War of the Welles
In October of 1938, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Amid this air of paranoia, Orson Welles stepped behind the microphone for another broadcast of a radio drama, CBS’ The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
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Exotica Noir
For every Martin Denny , there were dozens of other, independent musicians plying their trade in exotica, with strange, stunning, and spooky results. It is these musicians that Technicolor Paradise celebrates.
Read moreA Brief History of The Quick
Power pop fans sometimes try to swell the ranks of their chosen obsession by widening their nets to include within it acts that are not necessarily deserving of the label. Take for example, The Quick.
Read moreAlcohol Professor: Lady Day on Swing Street
2015 is the centennial of two of the most important figures in American music and the history of New York. We took care of Frank Sinatra already on Alcohol Professor, so now it’s time to bow down to the woman he said was the most influential artist in his life and in modern American music history. Lady Day on Swing Street looks at the life and career of Billie Holiday, the Harlem Renaissance, and the rise and fall of Swing Street and Greenwich Village jazz clubs.
Read moreThe Best You’ll Never Find
When it comes to music, I have little nostalgia for vinyl. I much more prefer the internet equivalent of crate digging to the old school variety, where, along with the limits of physical space you had unlimited opportunities to inhale large quantities of dust. It has to be admitted, however, that those physical limits did provide an obsessive like myself
Read moreReparata and the Delrons
Reparata and the Delrons were a girl group that spent a long career plumbing the lower echelons of the American pop charts – a fact that even a cursory listen to any survey of their many singles renders somewhat unbelievable. Like fellow East-coasters the Shangri-las, their early repertoire was heavy on teenage melodrama and heartbreak. But as the 60s wore
Read moreBurt Bacharach: Casino Royale
Burt Bacharach’s soundtrack is probably the least maligned aspect of producer Charles Feldman’s 1967 film version of Casino Royale. For connoisseurs of cinematic disaster, the problems that beset that production are well familiar. Kaufman, who held the movie rights to Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, intended to make a canonical James Bond film, but upon failing to secure the cooperation of
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