(Videodrome is a recurring feature in which we highlight exceptional videos and/or performances.) Stop Making Sense may have the Big Suit, but if you’re looking for the pinnacle of live Talking Heads footage, I’d point you in the direction of this unbelievable show from Rome, 1980. Completing the Heads’ journey from minimalist to maximalist, it [...]

The grey curtain is starting to fall over the Upper Midwest, and in an effort to stave off winter’s cruel vibes, I’ve been spinning Desmond Dekker’s Super Best hits package. Here he is crossing through “Israelites” nine years after that song brought reggae and ska from the island to the isle, much to the mods’ [...]

In an effort to get away from the cycle of recording and touring, the Rolling Stones put together the Rock and Roll Circus in the winter of 1968, inviting along Taj Mahal, Jethro Tull (featuring Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi), Marianne Faithful, and a one-off supergroup called the Dirty Mac that was comprised of John Lennon, [...]

In his recent memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, Neil Young comes across this ancient Scopitone on YouTube. “I looked at it maybe twenty times in a row,” he writes. Why such interest in this fuzzy piece of video from the mid-60s? Because it’s a rare vision of Danny and the Memories, featuring Danny Whitten, Ralph Molina [...]

When I was a kid, this is what I assumed punk-rock shows looked like: dudes in leather jackets, tough-looking ladies with homemade haircuts. Check out the dude sitting up by the speaker cabs, dancing like his ear’s attached to one of the cones. Other people stand around, passersbys look bemused or confused. Someone hands out [...]

Try to think of someone cooler than Bob Wills. You cain’t. That’s not him singing–that’s him shouting over the verses like a real jazz cat and dancing with his fiddle like it’s a sack of money. Then he tosses in a solo just because he wants you to know that he can. Charlie Daniels’ Johnny beat [...]

Early on in this clip from The Old Grey Whistle Test, Kevin Coyne admits that he “knicked” his version of “I Want My Crown” off the song’s originator, Big Joe Williams.  Coyne’s interpretation is more spritely, melodic, and memorable than the bluesman’s—it’s the work of an art-school lifer caught in a moment of mainstream success. [...]

Dan “Bee” Spears was all of nineteen years old when he joined Willie Nelson’s Family Band as a bassist, a post he would hold until his death in December 2011. Marshall Grant’s tubthumping time in the Tennessee Two notwithstanding, country music bassists tend not to draw attention to themselves. Given Willie Nelson’s fast and loose [...]