Life House was intended to be Pete Townshend’s life’s work, so to speak, following the somewhat unexpected runaway success of The Who’s May 1969 groundbreaking 2LP rock opera,Tommy. But for various reasons, portions of Life House were instead transmogrified into the nine songs that comprise one of the truly seminal albums of the rock era, August 1971’s Who’s Next.
1. Red Hot Chili Peppers: Stadium Arcadium (Warner Bros.). Producer Rick Rubin's frenetic, skittering sound helps these four eternally Lost Boy punk/funkers stay hungry - and relevant.
In the heyday of Blockbuster, music documentaries and concert videos were tough to find unless you were willing to settle for musty oldies like the Three Tenors or musty newbies like Britney Spears. But the rise of video-streaming technology - and in particular, Netflix's Watch Instantly streaming service - has made music-video content of all types easier to access.
One thing our ongoing pandemic lockdown continues to remind many of us music lovers of on a daily basis is just how much we all miss attending live concert events.
The Beatles were, for all intents and purposes, over. While new, original music would follow in May 1970 with the release of Let It Be, the balance of the recording sessions for what ultimately became September 1969's Abbey Road is generally acknowledged as the in-studio swan song for those four Liverpool moptops who forever defined, if not outright created, the popular music artform in the 1960s.
Al Stewart is the kind of seasoned artist known for being well worth the wait. The Scottish-born and London-bred Stewart initially focused on mining a folk-driven vein when he made his debut with October 1967's orchestrally buttressed Bed Sitter Images, and it took the burgeoning singer/songwriter five more albums and another eight years until he truly hit his stride with March 1975's Modern Times.
Imagine the score for a 33-minute film noir with nonstop action. That's Béla Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin in a nutshell, although it's actually a one-act dance suite. The story concerns three thugs who use a young woman as bait to rob a series of victims, culminating in the Mandarin. They murder him—but not before he consummates his passion for the girl. The plot had enough sex and violence to get it banned immediately upon its 1926 debut in Köln, Germany.