Joe Bonomo's Blog

Five years ago, I was taken with Tom Campbell’s article in Ugly Things magazine on the Paisleys, a late-1960s Minneapolis-via-Canada psych band whose live shows, musical output, and general aesthetic worldview were, one can say, of the era. (Campbell’s article was reprinted at MinniePaulMusic here.) “To put it cruelly,” Richie Unterberger observed at Allmusic, “the Paisleys were exactly the kind of band roasted by the Mothers of Invention so unmercifully on We’re Only in It for the Money.” To ma...

Note: since relocating my old blog to Substack, I’ve been occasionally rescuing and revising posts that got lost in the move.

“One of me best songs I’ve ever written. Quite a fiery Wagnerian piece.”

That’s Pete Townshend about “I Can See For Miles,” the sonic masterpiece that the Who released as a single on October 13, 1967. Recorded during the fall in studios in London, Manhattan, and Los Angeles—at the latter, accessing Gold Star Studios’s echo chamber to achieve the proper menacing reverb on Ro...

What a cueious band the Rolling Stones have been in this century. Relative to, say, a hard charging gang of twenty somethings hungrily banging out tunes, forging a bunker mentality on the road in large cities and small ‘hoods, and hustling their music to an indie label or posting hopefully online, are the Stones even a band anymore? Before last year’s sturdy Hackney Diamonds, their previous album of originals had been A Bigger Bang, released in 2005 on the day President Bush announced an investi...

My mother Catherine Bonomo died on the afternoon of September 12, in hospice care in the home she’d shared with my dad. She was 93. Somewhere—somehow—in the daze of the past several weeks, I’d found myself teaching Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.” A moment near the end hit hard: “nothing, I knew, had any chance against death.” I was teaching Lucy Sante’s memoir I Heard Her Call My Name in another class; reading her story of coming alive as a trans woman as my mom was dying in the next r...

On July 11, 2009, Green Day played Target Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, one gig of many on their lengthy tour promoting 21st Century Breakdown. Before playing “Know Your Enemy,” the album’s lead single, Billie Joe Armstrong announced to the crowd that the day the band recorded the song “was the first day of the Republican Convention. The Republican Convention was here, right? We got those [bleep] out of office, right?” Alas, no video of the show exists online that I could find, so I don’t kn...

By the mid-Sixties, the Everly Brothers were facing some tough times commercially in their home country. Only two of their eight albums released in that decade sold in any measurable amounts in the U.S., and after 1964 only two of the numerous singles they’d issue would land in the Billboard Top 40. In ‘65, in the considerable wake of the Beat Group tsunami, they released a loosely-linked pair of albums, Rock'n Soul (in March) and Beat & Soul (August), neither of which sold much, though the sing...

I was introduced to the English writer Ian MacDonald (1948-2003) by his powerfully persuasive Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the 1960s, among the great books of Beatles criticism. (First published in 1994, it was reissued in revised editions in ‘97 and 2005.)

The book has its detractors—more on that below—but on the level of the sentence alone, Revolution in the Head has, to my ears, few competitors. MacDonald’s elegant and sophisticated prose engages as earthy, highly articula...

No rock and roll song exists in a vacuum. It’s always colliding with stuff—with whatever drives the songwriter to write, with obsessed or half-attentive listeners, with forces and events in culture larger than the singer’s bedroom or basement. Though a song can be time- and date-stamped, a great song will transcend whatever it was—a heartbreak, a news scroll—that occasioned it. Great songs carry history inside of them.

The Stooges released Raw Power in February of 1973, four months after Presiden...

By the mid 1980s, I had drifted away from Pete Townshend. The Who’s last album, 1982’s It’s Hard, had left me cold, and I’d found Townshend’s recent solo album All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes dull and impenetrable, and I’d rarely returned to it. Townshend released his next album, White City: A Novel, in the fall of 1985; the nine-song album was accompanied by a 45-minute film entitled White City: The Music Movie, directed by Richard Lowenstein and released on videotape by Vestron Music Vi...

I recently read “Stranger in a Strange Land,” Ellen Willis’s “Music, Etc.” column that ran in the December 27, 1969 issue of The New Yorker. (It’s gathered in Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, published by Minnesota in 2011.) She’s writing in Colorado Springs, Colorado, “an uptight military reservation,” where she’s hanging with members of the local radical community and enjoying the mountains and fresh air. She notices that her music listening is being affected by her sky-high...