Author: Jeff Burger

Particularly if you’ve been listening to Steve Forbert’s music for many years, you’re bound to have some fun with his new memoir, Big City Cat: My Life in Folk-Rock. The book—which lifts its title from that of a track on Alive on Arrival, his 1978 debut LP—offers lots of commentary on the inspiration for Forbert’s...

What a phenomenal year 1967 was for popular music: that one 12-month period witnessed the release of debut albums from the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Leonard Cohen, Procol Harum, the Velvet Underground, the Bee Gees, Pink Floyd, Laura Nyro, Traffic, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and Janis Joplin (with Big Brother and...

John Prine Returns with a Gem John Prine’s The Tree of Forgiveness is his first collection of fresh material since 2005’s Grammy-winning Fair and Square. That means fans have endured a 13-year wait, but it was worth every minute, because the new album is a gem. It’s hard to put your finger on just how...

More than 32 million people have already checked into the Eagles’ Hotel California, a country-rock landmark that first charted during Christmas week in 1976 and spent two months in the No. 1 slot. The group’s third chart-topper (following One of These Nights and Their Greatest Hits), it stayed in the Top 200 for two full...

I can’t listen to Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous 1975 album without thinking of a lunch meeting I had in New York City early in the year before its release. I had arranged an interview with a folk duo called Carlson and Gailmor, whose debut LP was about to come out, and a publicist at their record...

If you’re not at least a bit older than the concert featured on One for All Tour: Live in Australia 1989, you might not realize just how big a group the Bee Gees were. Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb (the brothers Gibb, hence the name Bee Gees) sold tens of millions of records—hundreds of millions...

Though live material from Arthur Lee’s brilliant rock band Love was in short supply for decades, the situation has changed in recent years. You’ll still have trouble finding much from the lineup that issued Love’s classic quartet of early albums between 1966 and 1969; but the good news is that group prime mover Arthur Lee—who...

Wars don’t produce a heck of a lot of good but one positive thing they have delivered is music. Conflicts ranging from the American Civil War to World War II have resulted in a ton of memorable songs; even the Vietnam disaster gave us Country Joe’s “I Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag.”  And then there was the Spanish...

Though never on a par with the Beach Boys, Jan & Dean had their moments. This wasn’t one of them. In fact, my first reaction when I heard Filet of Soul Redux echoed the famous opening line of Greil Marcus’s review of Bob Dylan’s Self-Portrait: “What is this shit?” Then I noticed that the CD...

In an interview cited in my book Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, he comments that Ringo “wasn’t known for writing his own material, and there was a bit of a worry [among the other Beatles when the group broke up]…how is his recording career gonna be? And in general, it’s probably better than...