Thanks to a handful of creative poster artists and their large fan group that immediately generated, many rock concert posters of the late 1960s today are rightfully considered art, rather than mere advertisements. Their most intriguing aspect then and today were the poster’s strong display of psychedelic arrangements, drug-influenced ways of perceiving shapes, names and […]
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Category: B. R. Music
Heart Full of Soul. Keith Relf of the Yardbirds by David French (2020)
In the southwest of London, in 1962 a young Richmond band called The Metropolis Blues Quartet was staring to become England’s probably most innovative rock band. This band would become the nucleus of a guitar based outfit that later significantly altered music history and start, among other things, the American psychedelic and garage rock period. […]
Crime and Spy Jazz on Screen 1950-1970: A History and Discography by Derrick Bang (2020)
The brief period of American sound film until roughly the mid-1940s was dominated by soundtracks and extradiegetic audio based on mostly sweet string orchestras, allusions to classical compositions and ballads. Then, in the 1950s and 60s, soundtrack composers increasingly used popular music of the decades before for police/detective/spy action productions, which would be in large […]
I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music by Peter La Chape
American political campaigns without music or shows would be an impossibility today. Speaking about the 20th century, neither marching band tunes, nor folk songs or hymns were the musical style employed most by political representatives running for office, but country music, as author La Chapelle proves. He finds many more details of this particular relationship […]
Five Years Ahead of My Time: Garage Rock from the 1950s to the Present by Seth Bovey (2019)
The Third Bardo’s 1967 song “Five Years Ahead of My Time,” a musical gem by the psychedelic garage band from New York is the eponym for this book, as the many garage bands of the 1960s laid the foundations for American Rock music. The word “garage” in this context actually describes their foremost place of […]
Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound: Transatlantic Trends by Charles O’Brien (2019)
Sound film changed many ideas and experiences of watching motion pictures; certain aspects that concern the use of songs, musical story lines and content of films from 1930 are evaluated here. Author O’Brian selected a corpus of roughly 500 feature films (including musical films) from France, the US, England and Hollywood’s greatest rival at that […]
Musik im klassischen Film noir by Janina Müller (German) (2019)
Janina Müller’s study (“Music in classic film noir”) takes a close look at the scores of mostly the popular films noir and a few rather unknown ones. Here it means studying, juxtaposing and evaluating the scores of several films, while their uniqueness in comparison with standard Hollywood movies is questioned. As there is hardly one […]
Music Wars: Money, Politics, and Race in the Construction of Rock and Roll Culture, 1940-1960 by Joh...
“One way to interpret American society in the second half of the twentieth century, for good or ill, is to see it as the triumph of rock and roll culture,” argues John C. Hajduk, professor of history at the University of Montana Western in the book at hand. This peculiar culture was a compelling force […]
The Blue Sky Boys by Dick Spottswood (2018)
In 1935, when teenage brothers Earl and Bill Bolick from Catawba County (NC) first performed publicly, they were inspired by the many duets and family band outfits of early country music. Back then, sibling/brothers/sisters duets or entire band families were popular, like the Carter Family, the Delmore Brothers, the Carlisle Brothers, the Monroe Brothers, Mac […]