Lucifer’s Friend – Ride The Sky (1971)
The needle drops, and the air crackles with something that feels dangerous. It’s a sound caught precisely at the fulcrum…
Black Sabbath – Paranoid
There are moments in music history when a sonic doorway is kicked open, not carefully unlocked. Black Sabbath’s 1970 breakthrough…
Canned Heat – Going up the Country (1969)
The first notes arrive like a promise. They are not the heavy, amplified churn of the late-60s electric blues that…
James Gang – Walk Away (1971)
I first heard it screaming out of a pair of cheap, tinny car speakers on a rainy interstate drive. It…
Canned Heat – On The Road Again (1968)
I remember the first time I truly heard this piece of music. It wasn’t through a tinny car radio or…
Eric Burdon & War – Spill The Wine
The air is thick, humid, smelling faintly of cheap California wine and a certain kind of studio delirium that only…
James Brown – Get On The Good Foot
It’s 1972. The air is thick with change, and the promises of the 1960s have curdled into a grittier, more…
Santana – Soul Sacrifice 1969
It is a familiar scene, etched into the collective memory of rock history: a twenty-year-old drummer, drenched in sweat and…
Sam Cooke – Blowing in the Wind
It’s late, the city quieted to a low hum, the kind of stillness where a great song can feel like…
Aretha Franklin – (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman
The streetlights blurred outside the cab window. Rain lashed the glass, an uneven rhythm track against the muted backdrop of…