Joe Bonomo's Blog, page 7

Noisy essays and heavy music

I’ve got a bit on my plate this week, so this a catch-all edition of No Such Thing As Was.

First off, I’m happy to announce that my new book of music essays Play This Book Loud will be out next May from University of Georgia Press in their “Crux Series.” I’m stoked to be working with the cool folks at Georgia. Play This Book Loud gathers my last decade of so of music essays and some smaller pieces. I think of it as a companion book to my 2017 collection of music essays Field Recordings from the ...

What can you give me?

I’ve been reading and thoroughly enjoying Brad Tolinski, Jaan Uhelszki, and Ben Edmonds’s MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band. Amidst the terrific stories about their early years and swift, raucous rise as local legends is a fact that confounds me: to a member, the MC5 were disappointed with the performance and sound on their incendiary, righteous debut, Kick Out the Jams.

Complaints abound: the show that was recorded on October 30, 1968 at the Grande in Detroit was an off n...

What can you can give me?

I’ve been reading and thoroughly enjoying Brad Tolinski, Jaan Uhelszki, and Ben Edmonds’s MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band. Amidst the terrific stories about their early years and swift, raucous rise as local legends is a fact that confounds me: to a member, the MC5 were disappointed with the performance and sound on their incendiary, righteous debut, Kick Out the Jams.

Complaints abound: the show that was recorded on October 30, 1968 at the Grande in Detroit was an off n...

The angel who's got the proof

Several years ago I wrote about how being raised Catholic meant that I was bound to a certain authoritarian guide book when it came to the enjoyment of popular culture. When my siblings and I wanted to see a new movie, I wrote, “my parents would consult the Catholic Standard, the weekly Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C.’s, official newspaper that materialized on our kitchen table with solemn regularity. The editors at the Catholic News Service classified each new movie with a letter...

Revisiting Roxon's Rock

Since migrating my old blog over to Substack, I’ll be periodically revisiting and revising some older pieces.

I've been dipping into Lillian Roxon’s influential Rock Encyclopedia lately, eager as always for on-the-ground reportage of the late-1960’s rock and roll scenes. An Australian, Roxon was dubbed the “Mother of Rock.” She wrote pop music criticism and journalism before turning her attention to sexual politics and feminism. She died, of an asthma attack, in 1973.

The massive Encyclopedia was ...

Boom boom ignite your heart

2024 has been the Year of Kate Clover—for me, anyway. Back in April I caught her and her ace band at Cobra Lounge in Chicago, and her albums Bleed Your Heart Out (2022) and The Apocalypse Dream (2024) have enjoyed high-rotation frequency on the stereo. The Los Angeles-based Clover began releasing music a few years back, issuing the digi singles “When Will I Hold You Again” with Dion Lunadon in 2020, and a moody vamp through “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” with Warren Thomas and a rollicking i...

How much time will it take

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 afternoon classes. Irritated, I hopped into my car and, in too much of a rush to select a playlist on my phone, pressed Shuffle: always a gamble. How many times have I impatiently cycled through tens of thousands of songs, pressing next next next when not in the mood for this song or that artist. I’ve wasted a lot of time—opportunities for surprises, discoveries, the...

No time like the right time

DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—Midway through Hoodoo Gurus’ show at Thalia Hall in Chicago, Dave Faulkner announced that this might be the last time his band swings through the United States. The Australian band formed in 1981, took a five year hiatus at the turn of the century, and have been going at it steady since 2003. The current jaunt is their second “big bus” tour of the States in recent years, and Faulkner wonders if maybe they’ve had enough. He was quick to wave off the possibility, in...

Looking for the glad times

DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—After the third song in Sunday night’s show at a crowded Vic Theater, Paul Weller addressed the crowd, half-apologizing for the lengthy set that was coming. “We’re going to play a lot of songs tonight,” he said. “So please be patient. Bu you’ll enjoy it!” A bit later, sitting at a piano stage right, he again guiltily referred to the long evening, acknowledging that since the last time he and his band played in Chicago (in 2015, also at The Vic) he’s released “eigh...

"What is a week-end?"

“Boy, the weekends just didn’t last long enough.”

That’s the unnamed narrator—he goes by “Jimmy’s daddy”—in Larry Brown’s novel A Miracle of Catfish, published in 2007, three years after Brown’s untimely death. Jimmy’s daddy’s a bit of a lout, to be sure, but his complaints are entirely sympathetic, and roll as endlessly as a cotton field at dusk:

You got up and you went to work and you came home and went to bed and you spent all week fixing Towmotors, fixing spot-weld machines, fixing baloney san...