Music Reviews

Bob Dylan hit a bit of a rough patch as the freewheelin’ 1980s gave way to the dour 1990s. Dylan ended the MTV decade on a high note with September 1989’s Oh Mercy—a visceral, smoky triumph produced by Daniel Lanois—but he stumbled out of the new-decade gate with the half-hearted mish-mosh sheen of September 1990’s Under the Red Sky.

John Mellencamp was making waves. Unfortunately saddled with the stage name “John Cougar” when he came onto the scene in the late-1970s, once he began climbing the singles and sales charts, he asserted his artistic identity much more forcefully by crediting his hit October 1983 LP Uh-Huh to John Cougar Mellencamp. He did so again on his full-artistic breakthrough album, August 1985’s Scarecrow, before dropping the Cougar moniker entirely when the ’90s rolled around.

Just Turn On With Me

"To be played at maximum volume." So went the listening instructions appearing in all caps near the bottom left of the back cover of David Bowie's June 1972 career-defining dystopian space-glam saga, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars.

I continue to feel blessed I was able to see Pink Floyd's Division Bell Tour, their last jaunt around the world, at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey on July 17, 1994. Even though I was in the nosebleeds, way up near the top of the back of the stadium, I quite enjoyed the band's overall visual spectacle and the live quad sound system to their intended effects.

R.E.M. were the undisputed kings of American-bred alt-rock by the time the mid-1990s rolled around. Emerging from the college-town kudzu of Athens, Georgia, with the game-changing jangle of July 1981's "Radio Free Europe" single and August 1982's subsequent Chronic Town EP, the underground quartet perfected a more fully realized signature sound on their April 1983 full-length debut, Murmur.

1968 was a busy year for The Beatles. They had traveled to India to study Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, launched their own record label, Apple, and spent months at EMI's studios at Abbey Road recording their mammoth double-album, The Beatles (aka The White Album). But even before that album was released, they were planning what would end up as their post-breakup album and film, Let It Be. That disc was recently reissued by Apple/Capitol/Universal in a super deluxe edition, remixed by Giles Martin and engineer Sam Okell, complete with previously-unreleased bonus tracks, and the film has now been given a reimagining by Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson, in the form of The Beatles: Get Back on the Disney+ streaming service.