Blog Posts by Barney Hoskyns

NOTE: This is a pretty straight transcript of what the late Barry Beckett told me in his Nashville office in September 1985. He had just moved up from Muscle Shoals Sound, where he'd worked with everyone from Wilson Pickett and the Staple Singers to Bobs Dylan and Seger, and he would go on to produce not only Hank Williams Jr. and Kenny Chesney but Phish and the Waterboys. In this interview he talks about how he came to Muscle Shoals and how a rift with FAME Studios boss Rick Hall led to the formation of the famous Muscle Shoals Sound studio at 3614 Jackson Highway. Barry was a great man and will be sorely missed as a presence in American music. -- Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

                                                            *

"I WAS BORN in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1943. I moved to Pensacola, Florida, at the age of 19 and spent about four years down there. I went on the road with a small combo and played the Gulf Coast circuit--Top 40, plus a lot of

25 years after he first hinted at the project, the vast first installment of Neil Young's multi-media scrapbook — covering the years up to 1972 — is finally with us. And it's awesome.-- Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

"I don't know that I have much to hide," Neil Young says in a 1971 home-movie interview included on Archives, Vol. 1. "Other than bein' a rich hippie..."

Young certainly doesn't hide much in this 10-disc monument to himself, which after all is only the first of several pyramids this rock pharaoh is assembling to enshrine his artistic legacy. No outtake, no scrap of scrawled lyrics, has been left unturned in the effort to encapsulate the Canadian's 50-year career.

Many diehard Neil Nuts had begun to wonder if the Archives would ever become a reality, so long have they been promised, postponed, rescheduled. Now the first volume is here, is disappointment inevitable? Actually, no. Tailor-made for the box-set culture that Dadrock has become, this

It's an astonishing 40 years since Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman formed their massively influential Byrds spinoff the Flying Burrito Brothers. Let's track back to the making of their seminal 1969 debut The Gilded Palace Of Sin--and its immediate aftermath.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

In the fall of 1968, Gram Parsons set about assembling his very own Rolling Stones--a country-soul-rock-gospel hybrid that would give proper vent to the music inside him. And who should join him in this enterprise but Chris Hillman, who like Parsons had jumped ship from the Byrds. "As time healed, we started talking again," Hillman says. "The Byrds had really fallen flat for me. Even after hiring Clarence White, I felt it wasn't going to go anywhere. So Gram and I patched it up and had this wonderful idea for the Flying Burrito Brothers."

Like Parsons, Hillman had separated from his wife, and the two bandless bachelors moved into a house in Reseda and began writing songs. For a

RBP's very own Seldom Seen Kids--make thatWrinklies--present the year's aural highlights.--Barney Hoskyns, EditorialDirector

Present: 1 Sam Amidon--"Sugar Baby," from All Is Well (BedroomCommunity): Sam takes old songs and old instruments and makes them soundneither nostalgic nor hokey--nor, for that matter, old. Then he sings in thesweetest, most buttery voice imaginable. This song is a heartbreaker to itslast stuttering notes. Listen to it whilst perusing Amanda Petrusich'sexcellent questing travelogue It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, AndThe Search For The Next American Music (Faber). Martin Colyer

2 Jill Barber--"When I'm Makin' Love To You," from Chances(Dependent): A ray of early morning sunshine in an album ofsmall-hours love-lorn lament, this is a shag-happy celebration of all beingright with the world, sung with a sleepy little gurgle of old-timeyconcupiscence from a Canadian rootsy-tootsy artist in the tradition of VictoriaWilliams. Mat Snow

3 Beck--"Gamma Ray,"

Five years ago, the Rock's Backpages posse knocked their fevered crania together and came up with the 50 greatest tracks ever laid down in the name of F.U.N.K. Here are the next ten, from Cameo to Grover Washington, Jr.-- Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

40. Cameo: "Candy," from Word Up! (Atlanta Artists/Polygram, 1986) A fractured, jagged groove built on slamming machine beats, interrupted every eight bars by a descending slab of metal guitar. Larry Blackmon admonishes and cajoles, frequently in his best Dick Van Dyke mockney. The killer track from a killer album--the boys from Atlanta at their absolute peak.

39. The Commodores: "Brick House," from Zoom (Motown, 1977) It's hard to remember now, but there was a time when the Commodores were more than just a backing band for the lachrymose Lionel Richie. "Brick House" is one funky blaster--a paean to, ahem, well-built gals. The horns stab, the bass thumps, the boys gleefully chant horny filth--it's one helluva

The bookies' surprise favorite for the UK's ultra-prestigious Mercury Music Prize is the dark second offering from a mysterious South Londoner who calls himself Burial. Untrue confirms what his 2006 debut intimated: The guy is an underground genius.

I don't even know what dubstep is, and I'm not sure I need to know. It seems to be a term for the skippy, jittery South London dance music that came out of UK garage and "two-step" — the latest mutation of the sound that produced Mike Skinner aka The Streets.

I loved The Streets and for some reason felt compelled to check out last year's debut by Burial, whose name suggests pantomime metal morbidity but who is in fact a self-effacing fellow from South London making records in his bedroom while harboring no desire for personal attention: a laudable stance in this age of rampant exhibitionism. "I can't step up, I want to be in the dark at the back of a club," Burial (né Will Bevan) said in a recent and very rare interview. "I don't read

The death of Jerry Wexler has robbed the world of one of black music's great white facilitators: a brilliant believer who coined the term "rhythm and bleus" and nurtured soul giants from Ray Charles to Aretha Franklin. I had the honor of interviewing him twice, once in New York in 1985 and again in Florida, where he'd retired, in 1993. This is an excerpt from the piece that resulted from the latter encounter. -- Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Most ageing music moguls slough off any real love for music they started out with and sink into a torpor of cocktails and daytime television. Not Jerry Wexler. Wrapped in an enormous hooded bathrobe, with the sea lapping against the jetty at the end of the garden, Wex seeks solace from his favorite saxophonists — Johnny Hodges, Lester Young, Ben Webster — long into the Florida night. Fifty years after first hearing them on 52nd Street he's still hero-worshipping them, still can't listen to Henry "Red" Allen on "Meet Me In

It is 35 years since Todd Rundgren released the spellbinding A Wizard, A True Star. With the sometime Runt about to release his new Arena, it's time to pose the question: Is Wizard the greatest album ever made?

"Sometimes," Todd Rundgren sang, "I don't know what to feel." But sometimes you do know what to feel. And right now I feel like saying what I've contended for many years, which is that Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star is simply The Greatest Album Ever Made.

You heard me right, pardner. Better than Pet Sounds. Better than OK Computer. Certainly better than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Farts Dub Band. An album of vaulting ambition — of wizardry and true stardom — released into an unsuspecting world by a contrary, super-precocious wonderboy who should have been the biggest thing to happen in the '70s but who was just too complex and polymorphous for lasting pop success.

A Wizard, A True Star came out 35 years ago but still sounds more bravely futuristic than any ostensibly cutting-edge