Joe Bonomo's Blog

The Strokes know how to reemerge. Three weeks ago, they released a new single, “Going Shopping,” on the same day they announced that a new album, Reality Awaits, would be out this summer. Later this year, they’re touring across North America, Japan, and Europe. This constitutes a flurry of activity for the slow-moving band: their most recent album, The New Abnormal, was released a couple of weeks into the 2020 COVID lockdown; that album appeared seven years after its antecedent, Comedown Machine...

Recently, I noticed that we are as far from the Rolling Stones’s 1994 song “Love Is Strong” as that song was from “Come On,” the Stones’ debut single released in 1963. This is both a banal and an astonishing observation, as, yeah, the world keeps spinning (and so do the Stones), and yet that spin can be disorienting, if not troubling. 1963 seemed awfully far away to me in ‘94, in part because I wasn’t alive when the Stones emerged, in part because, well, three decades is a long span; certainly t...

A tribute song is an act of translation. A musician’s inspired—by gratitude, awe, or grief, or all of the above—to honor someone, or some thing, to translate their moods and feelings into a work that pays homage and celebrates or mourns. On February 26, 1967, Albert Ayler, on alto sax, gathered with Joel Friedman (cello), Alan Silva (bass), Bill Folwell (bass), and Beaver Harris (drums) at the Village Theatre on Second Avenue in New York City’s East Village to play “For John Coltrane,” an origin...

In the summer of 2004, the New York Times serialized The Great Gatsby in the Sunday Book Review. As it happened, I was living in New York during several weeks of the run. The seven-day wait between reading each chapter allowed Jay and Nick and Daisy, whom I already knew very well, to move again inside my imagination, and, as exquisite overlays, against the backdrop of the Brooklyn and Manhattan streets I was walking everyday with new vividness. Best of all, Fitzgerald’s story felt as if it were ...

In the summer of 2004, the New York Times serialized The Great Gatsby in the Sunday Book Review. As it happened, I was living in New York during several weeks of the run. The seven-day wait between reading each chapter allowed Jay and Nick and Daisy, whom I already knew very well, to move again inside my imagination, and, as exquisite overlays, against the backdrop of the Brooklyn and Manhattan streets I was walking everyday with new vividness. Best of all, Fitzgerald’s story felt as if it were ...

Dear No Such Thing As Was subscribers, followers, and readers: I’ve got a bit on my plate between teaching and traveling, so I could’t get to a new post this week. As Spring is threatening to burst out for good here in northern Illinois, my mind and heart go to the Records, a band that I’ve long associated with warm sunny weather. In lieu of a new piece, or in case you missed it the first time, here’s something I wrote about the band’s second and sadly underrated album Crashes, released in 1980....

Lester Bangs famously dismissed the MC5’s debut Kick Out the Jams as “ridiculous, overbearing, pretentious,” the band as an overrated machine done in by its own hype. A couple of years later, Bangs equally famously recanted. “But then, it was the first review I ever had published,” he wrote in 1971 in “James Taylor Marked for Death” in Who Put The Bomp, “and even if more death threats came in after that review than any other save Jann Wenner’s [review of Cream’s] Wheels of Fire…(and most of them...

“OK, let me tell you about some of the things I’m going through,” Joe Jackson sings at the start of “Don’t Wanna Be Like That,” from his 1979 album I’m The Man, offering less an invitation than a demand. It helped me that I was saying those same words to myself on a daily basis. The brave guitar/bass/drums intro does its best to stabilize things, but fifteen seconds in the song feels as if it’s headed down a steep hill. The excitable, noisy blend of Gary Sanford’s guitar, Dave Houghton’s drums, ...

DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—Margo Price and her new band hit the Metro in Chicago on Saturday night, a stop on their “Wild at Heart Tour.” She’s supporting Hard Headed Woman, her fifth album. (Price considers her ambitious Strays records, released at either end of 2023, as one expanded album. I wrote about those albums and Price’s career in Play This Book Loud.) Price is promoting Hard Headed Woman as a return to form of sorts after the more experimental contemporary sound and pharmaceuticall...

I was introduced to Joe McPhee’s Nation Time through Mike Faloon, founder and co-editor (with Mike Fournier) of the righteously lo-fi baseball ‘zine Fisk, which I’ve been reading for years. Nation Time was originally released in 1971, with a distribution of a thousand or so copies, and has been reissued on several occasions since, most recently in 2019 by Superior Viaduct.

In 2024, McPhee published Straight Up, Without Wings: The Musical Flight of Joe McPhee, an entertaining and illuminating mem...