Of all America’s creative gifts to the world, does any touch humanity more than the captivating music we call the blues? Rock & roll, rhythm & blues, rock, soul, funk, jazz, heavy metal, and pop music in general, are just some of the musical genres that have rolled out of the blues. For lovers of…

Back in San Francisco last week for the first time in 20 years, we found ourselves, as you invariably do in San Francisco, amongst the throng at Pier 39. After checking that the city’s famous sea lions still hang out at K-dock, I heard the most unexpected sound – full tilt piano boogie woogie emanating from…

How George Bernard Shaw wrote the world’s first anti-rock music review.  Let’s go all literary today and talk about the Nobel Prize-winning author and playwright, George Barnard Shaw. If you haven’t heard of him, George had enormous influence on Western culture, politics and theatre from the 1880s until his death, aged 94, in 1950. The…

Here’s my fourth film on Original Chicago Blues. I totally forgot to upload it. Here is the missing fourth film from my series about the original era of Chicago Blues – the era BEFORE those iconic bluesmen Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker and company burst onto the blues scene in the 1950s. Actually, ‘burst…

It’s hardly rock ’n’ roll but we liked it. The first time I heard the Kinks, I didn’t know what struck me. Well, yes I did – probably the first power chords I’d ever heard; and they made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and start head-banging. It was high summer…