
Dan Epstein is the Forward’s contributing music critic. His books include Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76.
Dan Epstein is the Forward’s contributing music critic. His books include Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76.
Of the many memorable moments in Apple TV+’s eight-part documentary “1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything,” there’s a particular segment in Episode 3 (“Changes”) that may be my favorite. On a drab-looking British TV chat show from 1971, adult pundits and teen guests argue over whether there should be sex education in UK schools…
The idea of “outtakes” — songs recorded by an artist during sessions for an album, but which for whatever reason don’t make the final running order — has fascinated me ever since I dropped 15 bucks on “Still On the Edge,” a bootleg collection of Bruce Springsteen demos and studio outtakes, back in the early…
It’s August 14, 1971. “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” by the Bee Gees is enjoying its second of four straight weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, “Klute” is the number one film at the U.S. box office, and tonight St. Louis Cardinals ace Bob Gibson will hurl the first and only no-hitter of…
The definitive top 50 rankings of Leonard Cohen’s 'Hallelujah' cover versions
And no, this is not an aggrieved defense of a Boomer icon either
Nöthin’ But a Good Time. By Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock St. Martin’s Press, $29, 560 pages It was during the first few weeks of 1984 that I suddenly realized David Lee Roth was Jewish. I’d been a Van Halen fan for nearly five years at that point, yet had somehow never considered the possibility…
For a rock and roll-obsessed teenager in the early-to-mid-1980s, picking up the first two New York Dolls albums was like stumbling across a pair of travel brochures from an enchanting destination that no longer existed. Whenever I visited my dad in New York City I could still traverse the same filthy lower Manhattan sidewalks that…
This holiday season inevitably brings to mind all the classic Christmas songs that have been written by Jews. Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” is the big blini, of course, having been covered more than 500 times since Bing Crosby first sang it on his NBC Radio show on Christmas Day 1941. But there are over a…
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