Paul Butterfield’s Better Days, Live at Winterland Ballroom. “Without Paul I don’t know if a lot of us would be here tonight…” That’s the way Bill Graham introduced Butterfield and his then-new band Better Days at this 1973 concert in San Francisco. Truer words were never spoken. When the Paul Butterfield Blues Band first burst onto the scene in 1965,...

Back in 2007, when American Idol was a more formidable force than it is these days, season six Idol finalist Sanjaya Malakar took the nation by storm. Then only 17 years of age, his Stevie Wonder-influenced vocals were sometimes upstaged by a series of outlandish hairdos and, in one memorable instance, an emotionally overwhelmed young girl (Ashley Ferl, who was...

This column is like the title says — its intention is to fill the gap for those of us who were satiated musically in the ’60s and then searched desperately as we aged for music we could relate to and get the same buzz from nowadaze. iTunes was the answer for me in 2003 and I have been following the...

This column is like the title says – its intention is to fill the gap for those of us who were satiated musically in the ’60s and then searched desperately as we aged for music we could relate to and get the same buzz from nowadaze. iTunes was the answer for me in 2003 and I have been following the...

This column is like the title says – its intention is to fill the gap for those of us who were satiated musically in the ’60s and then searched desperately as we aged for music we could relate to and get the same buzz from nowadaze. iTunes was the answer for me in 2003 and I have been following the...

Beck, Morning Phase. From the Silver Lake street boy wandering through Los Angeles on the city buses to worldwide conqueror of all things musical, Beck is one of the great enigmas of the past quarter century. At first he was like Woody Guthrie’s illegitimate son, except he specialized in a boom box instead of an acoustic guitar. Over the years...

Greatly expanding the original 1987 live album Концерт, A Matter of Trust: The Bridge to Russia is now the definitive document of Billy Joel’s historic tour of the Soviet Union. The new two-disc version ups the track listing from 16 to 27, with spirited takes of “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” “Pressure,” and “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” among...