Joe Bonomo's Blog, page 4

737 comin' out of the sky...

There’s a moment in the 2022 Netflix documentary Travelin’ Band: Credence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall when drummer Doug Clifford’s on a balcony in Paris, knocked out that he’s spending his 25th birthday in the City of Lights, gushing like a wide-eyed tourist about having visited the Louvre and Lois XIV’s “playground.” Which he was. Though in the Spring of 1970, Credence Clearwater Revival were in rapid ascension, the band members were still appealingly untutored in the ways of th...

We’ll sing to people and show

DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—Looking at the Linda Lindas onstage, you’d be forgiven for guessing that they’d formed two weeks ago, they’re so energetic and they look, well, they are so young.

In fact, the Los Angeles-area band formed in 2018, gathering together as a backup/pickup band behind Kristin Kontrol (Kristin Gundred, founder and lead singer of Dum Dum Girls). They played and recorded a handful of covers at first, releasing an EP in late 2020, and is well known by now, the following yea...

Everything will be alright

“‘Baby Drummer’ is about longing for something exciting to happen in music again. For a band or an artist to come along and totally change the game. For a new subculture to emerge championing guitar music again as it has in the past.”

That’s Bobby Bird, aka Bobby Nerves, about a song from his band Bad Nerves’ debut album, and also on why he gets up in the mornings. The Essex-hatched, London-based band—Nerves out front singing, William Phillipson and George Berry on guitars, Jonathan Poulton on ba...

The song's too simple

In 1985, Dave Hickey published an essay titled “The Delicacy of Rock-and-Roll” in Art Issues magazine, and later included it in his book Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy. In the piece, Hickey, loosely and casually yet highly persuasively, takes down the so-called dichotomy between high and low art. It was a career-long game for him, to deflate pompous arguments.

In the essay, Hickey remembers a night at an underground film festival at University of Texas, in Austin, where he was a student in...

Play This Book Loud: The Playlist

My new book Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays is out in a month with University of Georgia Press. To celebrate and to offer a sonic “teaser” of sorts, I’ve created a five-hour Spotify playlist of (nearly!) all of the songs and artists I wrote about, glancingly or head-on, in the book. The jam would also work nicely as reading accompaniment, I might add.

You can access the playlist here or right here:

Pre-sales of Play This Book Loud would help mightily, if you’re so inclined, and so would spreadi...

Attack!!

In Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays, my new book out this May from University of Georgia Press, I write about cover songs:

A song is covered for any number of commercial, audience-pleasing, or personal-stake reasons. A singer might announce, onstage or in front of his bedroom mirror, “This song matters to me because. . .” Sometimes a musician covers a song to learn something technical inside of the playing, in the odd chord or tricky time changes. Sometimes a musician covers a song she’s loved s...

Wasted

Keith Richards once said—or he didn’t, who knows—that rock and roll is music for the neck downwards. Dave Feldman of Wyldlife said just last week—this one we can pinpoint—“We are morons. Maybe the sharpest morons in the room, but morons nevertheless.”

Feldman may be playing up a certain persona. His Jersey City, NJ-based band—he’s out front howling, Sam Allen’s on guitar, Spencer Alexander’s on bass, and Russ Barrnett’s on drums—has been banging around for the last decade and a half, making noise...

To places far away

I’ve admired Eric Fischl’s work for decades, though I’ve only now gotten around to reading his 2012 autobiography, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, co-written with Michael Stone. A painter and sculptor, Fischl became famous, and outstandingly wealthy, in the 1980s, along with David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and other Mary Boone Gallery-related artists. Fischl was always a bit of an outlier, making “old fashioned” narrative paintings at a time when his trailblazing cohort were producing abst...

Slipping away

Weather ignores borders—rain in northern Illinois is likely falling in southern Wisconsin, too—just as popular music leaks through the boundaries that separate decades. An arbitrary gathering of years, a decade implies that a Zeitgeist emerges with calendar regularity, when most of what we associate with a given ten-year span occurs at a later perspective. When I first heard Nirvana blasting from a rickety front porch in Athens, Ohio, my first thought wasn’t, This is an epochal Nineties moment, ...

I'm talking about the human race

When I read that David Johansen had died, my first thought went to a song that he wrote that’s about being very much alive.

“Human Being” is the closing track on New York Dolls’ second album, 1974’s Too Much Too Soon—a wholly appropriate bit of sequencing, because anything following the song would’ve had to struggle mightily to be heard. Written by Johansen and Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders, the song came to life a year or so earlier, the result of jam sessions detonating at various “rent parti...