Music Tonight: L.A.-based group Truth & Salvage Co. bring its organic amalgamation of traditional Roots/Country/Americana/Rock music to Oakley’s 20th Century Theatre for an 8 p.m. show with opener Ruston Kelly, a Nashville-based singer/songwriter who grew up in Cincinnati (he attended Wyoming High School, which is when he began writing songs). T&SC received a boost early in their career (they only just formed in 2007) when Chris Robinson heard them and became a fan. The Black Crowes frontman (who’s also a big fan of Cincinnati’s Buffalo Killers) produced the band’s debut and put it out as the first release on his new label, Silver Arrow. Read more about the headliners here and check out the video clip for the band’s track “Pure Mountain Angel” below.—-
Momentous Happenings in Music History for November 2
On this day in 1964, one of Rock & Roll’s more under-heralded geniuses, Dion, reportedly stormed out of his session for the U.K. TV show Ready, Steady, Go because he said the lady go-go dancers were distracting him from (presumably) properly lip-syncing his tune. Like Madonna whoring it up on MTV while singing “Like a Virgin,” Dion was also a pioneer of irony in pop culture — the song he was due to perform was “Donna the Prima Donna.” As you can see from the below clip, producers solved the problem by chopping off the dancers’ heads and making death masks from them to suspend from the ceiling. Wait, what? I guess Dion was kind of a pioneer of Horrorcore, too.
Born This Day: Musical movers-and-shakers born Nov. 2 include: the man who put the “Emerson” in ’70s Prog Rock faves Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Keith Emerson (1944); ex-drummer for The Cult and Guns ’N Roses, Matt Sorum (1960); Hip Pop superstar Nelly (1974); and Country-turned-Modern-Torch singer k.d. lang (1961).
In honor of Ms. lang’s 50th birthday, here’s a very brief retrospective of her wildly successful, ever-evolving career.
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2011.