Back In the Day, 2011

Jeff Beck

Rock'n'Roll Party Honoring Les Paul

(Atlantic Rhino)

In June 2010, Jeff (master of the guitar in sundry aspects) assembled stellar participants at NYC's Iridium Jazz club. Les had frequently played there in his autumnal years. Jeff reasoned it would be the ideal site for a concert honoring the inventor of the very electrified plank from which Jeff had wrought idiosyncratic charms since 1960s Yardbirds seasons. 

Flanked by a host of eminent personages -- themselves adept at riveting, jump-fly note-escapades --  Jeff laid into Rockabilly, Surf, and intriguing instrumental forays rapt witnesses surely found delightfully flabbergasting. Much six-string abracadabra transpired that night; Les deserved no less.

(Note: 27 songs are performed in the full video. Only 22, though, appear on the CD.)

Recommended: "Double Talkin' Baby," "Cruisin'," "Cry Me a River," "How High the Moon," "Sitting On Top of the World," "Vaya Con Dios," "Mockin' Bird Hill," "Peter Gunn," "Rockin' is Our Business," "Apache," "Sleep Walk," "New Orleans," "Walking in the Sand," "Twenty Flight Rock"

Videos: Entire 2010 concert (1:27:00)   "Cruisin'"   "Tiger Rag"   "Sitting On Top of the World"   "Peter Gunn" 

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OP ED

E.P. by OP ED

(Self-issued)

All thunderslaps are concise and race furiously, tuneful architecture stabbing gray matter.

Recommended: "Poetry About Narcotics," "Inept Pimps," "Subordinate," "Death Wish"

Video: live August 2025 (Four songs, two from above EP)

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Patsy Cline

American Country Legend

(Sun Label Group LLC)

Per the Country Hall of Fame site, Patsy was killed in the same tragic 1963 plane crash that took pilot Randy Hughes, as well as her fellow Opry stars Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas. She was without equal as a stylist, whether emoting sonorously in torch balladry or snapping her fringed cowgirl skirt with wink and beaming grin. Produced by Owen Bradley, "Lovesick Blues" is but one cut featuring Hank Garland, Floyd Cramer, Grady Martin, and Buddy Harman rattling Nashville studio tiles.

It's both testament to Miss Patsy's lofty status and cursed injustice that in 2026, elevator speakers blare her immortal soundings in voiceless, annoying muzak manifestations.

Recommended: "Walkin' After Midnight," "Too Many Secrets," "Stop the World (I Want to Get Off)," "A Church, a Courtroom, and Then Goodbye," "I'm Blue Again," "Honky Tonk Merry-Go-Round," "I Cried All the Way to the Altar," "Lovesick Blues," "Cry Not for Me"

Videos: "Too Many Secrets"   "A Church, a Courtroom, and Then Goodbye"   "I'm Blue Again"   "Lovesick Blues"

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Back In the Day 1957, 2010

Tennessee Ernie Ford

Ol' Rockin' Ern (Capitol)

Old Time Religion (Green Hill)

Ernie's rustic-life matriculation left him seasoned in manners that ensured he was first-hand familiar with both fence post and altar call. His back-country boogie kicked heels to the swiss-cheese moon and back down to grassland. But the man's honorings of the Divine promise of salvation were horses of different colors altogether.

The bass-baritone immensity of his voice -- rip-snorting and aw-shucks gleeful in secular circumstances -- assumed reverential tones indicative of heart-and-soul sincerity in the presence of celestial majesty. 

Both records compiled tracks Ernie had previously waxed. Cliffie Stone, Speedy West, and Jimmy Bryant played on Ol' Rockin' Ern's songs - the three dealt wizardry in Cliffie's Hometown Jamboree band. (And the pipe-puffing bass-string guru authored four songs featured.) Their respective flairs stand out like shoes on a cobra.

Some of Old Time Religion's 15 selections also included Cliffie and Speedy (though their talents were recalled as a bit muted). And harmonic nobility the Jordanaires imbued tracks with characteristically august intonations. As was illustrated by sacred numbers restored from 1956 forward, Ernie's standing-in-need-of- prayer renditions prompted introspection and awareness that the loving Supreme Creator's hand beckoned. 

