Fifty years ago this week, a new record arrived in shops called Nursery Cryme by the largely unknown British band Genesis. The cover showed a Victorian-era schoolgirl wielding a croquet mallet in a vast field full of disembodied heads. The songs inside were just as bizarre, including “The Fountain of …
Read More »Flashback: Tawny Kitaen Cartwheels to Video Immortality in Whitesnake's 'Here I Go Again'
When the news of Tawny Kitaen’s death hit over the weekend, various images from her career flooded into the heads of fans. People who came of age in the Eighties remembered her appearance on the cover of the 1984 Ratt album Out of the Cellar and her role as Tom …
Read More »Flashback: Jason Segel Blasts Rush's 'Tom Sawyer' on 'Freaks and Geeks,' Eats Neil Peart's Sandwich
Jason Segel has always portrayed Rush fanboys. On 1999’s Freaks and Geeks, he played Nick, an aspiring rock drummer growing up in suburban Michigan in 1980. For Nick, there was no greater musician than Rush’s Neil Peart. With the devastating news of the drummer’s death on Friday, we look back …
Read More »Flashback: Helmet Bring the Oddball Metal of 'Betty' to 'Jon Stewart'
One of 1994’s heaviest albums was also one of its strangest. Released on June 21st of that year, Betty, the third full-length from NYC four-piece Helmet, retained the huge staccato riffs, free-form solos and supple vocal hooks that had helped make their prior album, 1992’s Meantime, into a period classic …
Read More »Flashback: Jimmy Page and Sean 'Diddy' Combs Take on 'Godzilla'
Godzilla: King of the Monsters arrives in theaters this weekend. It’s a sequel to 2014’s Godzilla where the enormous beast wreaked havoc in San Francisco and battled Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe. Despite receiving somewhat mixed reviews, the film grossed over $500 million and guaranteed a …
Read More »Flashback: America Play a Hazy 'Sister Golden Hair' in 1980
Looking back, it seems odd that one of the Seventies’ greatest feel-good songs begins in such dispiriting fashion: “Well, I tried to make it Sunday/But I got so damn depressed.” When “Sister Golden Hair” was released in 1975, America had little reason to be depressed. In the prior four years, …
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