Carlo | March 7, 2010
In rock ‘n’ roll, comebacks are by no means a sure bet. Some bands never go away, even when they should, like the Stones and the Who. Some go acoustic and minimal, like Ray Davies of the Kinks. Others devolve into their leader, like Roky Erickson, whose 13th Floor Elevators yielded the barbed-wire breakup song, [...]
Carlo | November 6, 2009
Weird to think of “Leonard Cohen Live in London” alongside “Allman Brothers at Fillmore East,” but both are paradigms of the live album, capturing artists at the peak of their powers. Cohen’s was recorded in 2008 when he was 73, near the start of his nearly two-year-long tour; the American leg this fall was his [...]
Carlo | November 1, 2009
I keep running into other lucky ones who attended the Leonard Cohen concert at the Allen Theatre in Cleveland Oct. 25; we all stand in awe (here’s my preview). In more than three hours, Cohen and his amazing troupe of cosmic musicians rekindled my belief, that I’d thought retro, in pop as conveyor of truth. [...]
Carlo | June 26, 2009
When I called Michael Jackson a has-been on my Facebook page, some people were pissed. All I meant was that since the mid-’90s, the most interesting thing about Jackson, who died June 25, was his dysfunction. Weird-looking, for sure; mysterious and shape-shifting psychologically and otherwise. The child molestation charges he was cleared of, the marriages [...]