Recommended Ol' Rockin' Ern: "Milk 'Em in the Mornin' Blues," "Catfish Boogie," "Anticipation Blues," "Country Junction," "Shot-Gun Boogie," "Blackberry Boogie," "Ain't Nobody's Business But My Own"

Recommended: Old Time Religion: "Just Over in the Gloryland," "Old Time Religion," "It Is Well With My Soul," "Just a Little Talk With Jesus," "I Love to Tell the Story," "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," "The Old Rugged Cross," "Whispering Hope," "I Need Thee Every Hour"

Videos: "Country Junction"   "Blackberry Boogie"   "Ain't Nobody's Business but My Own" (w/Kay Starr)   "Just Over in the Gloryland"   "I Love to Tell the Story"   "Whispering Hope"

Ol' Rockin' Ern:

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Old Time Religion:

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With Randolph Scott on the set of 1951 film Man In the Saddle

Yee Loi

Amidst eight raging fire-piles, the truculent sisters and brother stoke much fiercer flames, as embodied in Rock'n'Roll that's gonna blaze millions bye bye.

Video: "Why Ask Why"

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Bobby/Billy Smith

Name debate rages, but I'll leave that to collectors of dust-blanketed 45s. (Original 1959 Fox vinyl bears name "Bobby." Factory printing goof? Temporal pseudonym?) Spare, twanged, Country bloodline unashamedly evident. In line of obscure-but-jumpin' gems put down in wake of revolutionary EAP and the Blue Moon Boys.

Video: "Bevy Mae"

All good cretins dwell near turntables

Future times will bring spectacular songs, in a number of styles and from sundry assemblages. But there will never again be tunes precisely of a sort with those wrought by the globally celebrated, glue-sniffing, bowl-cut, leather-enwrapped misfits from New Yorks' broken boulevards.

I call it the 'Ramones formula' - the seamless union of chewy-chewy Pop that once blared from cheap transisters that teens pressed to their ears while shooting sidewalk curls, and killer-chorded LOUD brutalities that separate skulls from spines and send grinning heads veering tiltedly into the Outsider Zone.

Lyrically, both the great unwashed of disposable drive-in subculture and agonized teen angels enjoyed portrayal:

"I'm just a comic-book boy / there's nothin' scary to enjoy / Freak admission, stroll inside / I was born on a roller-coaster ride"

"I kissed her and hugged her and I said good-bye, last thing I knew

she wouldn't make it alive / Oncoming car went out of control, it crushed my baby and it crushed my soul / Now all I've got is sorrow and pain, standing out here in the rain / The crash, shattering glass,
the sirens, and pain / It's driving me insane oh-yeah"

For their first several albums, the Forest Hills four credited all numbers to simply 'The Ramones.' It was in subsequent years that individual credits emerged.

Sources today differ as to which original member penned any given carbonated mini-classic. But among ones main tune-scribes Joey and Dee Dee -- bards of the Central Park Reservoir -- either authored solo or collaborated on, sometimes with Johnny and Tommy leaning in, are:

Blitzkrieg Bop / Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue / Glad to See You Go / Cretin Hop / I Wanna Be Sedated / Teenage Lobotomy /  Rockaway Beach / Pinhead / I Wanna Be Well / Sheena Is a Punk Rocker / Don't Come Close / Do You Remember Rock'n'Roll Radio /  Rock'n'Roll High School / Tomorrow She Goes Away / Psycho Therapy / She's the One / Go Lil' Camaro Go / Life's a Gas / She Talks to Rainbows / Pet Semetary / Makin' Monsters With My Friends.

The tenement fire-escape, outsider commandos were a prolific (not always) happy family. But the catalog is far too extensive for remark here. (In years ahead, subsequent members Marky, Richie, and CJ also contributed material.)

Sneaker imprint of the Ramones Formula can be found in a wide swath of contemporary endeavors, so profound is the torn-jeans pogoers' enduring impact. Zombina and the Skeletones, Brad Marino, Yee Loi, the 66ers, Poison Boys, Hillbilly Casino, and Sour Mash Kats are but seven that currently honor the Ramones in songcraft, spirit, or both.

(Again, many others exist.)

