists
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Lincoln, -- Placer County - Chubby Checker is ticked off. But only in the very nicest possible way.

The 70-year-old creator of the twist, the greatest dance sensation in history, doesn't feel the respect he thinks he deserves. He sits in his modest suite on the top occupied floor of the Thunder Valley Hotel and Casino, where he will perform that evening once again, trying to explain how he feels.....sfgate

Johnny Otis - Rhythm and Blues Renaissance Man
Monday, January 23, 2012
If rhythm and blues ever had a renaissance man, his name was Johnny Otis.

Otis, who died Tuesday at 90, was a bandleader, an administrative assistant to the lieutenant governor, a minister with his own church, a disc jockey, a college professor, a painter and sculptor, an author, and a celebrated chef. ....sfgate

Warren Hellman's passion spawned world-class fest
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Warren Hellman stood behind his desk in the corner office. He was wearing his trademark faded denim shirt and no tie - hardly the expected gear for billionaire investment bankers. He punched up a website on his laptop and broke into a huge grin as the voice of coal miner's daughter Hazel Dickens sputtered forth......sfgate

'George Harrison: Living in the Material World'
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
The portrait of George Harrison that emerges from the new Martin Scorsese documentary, "George Harrison: Living in the Material World," airing in two parts Wednesday and Thursday on HBO, is a convoluted mass of contradictory characteristics, with a little Vaseline on the lens to blur some of the less comfortably explained pieces of the story.....sfgate

'Rock of Ages' musical exhumes '80s power ballads
Sunday, February 27, 2011
There have been few musical sins committed in the name of rock 'n' roll as egregious as the power ballad. Not really rock and not really a good idea to begin with, the rock power ballad was born in the '70s as a way for hard-rock bands to get their crummy music on the radio, like "Beth" by Kiss.....sfgate

Arhoolie Records' roots showing on 50th birthday
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Chris Strachwitz remembers when giants walked the earthHe shakes his head as he recalls recording Mississippi bluesman Big Joe Williams, king of the nine-string guitar, at the very beginning of Arhoolie Records, the Berkeley folklore recording empire over which he has presided for a full 50 years....sfgate

Buffalo Springfield together again on Bridge bill
Monday, October 25, 2010
For a group from rock's Pleistocene era that managed only one real hit in the band's short life and haven't appeared together onstage in 43 years, Buffalo Springfield has always attracted an outsize degree of sentiment, largely because of its two famed alumni: Stephen Stills and Neil Young....sfgate

Music review: Bob Dylan at the Warfield
Friday, August 27, 2010
Bob Dylan conducted something of an intimate house party Wednesday at the Warfield with more than a thousand of his closest friends or, at least, those willing to wait in line for tickets before the show. Tickets for the last-minute addition to his touring schedule - he played the night before at a sold-out Fox Oakland - were placed on sale the day of the show only and sold for cash. When the box office opened at 5:30 Wednesday afternoon, a line snaked down Market Street, ...sfgate

Time comes back around for Lester Chambers
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Lester Chambers can't play the cowbell anymore. An injury to his neck, probably exacerbated by all those years of playing cowbell in the first place, has sidelined the man who made the instrument famous on the opening of the Chambers Brothers hit "Time Has Come Today."....sfgate