Features

Roger McGuinn. McGuinn co-founded the group with Gene Clark and was its nominal leader. If you disassemble the complex tapestry of the Byrds' sound into its molecular underpinnings, McGuinn's distinctive voice and unique twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar are the nucleus. Lead guitarist McGuinn's unique style simultaneously employs a flat pick and fingerpicking patterns, drawing

more from five-string banjo rolls than typical guitar scales. When this unusual picking pattern is done on an electric twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar, the resulting sound is a brilliant cascade of harmonic intervals and gleaming overtones. McGuinn also sang lead on many of the group's songs, including all of their Dylan interpretations.

(This piece, originally written in 1988, runs with a few updates)

Maddy Matlock and the Paducah Patrol, Warren Barker, The Vestry Choir, Raoul Meynard and Orchestra, Clint Walker and the Sunflower Serenaders, Gus Farney at the Giant Wurlitzer- these are just a few of the exciting musical acts that helped Warner Brothers Records lose a whopping $3 million a year between 1958 and 1962- its first four years in existence.

Not a great start. In fact the parent company, Warner Brothers films almost shut the doors, but didn’t, according to Fredrick Dannen in his excellent and often hilarious book “Hit Men,” out of fear that it wouldn’t collect money owed by slow paying independent record distributors.

The Gruvy Awards are back yet again! An annual event, The Gruvys are given to the best products AnalogPlanet reviewed in the most recent calendar year. This time around, the Gruvys honor the gear we tested in 2023 and subsequently found to possess a combination of high build quality, exceptional sonics, and in the case of less expensive gear, provide great value for the money. Read on to see what products made the 2023 AP Gruvy Awards cut. . .

Producer Rick Rubin born in Long Beach, Long Island, New York in 1963, graduated high school in 1981. Johnny Cash, born in Kingsland, Arkansas in 1932, graduated high school in 1950. Yet these two, separated in time by more than thirty years, and by an even wider socio-cultural gap, will forever be linked by the music they created together during Cash’s last decade of life. Rubin’s resurrection of Cash’s career with the release of American Music in 1994 is but one fascinating facet of this enigmatic figure’s twenty year career in music.

In 1984, while a film and video student at N.Y.U., Rubin met Russell Simmons at Danceteria—a New York club where downtown hardcore rockers and uptown rappers mixed comfortably—and the two immediately hit it off, sharing a common musical vision of hard beats and hard rhymes, with Simmons drawing from R&B roots and Rubin from hard rock. Rubin had a vision of melding the two seemingly disparate musical forms and though he’d never produced a record, he sought out the duo of T. La Rock and Jazzy Jay, and out of that came a 12” vinyl single, “It’s Yours,” which was released on Partytime/Streetwise records. It featured rhyming raps set to a loud, hardcore beat with metal overtones. Though the track went on to sell around 100,000 copies—an impressive number for the newly emerging musical genre—Rubin was never paid for his work.