Bios and stories about the artists we feature
Don’t go running for your old Latin textbook. The quasi-Latin phrase Vincebus Eruptum is supposed to mean “We control chaos” and if San Francisco psychedelic rockers Blue Cheer had any say in the matter, it was going to be the name of their first album. Recorded live in the studio, the six song set kicked […]
I called up my old Twig bandmate Mike (bass player and resident electronic wizard) and asked him to tell me everything that I would need to record a band live. Mike had done this in April of 1975 when he recorded our band Sledgehammer on one night of a two night gig we played […]
In my archives, I have a old cassette tape dating back to early in my junior year of high school – somewhere around 1969. It isn’t much to listen to because there is a lot of background noise, some snippets of dialog and the first (and unfortunately only) bit of music ever put down on […]
It was a toss up between ‘Fog Tap’ or ‘Spinal Hat’ so I flipped a coin to decide what to call this installment of FTV. The band Foghat was named years before the band even formed when guitarist/vocalist ‘Lonesome Dave’ Peverett was playing Scrabble with his brother. The nonsense word stuck in his subconscious […]
Imagine 11,000 screaming fans, the majority of them girls between the ages of 13 and 17, crammed into a ballroom with a legal capacity of just 2,500. This crowd would be the equivalent of the audience at the much larger Milwaukee Arena packed into a space the size of a large high school gymnasium on […]
As far back as I can remember, our family had pickup trucks. I learned to drive on our camp beater truck that was old enough (circa 1949) that it sported a standard shift on the column, a key that was on and off only, and the starter footswitch was on the floor near the […]
Ronnie Montrose died in 2012 after a prolonged struggle with prostate cancer and that is what music fans everywhere were led to believe. Later reports indicated that he had taken his own life, but in that he had resolved to battled the disease without chemotherapy or invasive procedures, one undoubtedly led to the other. […]
It is the summer of 1967. Herman’s Hermits and The Who are touring the United States. Which band is the opener and which is the headliner? This is a trick question because technically, the opening band was The Blues Magoos with The Who second on the bill and Peter Noones’ lightweight pop band Herman’s […]
Joan Baez was a big part of the 1960s and played a major role in defining the entire protest singer genre. I didn’t like her. I liked Donovan, Dylan and Arlo Guthrie, all artists who were supporting causes and writing songs very similar to Baez, but I could never quite get past her often prickly, […]
In the fall of 2016, we spent two editions of FTV discussing the end – as in “when a band comes to an end” and not “The End of the world” (9-28-16 and 10-5-16 if you care to backtrack a little). A couple of months ago, we spent sometime talking about the sudden end, and […]