Woodstock

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Fess Elisha Parker, 1924–2010

In memoriam
The King of the Wild Frontier is dead.
By CLIF GARBODEN | March 24, 2010

Boston's road from Loserville to Title Town
Moments after Adam Vinatieri's field goal split the uprights as the clock expired in the Louisiana Superdome on February 3, 2002, the streets of Boston were in bedlam. Drunk people dangled from trees and hung off lampposts. Motorists leaned on their horns. I saw a guy hug a cop
By MIKE MILIARD | December 22, 2009

Review: Tom Russell | Blood and Candle Smoke

Shout! Factory (2009)
This LA-born troubadour with a Dustbowl voice works voodoo on his 24th studio album, conjuring ghosts of the ’60s and ’70s along with apocalyptic visions as he relates tales of gun-toting madmen and dark rifts of the heart.
By TED DROZDOWSKI | September 22, 2009

Review: The Baader Meinhof Complex

Terrorism made simple in Uli Edel's Complex
Terrorism made simple in Uli Edel's Complex
By PETER KEOUGH | September 10, 2009

Which way the wind blows

Letters to the Boston editor, August 28, 2009
The venting of wind-power skeptics in the Phoenix piece “ Why wind power blows ” really misses a major point: global warming. When we finally get down to grappling with dangerous climate disruption, all forms of non-carbon emitting power will rise.
By BOSTON PHOENIX LETTERS | August 26, 2009

Review: Taking Woodstock

Ang Lee sums up the counterculture in style
If there ever was a way to inject fresh interest into events that most people born after the baby boom couldn't care less about, it's to involve Eugene Levy and a shame-to-fame plot line made for reality television.
By CHRIS FARAONE | August 27, 2009

Health of a nation

Enough with the 'forums!' Plus, playing politics and sporting news.
Let's just forget about all these dog and pony health care "forums" and face some facts. First and foremost, the main (and, perhaps, only) debate is this: Do you believe that health should be subject to the marketplace?
By PHILLIPE AND JORGE | August 19, 2009

How much rock would a Woodstock stock if

Three-day festival of peace and music
Hopes are high among the quartet of rock entrepreneurs – John Roberts, Joel Roseman, Michael Land, and Arnie Kornfeld – who think they can succeed where George Wein, Newport promoter, has not.
By ELEANOR WEBER | July 23, 2009

Beginning? Or end?

Woodstock 40 years later
Let me get this straight up front: I didn't go to Woodstock. But I was teaching a "student-initiated course" in pop-music history at Antioch College at the time, and a number of my students announced that they were going to miss a couple of classes because they had tickets to Woodstock.
By ED WARD | August 12, 2009

Beginning? Or end?

The music man

George Wein, the father of American music festivals, reflects on bringing world-class folk and jazz (and more) to Newport
Forty years after a half-million hippies descended on a sprawling dairy farm in upstate New York, Woodstock has become shorthand for an entire epoch.
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG | August 05, 2009

Sex, Drugs, Rock and Peace

How Abbie Hoffman politicized Woodstock – and changed America
It is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind in the same way the Sioux Indians carried the Sioux nation around with them. It's a nation dedicated to cooperation versus competition, to the idea that people should have a better means of exchange than property and money.
By AL GIORDANO | July 22, 2009

Scholarship gigs

Newpoli and Steven Bernstein do their homework
When in 1999 Björn Wennås moved from Sweden to Boston to study jazz guitar, he hardly imagined that he'd one day be playing in an ensemble that specializes in Italian folk music of the 12th to 19th centuries.
By JON GARELICK | August 04, 2009

Interview: Michael Lang

Going back to Woodstock
"At the end, he talks about how wonderful it was, but throughout the entire day, Pete Townshend was like the Grinch that stole Christmas. He was uptight, miserable, hated being there, and wanted to go home."
By ROB TURBOVSKY | July 22, 2009

