discoveries

Gil Hubbs, Stan Hubbs' younger brother, wrote us a short memoir about his brother that opens up Stan's world to us and dispels a lot of misinformation about his art, life, and h...

The tourist in Freeport, Grand Bahama is a creature starved for information. Street names are irrelevant to locals, appearing only on inconsistent road signs and the hard-to-fin...

In July of 1982, Indira Gandhi, the former Prime Minister of India, made her first official visit to the United States in more than a decade. For her meeting with President Rona...

It’s fun to watch bodies move around. Since Philadelphia’s jubilant Bandstand struck up a national obsession in the 1950s, the dance show has proven perhaps television’s most...

During his 40 years spent operating at the margins of the record business, Consolidated Productions founder Mel Alexander penned a total of 73 original songs. Across those same ...

Death is a soft white foam. Enter “The Space Between.” Your last breath slips off the lungs. You find yourself standing before an unfathomable froth, like a sea of steamed milk....

If you can deactivate the now-calcified preconceptions of ’90s nostalgia and push beyond the ear-perking noisy hooks that register at first as standard shoegaze moves, and get c...

Twin Cities punk rock was at an impasse in the late 1970s. Minneapolis trio The Suicide Commandos, pioneers of the local underground and the first band of its kind in the Lake S...

Starting at the tailend of the 1960s and continuing through the bygone ’90s, the Mississippi-born Joyce Spence journeyed across the United States and Canada, propelled by her...

The Mystic Tide story skirts the shoreline of a prototypical mid-60s grassroots rock’n’roll parable. It’s a modest tale, representing little more than a ripple across the...

It looked as if a tornado had passed through the house, picked up the remnants of Arrow Brown’s strange, sordid life, and dumped them in the alley. September 1990: a warm breeze...

With the esoteric sounds of ’80s Scottish cold wave duo Vazz enjoying a well-overdue renaissance, the band’s multi-instrumentalist and producer Hugh Small reminisces about their...

Being a teenager in the American suburbs of the 1980s and ‘90s often meant that your ideals seemed to outpace your surroundings. By the early 1990s, as a generation came of age ...

“We were all so young. This was really the first time that we were on our own without adults. There was this sense of our first real freedom.”—Craig Erickson

By 1997, emo was in the early throes of its first evolution since erupting out of the D.C. hardcore scene a dozen years earlier. This new wave was less concerned with its post-h...

Ohio’s Oberlin College has been a breeding ground for the struggling artist set since its 1833 founding. Poets, playwrights, authors, screenwriters, and musicians have tossed Ob...

“Well, you know a ‘love apple’ is a tomato,” explains vocalist Annette Warren. “And we didn’t want to be called ‘Tomato.’” So the Love Apple name—in colorful reference to the ap...

Manhattan's Wurlitzer Building, Floor #8, Room 551. Spring, 1977. The cheapest custom studio in New York City has cut their hourly rate in half to accommodate a middle-aged blac...

“The radio stations that played Spanish music had what they called ‘English Oldies.’ The deejay would play the Spanish songs but then he would pick some English oldies to add to...

More a Patterson exurb than a New York City suburb, Haledon, New Jersey, had seen the passage of a handful of meaningless garage combos, two of which performed dead-on covers of...

The White Birch, ca. 1899 Stephen Immerwahr: I first saw Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s The White Birch in 1990 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and loved it immediately. The two femal...

  Branko Mataja (1923-2000) was born in the small costal town of Bekar, then part of Dalmatia, now Croatia. Shortly after that, Branko's family relocated 500km east to the Yugos...

Bedhead began with two brothers—the Kadanes. Bubba two years older than Matt, they were from Wichita Falls, a small city in Texas about 120 miles northwest of Dallas. The town o...

Cutting what may’ve been the Ebirac label’s finest recorded moment, Caribe pulled out all the stops for La Solución's final album. Mi Barrio se Quemo (My Neighborhood is Burni...

Lamont Dixon’s sketch on the back cover of this album says just as much about Norman Whiteside as the songs contained herein. An eyes-skyward dreamer whose ambition and talent w...

It’s 1979 in Glens Falls, New York, and 18-year-old Alan Dunham hurries down the stairs into the basement of his folks’ home — his laboratory. As per usual, he’s got a new song ...

