Music - Stories

In high school, I hated Kiss. I loathed them. I despised them with an intensity that adolescents reserve well, um, for pretty much everything. The origins of my Kiss hatred were simple: they were immensely popular. Therefore, ipso facto, Kiss were the product of focus groups, polling, and shadowy backroom corporate manipulations. They were talentless, made-up hacks who pandered to the lowest common entertainment denominator. That was Kiss. And then, approximately twenty years

Johnny Rotten, née John Joseph Lydon, is slouching at the podium at the Holiday Inn on King Street West in Toronto, and holding forth on his humble beginnings. He sips on a bottle of mineral water, his bleached-blonde head tucked to the side. “I come from the lowest kind of shit you can imagine,” says Johnny, who is wearing a black designer T-shirt, baggy black pants and shiny new pair of black Addidas that retail for about $200. He is nearly fifty, and he takes his step-gran

In the seventies and the eighties, when they were still together, the Ramones were as ubiquitous and as constant as, say, the Catholic Church or Starbucks. Wherever and whenever you saw them - and, in all, there were 2,263 shows to see - the punk rock quartet from Forest Hills, New York generally looked the same, and they generally sounded the same, as well. This is not say that the Ramones did not eventually learn to master their instruments (they did), or that they periodic

The sticker affixed to the London Calling album shrink-wrap, 23 years ago this month, boldly declared that the Clash were “the only band that matters.” If that is true – if it was more than record company hyperbole – then Joe Strummer’s death on Sunday, of a heart attack at age 50, was a very big deal indeed. It wasn’t as big as John Lennon’s murder, of course, which came one year after London Calling was released, and shook an entire generation. Nor as newsworthy, likely, as

Things You Suspected You'd Regret When You Got Older, But Did Anyway, Part 397 the 1970s, Warren was (not entirely surprisingly) unlike many of peers. To him, a weekend spent smoking dope and listening to Led Zep on headphones was a wasted 48 hours. If he was going to irritate his teachers and like-minded authority figures, there had to be a better way. Along with his pals, Ras Pierre Schenk, Alan "Flesh" Macdonald and assorted other miscreants who attended Bishop Carroll and