Anthony Nownes

Cheap Trick is one of America’s greatest bands. They are criminally underappreciated. As proof, consider that Cheap Trick can’t sniff the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, even though it has inducted the likes of Donovan, Jackson Browne, and the ...

Odessey and Oracle (the lads couldn’t spell) is one of my best ever thrift-store finds. In summary, it is a blockbuster.

I’ve written previously about my affection for soft rock. To date, I have exactly zero converts to my basic view of soft rock, which is nothing more complicated than that it sometimes is enjoyable to listen to.

Music trivia is like a great Pacific Ocean garbage island in my brain—it takes up a lot of space, has a half-life of 5,000 years, and will never allow anything else to sprout up in its place. Yet sometimes the ...

Has any group in history as undeniably talented band as the Bee Gees been subject to as much derision as they have?

Every time one is tempted to dismiss Neil Young as irrelevant, he roars back with a Harvest Moon or a Prairie Wind.

When I found the album I thought to myself, “What kind of jackass would stuff this classic album in the Goodwill bin?” Upon reflection, however, I realized that I was the one engaging in jackassery.

One way to avoid the pitfalls of enduring rock stardom is to not endure. The ephemeral Ram Jam—comprising a group of guys who were thrown together by record executives and thus hardly merit the moniker “band”—preserved its place in rock ...

So why do I keep buying records? Because I listen to them and I enjoy having them around. Sometimes the latter is more important than the former.

“Soft rock” is much maligned, viewed by the intelligentsia as fluff cynically foisted on the listening public while America burned. I have a much more positive view; as an unpretentious reaction to a nihilistic politics, a brutal and confounding war, ...