By: Michael D. McClellan | “Before Elvis, there was nothing,” John Lennon once observed, this in reference to all those popular singers who crooned so statically and politely in front of rigid dance bands in the style of Perry Como. The white ones did, anyway. But Elvis was different – he grew up in Memphis, […]
By: Michael D. McClellan “Never regret thy fall, O Icarus of the fearless flight For the greatest tragedy of them all Is never to feel the burning light.” — Oscar Wilde Terence Trent D’Arby is dead. The ‘80s enigmatic supernova who, at the height of his popularity, sold more than a million albums in […]
By: Michael D. McClellan | David T. Walker’s fingerprints are all over one of the most noteworthy periods in music history, his contributions to the Motown corpus lauded by everyone from Stevie Wonder to Diana Ross, but you would never know it, not with the reticent Walker perfectly comfortable working in the shadows of such brilliance. Ubiquitous […]
By: Michael D. McClellan | Once upon a time, when Los Angeles lived and breathed, there was a man marked for greatness, despite the placid Midwestern upbringing that provided little hint that he was more than us after all. His backstory didn’t contain the baroque detail or the meteoric rise of a certain working class family from […]