Blog Posts by Barney Hoskyns

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A slightly unreal and slightly real account of a meeting between the Foreboding Four and their Number One Fan, Metal Mike Saunders, published in Circular on 25 September, 1972——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Some people might want to meet Bob Dylan. Others, if asked which rock idols they'd most like to rub elbows with, might spout off names like John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Keith Richard, Ray Davies. Feh.

Me, I was whizzing over to Griffith Park in my 1966 Chevy II to say hi to the greatest rock group in the world, the true keepers of the faith, the absolute Number One group of the '70s so far. You know who I'm talking about as well as I do: Black Sabbath.

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A Flashback: Jan. 12, 1972

How it all came about was, I won the recent What Black Sabbath Means to Me Contest. This, as I later found out, was a special offer included in but 500 lucky copies of Master of Reality pressed during December, 1971.

Fate as it were, upon acquiring my fifth new copy of Master of

Sticky Fingers, L.A. Woman and There's a Riot Goin' On get the respect, but six of 1971's more overlooked albums sound surprisingly good at 40, says Gene Sculatti——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

The big hits get their props as "heritage" records, even "iconic" works of art whose contours and content are to be admired and analyzed for decades. Forty years ago, pop's graduating-albums class included Led Zeppelin's fourth, Janis Joplin's Pearl, There's a Riot Goin' On, Madman Across the Water, L.A. Woman, Joni Mitchell's Blue and the Stones' valedictory Sticky Fingers.

But what of the rest of the hundreds of albums that stepped onstage in '71: Do any deserve a replay today?

As it turns out, yes. The year 1971 was a good one for sleepers, among them this half dozen, most now available on CD.

The Band: Cahoots (Capitol) Music from Big Pink and The Band rightly grabbed prizes as groundbreakers, but The Band's fourth also belongs alongside their best work. Looser, with

Don Snowden claims revisitation rights with rock's most beloved Athenians——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Snapshot 1: It was not a pretty persuasion.

In fact, I'm sure I was fairly well pissed off.

There we were at our second or third Jazz Fest in New Orleans circa '82 or '83, still in the throes of the first flush of discovering the full range of New Orleans music and culture (long before Cajun and Creole recipes/seasonings made it to menus around the world), especially the R&B piano tradition centred around Professor Longhair, sadly deceased only months before our first Crescent City pilgrimage a couple years before. But we did know of James Booker (who shall be waxed ecstatic over at greater length in another post shortly) and catching the mercurial pianist around town as often as we could during those two weeks was always high priority.

Now, Nina had turned a couple of her hometown friends on to Jazz Fest, music people from around Washington, D.C., so we were

Gary Pig Gold asks if there is a conspiracy to stop the Prefab Four entering the hallowed pantheon of rock immortals——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Can it really be true that Rolling Stone publisher/magnate Jann S. Wenner has personally conducted a decades-long campaign to bar the Monkees from induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

Far-from-dummy Monkee Peter Tork certainly thinks so.

"He doesn't care what the rules are and just operates how he sees fit," Tork told the New York Post in 2007. "It is an abuse of power. I don't know whether the Monkees belong in the Hall of Fame, but it's pretty clear that we're not in there because of a personal whim."

Now sure, the Monkees (along with the Beach Boys, Byrds, even Beatles, most every Motown act, etc. etc. etc.) certainly didn't play every single note on every single record they ever made. Nevertheless, in 1967 Jann and his fledgling zine were riding extremely high on the Monkee-bashing bandwagon, using the

When U2 decided to go all glam 'n' ironic on Achtung Baby, the late Robert Sandall was there to watch them take it to the streets of Europe. This was his account, published in the London Sunday Times on May 31, 1992.——Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Having, by his own account, spent most of the 1980s "trying to dodge being a rock star," Bono (aka Paul Hewson, the singer and most prominent member of the Irish supergroup U2) now looks like a caricature of a man making up for lost time.

His sudden arrival last Wednesday in the lounge of Zurich's Dolder Park Hotel has much of the glam élan of his entrance, earlier that evening, on to the stage at Zurich's Hallenstadion. The wrap-around, bug-eyed shades and slinky man-in-black designer outfit, nattily set off by a small but perfectly-formed cigar, are all very New U2: a bit flash, a lot more fun. Heavier on style, lighter on content.

The band's guitarist known as the Edge but christened David Evans, is perched on

As much as her personal life was the archetypal pop-culture car crash, Amy Winehouse's music was sexy, stylish, and more emotionally compelling than anything else the Noughties had to offer. The show I saw her play in London in July 2007 was one of the most riveting I've seen in 40 years--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

The last time I'd had a ticket for Amy Winehouse was in March. The previous night she'd played L.A.'s Roxy, but I didn't have a ticket for the Roxy. With a certain inevitability she was a no-show at Spaceland in Silver Lake. That was the gig I had the ticket for.

From Silver Lake to London's Somerset House via a wedding and a Mercury Prize nomination: would the divine Ms. W stand me up a second time? Well, she didn't and she told us - more than once - how she'd been looking forward to this for "months."

I'd been instantly smitten by Winehouse's sophomore opus Back to Black: not by the novelty hit 'Rehab' so much as the album's other treasures, which

Country's alternative diva recalls the late Gram Parsons - and banters with guitar maestro James Burton - for the benefit of Melody Maker's West Coast correspondent--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

"I was nervous but I looked forward to playing overseas because I had this feeling there was an audience for my kind of music, especially since Gram's albums did so well there. He had been recognized critically in Europe and England far more than in the States. I don't think people here realize the magnitude of how he affected music," says Emmylou Harris during a rehearsal break at Alley Sound in North Hollywood.

Emmylou's new album, Elite Hotel, is filling the airwaves throughout the States and with a return trip planned for England in a couple of weeks, things look bright for 1976. Over the last year Emmylou and her band have been working solidly, including two LA shows with Elton John.

"There's no way you're gonna get 55,000 people who came to see Elton John

I thought it was high time someone just came out and shouted it from a virtual rooftop: in some distant parallel universe, Ron Sexsmith is the greatest singer-songwriter around. If you didn't already know that, you heard it here--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

The first thing we might say about Ronald Eldon Sexsmith is that any other aspiring singer-songwriter/poet-troubadour with a name like that would have changed it years ago to, say, Jim Tunesmith or Woody Blacksmith.

Ron Sexsmith?! How you gonna make it through this world with a moniker like that?! Especially when Sex is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when you hear Ron's sweetly droopy songs.

Yet the fact that Ron Sexsmith is called Ron Sexsmith is one of the many things I love about a man I regard as one of the most unjustly unappreciated treasures of the past 20 years. I love the name because it's real if faintly strange: no one could possibly have made it up as a cool-sounding showbiz ID. And