Joe Bonomo's Blog

I’ve been re-reading Patti Smith’s beautiful and heartbreaking Just Kids, this time around struck by the layers of nostalgia beneath the surface of the memoir. Smith writes with such affection for Robert Mapplethorpe, even of his more self-centered, distracted, and harmful moments, that the forecast we all know of his tragic demise never arrives; we just have two skinny kids banging around New York City on waves of hunger, bliss, luck, and love. Smith’s details of her blossoming romance/friendsh...

Deadlines are still chirping, so until I can get back into the NO SUCH THING AS WAS groove, here’s another from the archives. George Harrison released “My Sweet Lord” on this day in 1970; here I write about the mighty Edwin Starr’s take on that tune, from his righteous 1971 album Involved, as well as “Time” from that same album. (And some James Baldwin, too.)

I was hurrying, having realized nearly too late that I had to dash to the opposite side of town to grab something before lunch and afternoo...

I’m currently reading Paul “Smiler” Anderson’s engrossing Mod Art, a history of music, graphics, fashion, art, and mod design from the 1950s through the ‘90s. Highly recommended. As I have Mod on the brain (yet again) and am facing some deadlines, I’m revisiting this review I wrote a few years back of The Sharper Word: A Mod Anthology, edited by Paolo Hewitt.

I recently finished The Sharper Word: A Mod Anthology, a gathering of writing devoted to the history of the Mod lifestyle edited by Paolo H...

DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—Guitarist and Saints founder Ed Kuepper, with longtime drummer Ivor Hay, is currently steering Saints 73-78, a touring outfit featuring Mick Harvey (The Birthday Party/Bad Seeds) on guitar and keyboards, Peter Oxley (Sunnyboys) on bass, and Mark Arm (Mudhoney) on vocals. Midway through the Saints 73-78’s set at the Metro in Chicago on Tuesday night, someone behind me yelled out for “Kissin’ Cousins,” the Elvis Presley nugget that the Saints, in their original form,...

The Hives, Sweden’s artisans of riffology, are clearly making up for lost time. The band released their first five albums Barely Legal (1997), Veni Vidi Vicious (2000), Tyrannosaurus Hives (2004), The Black and White Album (2007), and Lex Hives (2012) across a decade and a half. Nearly as much time—eleven years—lapsed between Lex Hives and the sudden arrival of new Hives releases, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons (2023) and the band’s latest, The Hives Forever Forever The Hives, released two month...

The Kundalini Genie’s fourth album 1111 (sometimes stylized as 11:11), released in the difficult Spring of 2020, is a mind-bending soundscape journey into interior states propelled by loud, fuzzy guitars, mammoth, reverb-soaked drumming, and airy vocals in dreamy arrangements, the sound saturated and rich. Chords change as if moving lazily underwater, keyboard flourishes arrive like glimpses of high-flying birds, cymbal crashes move in slow motion, drum fills spill unhurriedly, galloping against...

When my brother Paul and I were kids we were gonzo KISS fans, coming of age right at the band’s mid- to late-1970s peak. Alas, we could never seem to pool enough allowance money to be able to afford memberships in the coveted KISS Army—the perks of which taunted us from the advertising inserts in Rock and Roll Over, Love Gun, and KISS Alive II—but we were true fans, young enough to giddily, innocently enjoy the stomping riffs and cartoon camp, old enough to reckon with our disappointment, unease...

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...