Devin McKinney

Autumn is a-comin’ in, and it’s time to fetch up some more of that smoky Dylan mystique. So it arrives: No Direction Home, a two-part “American Masters” profile airing on PBS on September 26 and 27, directed by Martin Scorsese, and mounted by the combined foundational forces of Apple Computer, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, […]

The Rolling Stones opened their latest U.S. tour on August 21 at Boston’s Fenway Park, and despite high-end ticket prices too obscene to cite here, the Ameriquest-sponsored caravan will doubtless set new records for bodies shifted and dollars exchanged. But it’s gotten way too easy to make jokes about corporate rock and wheelchair rock and […]

In times when too many things make too little sense — for instance, the brazen millionaire crooks and liars that run our government in both its public and its private forms — you grasp at anything in the culture that looks positive, promising. Pathetic pastime though it can seem, one is helpless to do otherwise. […]

“Deep down in the jungle where the coconuts grow / There’s a signifying monkey that the WORLD should know … ” — “The Signifying Monkey” (Willie Dixon) It was already humid inside the Beacon Theater when Elvis Costello and his backing band The Imposters took the stage on an April night to play the single […]

“I got my finger on the trigger” are the first words you hear on Bruce Springsteen’s new album, Devils & Dust. They bespeak a promise that’s been implicit throughout Springsteen’s career; they summon up a pose he has customarily struck. They also imply the sort of violent, alienating move — a lethal shot, a symbolic […]

On February 28, a shooting occurred outside the studios of Hot 97, New York’s top hip-hop station, where Queens-born rapper Curtis Jackson, a k a 50 Cent (at the moment, the genre’s preeminent artist), was being interviewed. He used the occasion to publicly disown his protégé, The Game (real name Jayceon Taylor, of Compton, California), […]

“Real, pure, unaffected by outside influences.” So the Shaggs were described in the liner notes to their legendary 1969 album, Philosophy of the World. In this rare case, jacket hype disguised truth: Dot, Betty, and Helen Wiggin of Fremont, New Hampshire, had a sound that seemed innocent indeed of any other music then being made, […]

On an Alex Chilton bootleg called Starcrossed, there’s a suite of songs recorded at a Manhattan rock club sometime in 1977 or ’78. The singer, supported by a small band, is playing oldies to a small crowd — Porter Waggoner’s “The Rubber Room,” Dusty Springfield’s “The Look of Love,” some Everly Brothers, and Carl Perkins. […]

I’ve never heard a piece of reggae, ska, or rock-steady I didn’t like at least a little. The off-beat of Jamaican pop can make anything sound good — even the tribute album. Most tributes are a waste of time, and from the Hollies’ late-’60s effort to the 30th anniversary concert held at Madison Square Garden […]

What did anyone expect, upon hearing that Bob Dylan had written a memoir? What would the style be, what would it want to say? Would it be like those liner notes he wrote in the ’60s, full of secondhand Beatitudes rendered superfluous by the real poetry, verbal and musical, inside the jackets? Or would it […]