Punk at its core being an alacritous swipe against prevailing mores -- both musical and cultural -- it's completely in tune with the rebellion instinct that present-day provocateurs reject traditions and stitch novel menaces.

Hence, what ripsaw tunes now crowd beneath the Punk

banner tend more toward surly cacophony than bubblegum- confection Bay City Rollers huffing carbona in the closet.

Still, there is abundant value in incorporating past sways and gestures into fresh works. Such has often been the way of Rock'n'Roll. Of art through the ages, when you consult some hushed museum geek.

Da Brudders drank heavily from the pool of 1960s bands both obscure and chart-topping. Those combos offered much, long after initial splashes. And their notions lived on, albeit in acromegalic aspect, in the Ramones' Formula.

And though decades have passed, I still keep Ramones LPs beside my turntable. All good cretins do.

The Black Prints

Short Stories

(Self-issued)

Assembled land of Macron bop merchants cite but one ambition: to play the Rebel Sound loved by millions of chain-swingers, and to do so eminently. That they succeed can be affirmed by fractured Blues de Traverse festival acolytes, as well as by lucky attendees at other national gonegonegone gatherings. Tracks present ring out whoppingly big and bold.

Recommended: "King Cadillac," "Blue Lady" (players stretch impressively), "Deathrace"

Video: No related clips were available at presstime. live (2023)

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Eddy and the Backfires

Bite Baby Bite   EP

(Backfire Records)

Woe be to grinches 'cross the burg that crave shut eye - Eddy and the Backfires are in town, and they're raising all kinds of house-shakin' ruckus. They've taken the wildcat roar that dates from fins 'n' whitewalls late nights, and pumped it to overflow with kickapoo joy juice. Pillows over heads provide no escape.

Recommended: "Bite Baby Bite," "On the Run," "Chasing Leader"

Videos: "Bite Baby Bite"   "Chasing Leader"

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Tessy Records

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Chemical Valley Mutants

Struggle

(Self-issued)

Acerbic castigations of existent authority, coupled with jaw-jutted demands for liberty, are spat in scraped-concrete tones, and arrive within zoom-smash missiles. Praise I penned in review of the band's 2023 Poisoned ("Songs collected on their newest disc rage against worldly injustices via fierce assault on polite-society notions of musicality") hold no less true today. Led by filmmaker Jay Crimson, all involved seem intent on thunderous obliteration; damned if they don't prove equal to the ambition.

July 3 release is scheduled.

Recommended: "Struggle," "Pessimist," "No Supremacy," "Ignorant," "Slander," "When Her Eyes Roll Back"

No current Video available. This is a live performance of "Left Hand Path," from Poisoned.

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Black Kat Boppers

All Out Rock'n'Roll   digital album

(Swelltune Records)

One pointy alligator shoe stomping in Sun world, the other imprinting Blues swampscape, and mojos cavorting in Mashed Potato abandon all the while. Lauded scene habitués Roy, Luca, Dylan, and Colin affirm again why they're major attractions hither and thither. Don't comb tracks for ponderous cogitation, just grab some pick-'em-up-and-put-'em-downs.

(Collaboration and graphic artwork come courtesy of Clash-mate and dedicated supporter Paul Simonon who, on occassion, also subs on four-string axe at gigs.)

Recommended: "Billy Billy," "All Out Rock'n'Roll," "Scream & Holla," "Black Kat Boppin' atcha," "Casting My Spell," "Rollin' In," "You Silly Thing"

Videos: "Billy Billy" (live at Rockabilly Rave 2026)   "All Out Rock'n'Roll" (live at Continental Club 2024)   "Casting My Spell" (live at Hank Dietle's Tavern 2024)   "You Silly Thing" (recorded in separate locations during COVID era)

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Goofin' Records

Bear Family

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Screamin' Rebel Angels

What did Congreve write about a woman scorned? Joyce Green's incendiary 1959 Vaden Records stomper is revisited with all the self-righteousness and slitted-eyes finality of its initial iteration. Boz and Lyn Boorer pack proceedings with sufficient TNT to send flesh-and-blood bits of said carouser into past tense. Laura don't take no mess.

