Robert Lloyd

Typesetting, Yes. Typecasting, No

Robert Lloyd
Typesetter 1979-1981Music editor 1982-1985-ishWriter, “Critical List,” mid-1980s-early ’90sTV critic 1997-2002Best of L.A. editor 1985 and 2001Contributing writer 1979-2004 As a person with a regular byline, I am sometimes asked by journalism students for advice on how I got started in the business. I tell them that my case is a......

The Contemporaries

Robert Lloyd
The golden age of the session player is long over, but musicians still make a living at it. With apologies to everyone who should be mentioned here and isn’t, a sampling of players who might lately be found at work in the recording studios of Hollywood, along with a smattering......

Time of the Session

Robert Lloyd
Most of the music you will ever hear will be played by people you will never see and whose names you will neither know nor think to ask. It will be recorded in windowless rooms, witnessed sometimes only by an engineer or producer, the now-ancient technology of the overdub making......

Sandow's Inferno

Robert Lloyd
"WHEN YOU READ IT," SAYS ARTIST SANDOW BIRK OF Dante's Inferno, the great work of Western literature he has recently illustrated and textually updated, "the first thing is that it's so real. They talk about the actual scale of how big hell is, and there are maps of it, and......

Mr. Entertainer

Robert Lloyd
Photo by Photofest THE 13 YEARS SINCE HE DIED — OF THROAT CANCER perhaps not unrelated to the cigarettes that filed ceaselessly through his lips — have been good to Sammy Davis Jr. A four-CD career retrospective (Rhino's Yes I Can! The Sammy Davis Jr. Story) came out a few......
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20th -Century Cruise

Robert Lloyd
Take seven stranded castaways -- a first mate, a skipper, too; a millionaire and his wife; a movie star; a professor; and a Mary Ann -- lost not on an uncharted desert island but in the American history that might have made them (and the history they might have made),......

Art and Leisure

Robert Lloyd
It began when the local brand-name coffeeporium closed for renovations -- they are going to make the cash box bigger, I guess -- and I decided to bike three miles for a cappuccino. In this way, I could not only continue to drink reliable brand-name espresso, but would in the......

This Ain't No Juilliard!

Robert Lloyd
Photos by Stacy Kranitz How do you get to Carnegie Hall? --ancient Zen riddle IT'S HALF PAST FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON, AND THE big front room with the picture window and high ceiling and green walls, hung with pictures of John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, is full......

Time and Cookies

Robert Lloyd
I have owned three watches in my life. The best thing about the first was a bucking bronco on the face that appeared to move when you rotated your wrist. (I would like to have that watch now, just to make the horsie go.) The second watch was silvery and......
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Heroes Dream

Robert Lloyd
It isn’t surprising that the first major cultural response to the events of last September 11 was to call out the rock stars, first to an impressively restrained telethon, then to a flag-waving shindig at Madison Square Garden. What began as the music of the outside rebel young has long......