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Flashback To Woodstock

Philip Kopper
Summer 2009

Forty years ago a few rich kids hatched a nutty idea that became an event that rocked the nation, then morphed into a movement whose legacy lives on. This summer the young Museum at Bethel Woods in rural New York commemorates the anniversary of that idea, the zeitgeist that spawned it, and the phenomena that flowed from it—all of it evoked in one word: Woodstock. Read more »

The Wrecking Crew

Was Hal Blaine one of your favorite musicians back in the 1960s? How about Larry Knechtel? Carol Kaye? Oh yes they were.

Kent Hartman
February/March 2007

On a cool, overcast February night in Hollywood, near the slightly scruffy, down-on-its-luck intersection of Vine Street and Santa Monica Boulevard—the final stretch of Route 66—a group of highly talented musicians gathered in a weathered, non-descript former dentist’s office are about to make rock ’n’ roll history. No one present, from the bass player to the drummer to the guitarist, has any inkling that this particular studio session is likely to differ from any other. Read more »

Seeking The Greatest Bluesman

Robert Johnson died in obscurity in 1938; since then he has gradually gained recognition as a genius of American music. Only recently have the facts of his short, tragic life become known.

Samuel Charters
July/August 1991

Who was Robert Johnson? For so many years that question haunted all of us who loved the blues. Certainly we knew about Robert Johnson’s music. He had time to make only a handful of recordings before he died at the age of twenty-seven in 1938, and outside of the small towns of the Mississippi Delta country where he had grown up he was almost completely unknown.Read more »