Interview: Steve Swallow on the Gary Burton Quartet

An interview with Steve Swallow
DO YOU REMEMBER EXACTLY HOW YOU GUYS FIRST GOT TOGETHER? I have a memory. I tend to distrust them, but my recollection is that I met Gary when he called me up and asked me if I would consider playing in Stan Getz's band, which he was already in.
By JON GARELICK | June 30, 2009

Cannes job

Five films to watch for
Five goodies coming out of Cannes
By LISA NESSELSON | May 27, 2009

Reggae revival

Booming in Boston's underground, Caribbean riddims are about to burst back into the mainstream
The climate is tropical, sweet skunk fills the air, and reggae jams are hitting such lofty decibels that I can't even feel my phone vibrate.
By CHRIS FARAONE | May 21, 2009

Ring master

Toback's Tyson tames two egos
At its best, Tyson becomes its subject's psychotherapist, allowing him to disgorge with no judgment and little restraint his memories, fantasies, impulses, and fears.
By PETER KEOUGH | April 28, 2009

Westward ho!

The Phoenix survives Coachella
Forgot those rabid right-wingers with their hateful teabags — Coachella had the range, and the machinery for change, and the spiritual thirst. Oh and Leonard Cohen.
By GUSTAVO TURNER | April 29, 2009

By | January 01, 0001

Review: We Live in Public

Call it Woodstock crossed with Salò and The Real World
Josh Harris might not have contributed as much to the Internet as Al Gore, but as Ondi Timoner's lively and chilling documentary reveals, he did embody its excesses of narcissism and puerility and its delusions of grandeur.
By PETER KEOUGH | September 02, 2009

The worst word

How F**K became our top taboo term -- and why we need it to stay that way
Then it happens: you look up at the TV screen and see Bono, the lead singer of U2, step up to the podium to accept a statuette for recording the Best Alternative Music album. "We shall continue to abuse our position," he says, "and fuck up the mainstream."
By TIMOTHY GOWER | April 07, 2009

Gen Jones rules

But will they be practical problem solvers or scatterbrains on steroids?
One of the major themes of Barack Obama's political philosophy has been that it's time for America to move beyond the Baby Boom Generation's petty partisanship.
By STEVEN STARK | March 19, 2009

Voice of regeneration

Richie Havens rages on 40 years after Woodstock
Havens, who comes to the MFA this Sunday, has been following his muse since he was a child.
By DANIEL BROCKMAN | December 16, 2008

Rock and rote

Three decades in, AC/DC’s conservatism pays off
Three decades in, AC/DC’s conservatism pays off
By DANIEL BROCKMAN | November 10, 2008

Bob Dylan Unboxed

Everything you wanted to know about Tell-Tale Signs but were afraid to buy
This October, Columbia Records is releasing Tell-Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006 , a collection of recordings by Bob Dylan that are different from recordings issued on the seven studio albums he released in that period.
By GUSTAVO TURNER | October 15, 2008

Mission: accomplished

Organic hip-hop’s good and good for you
Way before Audible Mainframe snatched the title of Boston’s dopest live hip-hop group and bolted for the West Coast, Roxbury’s Mission pursued a similar course of action.
By CHRIS FARAONE | October 10, 2008

All Tomorrow’s Parties II

Edan at Kutshers Country Resort, Monticello, New York, September 19-21, 2008
At a festival like All Tomorrow’s Parties — a reminder of why so many of us entered the new millennium with tinnitus — an act like Edan might have seemed way out of place.
By MICHAEL BRODEUR | September 25, 2008

The Big Hurt: Earnest goes to camp

Plus baby comes from Clay and Bizkit defects to Manson
Hey: when the Verve play shows in America, they should start out their set with a cover of “The Freshman,” just so everyone’s like, “Wait a minute, I thought I had this shit figured out.”
By DAVID THORPE | August 26, 2008

Smoke screens

Does a surge of stoner movies mean America is going to pot?
What does it say about America that marijuana movies are a hot genre right now, perhaps hotter even than in the heyday of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s 1978 Up in Smoke ?
By PETER KEOUGH | August 18, 2008