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If you've been to Reno, Nevada, recently, you know that the "Biggest Little City in the World" is long past its heyday -- as much as it ever had one. Even in its prime, Reno (pop. 180,000) was best-known for the twin pillars of gambling

I saw the Pogues play only once, in 1989, as frontman Shane MacGowan was descending into drunkenness and a certain Tim Burton film was dominating the box office. Soused beyond measure, MacGowan staggered around the stage with little interest in singing, belching out a slurred and incoherent rant instead. The

With only two prior albums to their credit, a sixteen-song retrospective may seem premature. Then again, this is the group's tenth anniversary, those albums having come out back in the '90s. A few tracks appear on CD for the first time; a few songs have been

Among reviewers who have given faint praise to this two-disc soundtrack to the Martin Scorsese film, dismissing it as a marginal addition to the Dylan canon, the common reservation is that the alternate takes here aren't as good as the released originals. Well, duh. No other artist

Reviewing Whiskeytown's Strangers Almanac for a larger magazine many years ago, I argued that if alternative country music were to produce a Kurt Cobain, Ryan Adams would be it. I was mostly wrong, so far. There was a dark clarity to Cobain's work and a crispness,

In 1938, Jelly Roll Morton, broke, aging and nearly forgotten at 53, lately playing piano in a Washington, D.C, dive called the Music Box, approached Alan Lomax -- all of 23, but already de facto director of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress. What he wanted,