Jonny Whiteside

In 2017, country music fans were thrilled when singer-songwriter Tracy Dawn Thompson announced a collaboration with Grammy-winning producer and former Dwight Yoakam guitarist Pete Anderson. The duo began recording and performing together but late last month Anderson filed an unlawful-detainer lawsuit against the singer seeking to evict her from a Los Angeles apartment building he owns....

The death of saxophonist Big Jay McNeely, felled by cancer at age 91 on Sunday, Sept. 16, shuts the door on Los Angeles’ world-changing postwar R&B explosion. McNeely was the sole surviving artist from that profoundly revolutionary era and he epitomized it with an elegantly aggressive musicality — known as honking — which laid the foundation for rock & roll and kicked off a national craze via a horde of sound-alike responses to his electrifying 1948 debut “Deacon’s Hop.”...

From flat-broke chart-toppers TLC to producer Norman Petty laying down after-hours overdubs that allowed him to steal half of Buddy Holly’s song publishing rights, the music business has been reliably populated by some of the worst ripoff artists and bad-faith practitioners in the history of humanity. Naturally, Los Angeles has hosted many of the absolute lowest, and each one of these individuals — almost all uniformly black-hearted dastards — bears both close examination and endless excoriation....

The almost simultaneous deaths of legendary percussionists D.J. Fontana and Nick Knox last week was shocking, tragic and a loaded cultural moment that demands re-examination of the 20th century’s single greatest phenomenon — rock & roll. As Elvis Presley’s drummer, Fontana played a critical role in establishing a sound whose fundamentally primordial message of rebel liberation threatened to destroy Western civilization’s social order....

Dancer Lee Angel was midcentury rock & roll's premier muse, a backstage asset who exerted an irresistible force over Little Richard, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Jackie Wilson....

The jolt of losing West Coast punk-and-beyond legend Tony Kinman to cancer last week was as ugly and unexpected a bit of misfortune as this unpredictable world offers, but the premier of a new video for younger sibling Chip Kinman's Ford Madox Ford band offers no small solace. Taken from......

Tony Kinman, one of California punk rock’s most creative, forceful and influential artists, died this morning following a brief struggle with cancer. He was 63....

One never forgets their first Pedal Strike show. The high-velocity Los Angeles bike-punk quartet throw down a supercharged sound — taut, dynamic, intense — but vocalist Gnarly Charly routinely elevates the proceedings to stunningly astral heights. Without missing a beat, he’ll produce a piece of paper from his pocket, fold it into an origami headdress, pull a small wooden crate from behind an amp and proceed to go through a series of gravity-defying handstands before slipping offstage for a course of spectacular backflips across the dance floor....