Recorded in 1974 under the auspices of a senior project at a small Quaker boarding school in Newtown, Pennsylvania, “Eternal Life” is the product of Shira Small’s four years awa...

Independence has always been full of holes: subterranean tunnels, secret passages, mines, hidden hollows, and reverberating caverns. A place tailor-made for making lots of noise...

*December 12, 1971, was an active news day in Costa Rica. Although hijackings were commonly reported items for a region embroiled in Communism’s tug of war, the chain of events ...

A half-generation or more too old to go the way of full-on love beads, kaftans and impulsively imbibing Owsley Stanley’s fine-tuned lysergic acid diethylamide, the trio of Doug ...

Sometimes, simply saying “I love you” isn’t an available option. Sometimes, because it’s both forbidden and impossible, a person’s feelings go unexpressed and are left to gnaw a...

Calvin Johnson, not yet 30 years old, was already an elder statesman of Olympia’s music scene. More importantly, he was its biggest booster. “I always tried to get people to com...

George Shaw doesn’t mind being a punchline. No, really: When the trumpeter recalls how one friend referred to the groovy, slick innovations he and bandmates like Frank Potenza, ...

It was a chilly Monday night in November 1991. Two sisters were about to take the stage at the Ace of Clubs in Nashville, Tennessee, for a performance that could crack open thei...

At the crest of his mid-20s, Andre Gibson, a native of the Washington Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, was nearly a decade deep into a sprawling, unchecked musical dis...

On any balmy evening in late-1960s suburban Paris, a young Isabelle Powaga drifts toward sleep, her mother intoning melodies borrowed from Antonio Carlos Jobim and 1964’s Getz/...

“Tax Scam Records” is a phrase that was coined by collectors to identify albums that are believed to have been manufactured for the sole purpose of—get this—losing money. From a...

Tucked away in St. Anne’s Court in London’s Soho district, Trident Studios was the site of countless classic recording sessions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In order to ma...

Swingin’ London in 1968 was bright with the still-exploding plastic inevitable: street fighting students, underground art happenings, rock and roll circuses, Beatle-owned boutiq...

In the late 1960s, tuition at the University of Illinois—the flagship state school in the Champaign-Urbana metropolitan area—was a meager $400 a year. Tony Freda, a student and ...

Late in February, 1977, University of Minnesota students Larry Falk and Lisa Henrickson traveled to Chris Moon’s Moonsound Studios on assignment for campus paper The Minnesota D...

In the 1976 hardbound volume Minnesota’s Black Community, publisher Walter R. Scott profiles the state’s African Americans, in 18 chapters including “Early Black Settlers,” “Gov...

After flipping their car on a snowy stretch of road between Fargo, North Dakota, and their hometown of St. Paul, Minneapolis, Pierre and Andre Lewis did what any brothers would’...

During 1972’s summer, 13-year-old James Harris III was enrolled in Upward Bound, an enrichment program on the University of Minnesota’s campus designed to help prepare middle-sc...

As the 1980s came in, Herman Jones had earned his ski-legs on stages inside such lodges as Duluth’s Spirit Mountain and Trollhaugen of Dresser, Wisconsin. In that era, he’d also...

Pepe Willie was more of a sapling than a seed when he arrived in Minneapolis in the early ’70s. Raised in Brooklyn, he got his first tastes of the music business under the tutel...

In the late 1970s, a peculiar sound began to bubble up out of the City of Lakes, in its land of 10,000 freshwater bodies. Isolated in the upper Midwest, populated by ancestors o...

An era was finding its end. Union Planters National Bank had finally pulled up the roots of Stax Records, leaving hundreds of musicians locked out of 926 East McLemore and the C...

In his own words, the story of Archie James Cavanaugh: I was born in Wrangell and raised in Kake, Alaska, a predominantly Tlingit community located on Kupreanoff Island in South...

In April of 1979, the lone long-playing release by Father’s Children hit retail and radio with a dull thud. It had been a down spring for Mercury Records, with the Osmonds on th...

Robert Hosea Williams was born in 1936 in tiny Princeton, Indiana. His father, Albert Williams, was far too ambitious to stay put in Princeton, a town best known as the early ho...

Fujimo Records, an acronym for “Fuck U Jack, I’m movin’ on,” was an unlikely destination for a trio of high school Methodists from Etna Green, Indiana. “It was a very small town...