Video: "Black Cadillac" 

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The Gasölines

Though hurtling and bash-fisted, these severe minutes are also possessed of appeal familiar to brave ravers who dimly recall club episodes, midsommer midnight, or arena frenzies. People were killed by Morten Nilsen's guitar solo - and they're still grinning.

Video: "(I'm Not) Your Mirror"

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Big Cartel

AI music poisonous counterfeit

Music is an expression of humanity, not technological artifice. Composition begins in thought. Instrumental realization is most honestly performed by human beings.

There were no wind-up keys in the plaid-shirted backs of Jimmy Bryant and Speedy West.

Machines are not capable of independent thought, creativity, or interpretive production. True, artificial intelligence programs can in a twinkling assemble ideas fed into them by humans -- and they certainly can arrange those per typed request -- but no cold contraption ever had a brainstorm.

While penning these words, I asked an artificial intelligence program to compose Rockabilly song lyrics. Here's one verse:

Well, it's a cyber-billy boogie on the radio waves
Yeah, a cyber-billy boogie driving everyone crazy
Flip my toggle switch, baby, watch me go
Got a million gigabytes of Rock and Roll!

That's a far piece from Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

Whether a song's author breaks fresh stylistic turf or embroiders upon already existent fashions, he cannot help but be (at least somewhat) reflective of cultural persuasions.  

Not only is artificial intelligence unaware of social permutations not generally accessible in the clouds -- it can't even flip its own ON switch.

Despite all that, manufactured music in sundry genres is seemingly ubiquitous. Persons exploring musics online must tread with caution as if in sketchy neighborhoods.

Understood is that a songwriter or producer might find it simpler to pour notions into machines, rather than enlist breathing players, that their visions assume form.

But the result reeks of sterility. It satisfies no discerning listener who truly loves music.

A factory construct can't feel exhileration, heartbreak, or rebelliousness. Those emotional phenomena -- which prompt creation and inject real, blood-surging life into music -- are exclusive to people. State-of-the-art components can no more cry or laugh than can store-window manniquins.

The battle between man and machine is hardly a new matter. John Henry, the steel-drivin' man of railroad-worker choruses' folk legend, was said to have pounded more spikes than his metallic, steam-powered competitor. 

Just so, human conceptions embody actual life sparks that doggerel issued from components simply does not. Man stands victorious.

I'll hand over a million dollars to anyone who can produce a mechanism that's known the blues.

Forsaken Profits

Road Rash

(Anything But Radio Records)

Traffic poles look like a picket fence -- red/yellow/green being of no consequence -- as thrashing demons fly toward destinations unmolested. Some 14 years since they first materialized as a "drinking band with a Punk problem," and their collective fury remains as vigorous as when germination sprouted. This, then, is violent rapidity very much of our fraught moment.

Recommended: "DTE," "Chemical Burn," "Decayed," "Absolute Zero," "Avalanche"

Videos: "DTE"   "Chemical Burn" (live at Skatetopia)   "Decayed"   

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Marley Bone

Red Gators

(Marleybone Records)

When this writer terms Marley Bone predictable, that's not intended to be taken as a negative. The truth is a far piece down the road. The combo is a money-in-the-bank proposition: Reliably swinging bopmen that don't want no scufflin', just all-night fun. 

"Neesey" and "Vampire" were previously available as singles. Both were appaised here: "Would that all combos were similarly adept at contriving hushed romanticism. Group vocal eminence floats. Blissful stirrings are brought to a head by womanly radiance," I wrote of "Neesey." 

And of Vampire Orgy: "No one returns to the land of the living from this revelry. Intonations adorning low-gear, chunka-chunka Rockabilly nonchalance articulate a doomful scenario."

Newer material jumps, glides, and stutter-steps with the assurance of a hepster who's been around the block a couple of times, knows what's worth attention, and can deal it out for the pleasure of all at hand.

It's in the bank.

