Tim Stegall

This past March 5, the French punk label Guerilla Asso quietly slipped a genius album into the marketplace: Rocket To Kingston, credited to Bobby Ramone. The melding of the isolated vocal tracks from nine of Bob Marley’s most deathless classics to edited Ramones backing tracks, it sounds like a joke on paper. The cover even […]

Lester Bangs, the greatest rock journalist ever, felt eternal Lower East Side musical royals the Velvet Underground were “our Beatles and Bob Dylan combined” and that “modern music begins” with them. He wasn’t wrong. They existed only for a handful of years—1965 to 1970. But five years was enough for them to create virtually everything […]

The idea of compiling a list of the greatest punk singers of the ‘80s might seem a bit odd. After all, this was when hardcore rose and quickly dominated all things punk. And let’s face it: Hardcore vocalists are more noted for bellowing than actual singing, per se. Not that late ‘70s punk harbored many […]

1996: President Bill Clinton was squaring off against Kansas Sen. Bob Dole in a successful bid for a second term in the White House. On April 3, former math professor Ted Kaczynski was arrested in his remote Montana cabin, suspected (correctly, it turns out) to be American domestic terrorist the Unabomber. Conservative public policy bulwark […]

Since the world first became aware that there is such a thing as punk, there’s been a nonstop argument about its birthplace. The clueless mainstream media reported for years that it began in England, simply because the Sex Pistols’ snarl was more extreme. Which royally pissed off New York City, the first place to essentially […]

Rock ‘n’ roll had, for the most part, lost its “roll” by 1970. It became rock music—self-serious, dour, pompous, filled with pretensions to being “art.” It ceased being fabulous teenage noise, filled with Chuck Berry’s playful swagger and Elvis’ hypersexualized pelvic thrust and rebel sneer. Kids wanted something loud and flashy, full of energy, something […]

Alongside Hank Williams, Bob Dylan is arguably the greatest American songwriter of the 20th century. Last year’s blues-drenched Rough And Rowdy Ways proved that he’s hardly lost any of his gifts in this century, even as he approached his 80th birthday this past May 24. But the minute he walked into New York’s Columbia Studio […]

Kid Congo Powers has been one of punk rock’s most valuable players since 1979. That was the moment when boho poet/Slash journalist/Blondie fan club president Jeffrey Lee Pierce handed an open-tuned electric guitar to the Ramones fan club president, who’d previously been one of the suburban teenage habitues of influential local DJ Rodney Bingenheimer’s storefront […]