In March of 1987 I ventured to Berkeley for a punk rock show with a slightly older kid named Ben (later changed to "Claude"). I was headed for the newly opened Gilman St Project...

It was three days from Austin, Texas, to Olympia, Washington, by Greyhound, and what Sean McManus remembered best about the journey, which he embarked upon with his roommate in ...

San Antonio, Texas, in the late 1970s was a city of 650,000 residents on the verge of a real estate and population explosion. A Chicano soul and Tejano stronghold since the late...

Sometime in the mid-'70s, a young country singer named Kathy Heideman walked into Tiki Studios in San Jose, California to do a job. She was there to record a set of songs writte...

When it came to rhythm and blues and rock and roll recording activity during the late 1950s and early ’60s, Los Angeles truly was the wild West. The Rocky Mountains handily sepa...

By the summer of 1971, Caroline Peyton and Mark Bingham had the bulk of Mock Up safely in the can. Their well-practiced thumbs were getting them rides toward California and out ...

The story of Jackie Shane is the story of one of the greatest unsung soul singers of the 1960s. It is the story of an African-American transgender woman who had the courage, str...

The life and music of Charlie Megira are more dream than reality, a reverie concocted by the mind in the throes of a fever, a welcome hallucination replete with beautiful settin...

In the early 20th century, Milwaukee was culturally vibrant and politically progressive. Closer in many ways to Central Europe than the American Midwest, it was a city of brewer...

My friends and I called them Indian ​Bummer​. A library in Cupertino. Not really a venue, more of a community space that also holds local Girl Scout meetings and canned food dri...

In November of 1948 16-year-old Don McGinnis, his parents, and siblings drove cross country from North Carolina to Los Angeles. “There were ten of us in two cars with belongings...

Our beloved friend Joanna Brouk passed away April 28, 2017 after a brief battle with cancer, just as the world was finally starting to catch up with her incomparable, pioneering...

It’s 2014 in Melbourne, Australia, and on the program of the Next Wave Festival is a piece described as “Neo-Paganism, Pop Divas, YouTube, Yoga and Death Metal side by side in a...

Owing to its incomparable selection of analog field recordings and their remarkable provenance, and to its impeccable UI (user interface) —our first ever app, Environments for i...

After years singing country and gospel tunes on the family ranch in the Verde Valley, in 1960 Arizona singer-guitarist Alvie Self recorded a rockabilly banger. “Let’s Go Wild” h...

Buried within the 1,200 Cuca master tapes, a ceiling-high tower of cardboard Home Depot boxes, sat a small collection of forgotten master tapes. Originally a recording studio, C...

In 1986 Belgian synth-pop trio Elisa Waut scored a regional hit with “Four Times More.” The tune was de rigueur in the pop landscape occupied by The Pretenders, Fleetwood Mac, a...

Benjamin Trey Gruber 3.13.1991—9.12.2017 Trey Gruber had a vitality that latched onto every facet of his music. He wrote sensitive and devastating songs performed with his band...

Riding the crest of West Hollywood’s break into Beverly Hills and covering a modest 2.7-mile stretch of California desert in concrete, Doheny Drive is both a repercussion of and...

Somewhere in the rolling cypress hills of rural Sonoma County, California, a box of old crystal wine glasses sits, collecting dust. Probably a common sight here in the heart of ...

Issued quietly in the dead of 1991 on compact disc, Windows and Light is Suse Milleman’s only album. The synthetic, balearic album “came out of living the experience of having a...

In a cottage behind Tinseltown landmark Hollywood United Methodist Church, Chip Weitzner forged an entire world. Astral Travels, released in 1979, is the culmination of years of...

I got about 50 copies out there, and that’s when everything got tough Los Angeles locals know Tony Palkovic from his long-running show on KPSC community radio in Claremont. For ...

Perhaps best known as the musical director for Tennessee Ernie Ford or Burt Tillstrom’s “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” television program, Jack Fascinato was also a top secret space-ag...

As usual, it was past midnight when Tommy Falcone pulled into New York City with a car full of teenagers. The yellow glow and tile walls of the Lincoln Tunnel fell away and a sp...

Naomi Lewis’ Cottage Songs and Seagulls and Sunflowers have long been prized by collectors for their superior production quality, and poetical experimentation within the genre. ...

Picture a transparent plastic sheet placed over an image on a light projector. A lecturer draws diagrams all over it in erasable marker in order to explain: This variable, when ...