Jonny Whiteside

Hard as hell to imagine that anything good came of Hurricane Katrina, but in one case it did. Los Angeles drummer Harold Brown, who in 1960 assembled the core players that eventually became known as multiplatinum-selling, funk-jam revelators War, had been living in New Orleans for years; suddenly homeless, he......

{mosimage}It may seem odd that country singer Porter Wagoner, who has built a career on graphic examinations of matters of temperance, social morality and spiritual rectitude, dispenses his observations while sporting the gaudiest of sequin-and-rhinestone-encrusted Nudie suits. When hosting a segment at the Grand Ole Opry, where he has regularly......

{mosimage}David Axelrod suffers a fate shared by many great American creative minds: The Los Angeles producer-arranger-composer, who oversaw a long string of albums by Lou Rawls and Cannonball Adderley for Capitol Records, is celebrated in Europe, but has been all but forgotten here at home. (The U.K. label Mo’Wax coaxed......

The King is dead. James Brown was pop music’s true ruler, a king who, unlike Elvis Presley, actually reflected American culture’s reality. Brown did it with a painstakingly crafted mix of visceral, horny instinct and militant sociopolitical messages, striking with an impact no one in the history of recorded music......

Sandy West, the formidable drummer whose taut, brawny traps work propelled mid-’70s all-grrl phenom the Runaways to dizzying heights, died on Saturday, October 21, from lung cancer. West was only 47 years old, and it’s a damn shame, in part because West’s work was so grossly underrated by the many......