Recommended: "Red Gators," "First in Line," "Neesey Smile," "Vampire Orgy," "Lipstick," "Same Old Swing"

Videos: "Red Gators" (live)   "Neesey Smile"   "Vampire Orgy"   "Same Old Swing"

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Cash O'Riley

Booze, Lust, Lies & Heartache...Revisited   digital

(Rumble Road Records)

Initially issued in 2002, Cash's Booze again populates earways, now in fresh incarnation. Good ol' hayseed romping mashed into chipper with  outlawism and razor-ready Blues; what exits demands discernment. Select passages recall glorious half-moment before hillbilly heels were kicked up toward what local hands would term Rockabilly. Every love-lucky, back-country buck carries a homestyle dolly's curling b&w snap in his britches' bib pocket.

(All proceeds from digital sales go directly to worthy cause "Hobohemian" Cash.)

Recommended: "Send Along," "Big City Queen," "Everytime You Walk," "The Last Time," "I'll Be Gone," "I May Have," "Make You Cry," "Enough Beer"

Videos: "Big City Queen"   "Everytime You Walk"   "The Last Time"   "Enough Beer"

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Pig Boys

Feralization

(Self-issued)

Woefully scant online information was all the present writer could locate. Virtually zero 'net presence, which is thoroughly Punk. (And long live hand-scrawled gig flyers!) No more needs observing, save for how kick-ass it is to encounter chord-brutalizers in larval stage. 

Recommended: "Rockhound," "Get in My Car," "Pop Country Casualty," "The System Killed My Baby," "Feralization"

Videos: "Rockhound"   "Get in My Car"   "The System Killed My Baby"   

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The P-Town Skanks

"Meat" finds sharp-incisored Psycho and histrionic throat-urgings punctuated by a curious break -- that may have been recorded on the sly at some Eastern-territory hands-in-air celebration (bongos -- and is that a zurna?) -- before again tearing ass. 

Video: "Meat"

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Red-Hot Dynamos

They may cruise Italian strade, but the RHDs purvey old-ways Nashville tunery with all the realness of Robert's regulars. And their digital shufflers are fine as frog hair. But as the numbers here presented illustrate, it's high time a physical, full-length record could be grabbed from shelves. And I mean everywhere.

Videos: "Moonshiner's Run"   "Excuse Me"

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Rock'n'Roll solution, not problem

"Rock'n'Roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written, for the most part, by cretinous goons...and, by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration and sly, lewd -- in fact, plain dirty -- lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the Earth. It is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has ever been my misfortune to hear."

- Frank Sinatra 1957

Ol' Blue Eyes mentioned no names in his caustic grading. But his condemnation included not just onstage interpreters and those cheering on the raucous evolution, but also, by implication, the profound reshaping it delivered to the entire planet.

Sinatra, of course, epitomized an earlier idealization of the coolness spirit. But his favored model was a dinner-jacketed, cocktail-slinging hipster whose winked argot and nightclub long-legging had become passé, given generational exchange.

(And it merits remark that, when younger, Frankie had himself been assailed by clucking parents. It is not known to what degree his transformation from objection's focus to its spokesman was genuine or simply prompted by professional apprehension.)

The coolness of his era was one to be observed, to be entertained by, and perhaps aspired toward. But the new Rebel Music was egalitarian. Of its audience. Everyone could be a Rock'n'Roller, whereas only the socially well-situated orbited the Rat Pack galaxy.

Much 1950s Rebel Music was Southern and not Northern in origin. It was produced by the working poor, not imposed downwardly upon them by a gold cuff-linked, Copacabana elite. Factors of class and region had not been so prominent in popular culture. Rock'n'Roll ushered to the table's head constituencies theretofore 

unacknowledged.

Too, Rock'n'Roll was of multi-racial character. It was and remains an ill fit for propagandizing separatists. To twist an aged saw, a bird needs both the black Blues wing and the white Country one to flip, flop, and fly. Remove either from the equation and you can have fine music, true. But it won't be Rock'n'Roll.

Hailed since as masters and giants, pioneers more likely stumbled onto greatness as blueprinted its construction. And their ambitions doubtless prioritized daily bread above dreams of renown.

But from a patchwork foundation of poor boy nerve and determination rose a phenomenon so unique in its make-up, so cracklingly vibrant amid placid pop culture, that it endures, still.

As a singer, Frank Sinatra was a baker's dozen sorts of koo-koo. But that he didn't dig Rock'n'Roll back then was his problem, not ours.