Category: Rock music
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Splat! — Deep Purple Prove They Still Have Something to Say
By David Cohen | Classic Rock There’s a particular kind of nerve required to call your twenty-fourth studio album Splat! Most bands fifty-plus years into a career reach for gravity — some late-career meditation on mortality, wrapped in a title that sounds like it belongs on a headstone. Deep Purple, characteristically, have gone the other…
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The Day John Fogerty Had to Prove He Was John Fogerty
By David Cohen | Classic Rock I play rhythm guitar in a covers band. We love CCR . Anyone who has ever tried to play John Fogerty will tell you the same thing: the man has a sound. Not just a style — a sound. That swampy, coiled groove; the way the rhythm hangs back…
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The Quiet One Who Made the Noise Possible: John Paul Jones and the Architecture of Led Zeppelin
Last time I wrote about Jimmy Page the producer. This week I want to talk about the other half of Led Zeppelin’s secret — the multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and musical polymath who was doing fifty arrangements a month before he ever picked up a bass guitar in anger. If you have read my piece on Jimmy…
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The Man Behind the Desk: How Jimmy Page’s Real Genius Was Never the Guitar
Everyone knows Jimmy Page the guitarist. Almost nobody talks about Jimmy Page the producer — the man who invented the sound of heavy rock in a recording studio before he ever played it on a stage. There is a version of Jimmy Page that everyone knows. The Les Paul slung low. The violin bow across…
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Reflections of a Lawyer Who’s Also Lead Singer and Rhythm Guitarist in a Rock Band
A Cambridge-educated lawyer, a property mogul, a VC executive, and a retired Microsoft veteran walk into a bar in Tel Aviv. This is not the setup for a joke. This is my band. There is a version of my professional biography that I trot out when the situation calls for it. Cambridge law, 1988. English…
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The Harmonies Nobody Noticed Disappearing: Howie Epstein and the Quiet Loss at the Heart of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers
He wasn’t the frontman, the lead guitarist, or the founding member. He was the bass player and harmony singer who made the Heartbreakers sound like the Heartbreakers for twenty years — and whose absence most fans only recognised after he was gone. By David Cohen, Crosswinds Daily There is a particular kind of musician whose…
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“You Got a Lot of Nerve”: The Night Billy Gibbons Played Hendrix’s Songs in Front of Hendrix — and Changed Rock History
Everyone knows the myth: Hendrix once called Gibbons the best guitarist in America. It never happened. The real story is better. By David Cohen, Crosswinds Daily There is a famous piece of rock trivia that you will hear at every ZZ Top concert, in every Billy Gibbons interview compilation, and in roughly half the comment…