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57 years ago today, The Drifters released their first single to feature Charlie Thomas on vocals, a Doc Pomus / Mort Shuman composition which was a big hit for the group and an even bigger hit for a completely different group. Just before joining – or, more appropriately, being recruited for – The Drifters, Thomas had been a member of The Five Crowns. When manager George Treadwell, who owned the rights to The Drifters’ name, got fed up with his current crop of performers and decided to fire all of the existing members of The Drifters, he decided to grab The Five Crowns and recruit them to

Prior to recording the first of their two 1976 albums, A TRICK OF THE TALE, Genesis decided that their drummer, Phil Collins, was the ideal candidate to take over for Peter Gabriel as lead singer — something that must have surprised Collins as much as it did the rock press and Genesis fans. Drummers do what they do behind racks of tom-toms and stands of cymbals; bringing the bearded, rather nondescript Collins out front to lead the band must have seemed initially, as the British put it, daft. Crazy. Nuts. Collins, of course, wound up being just fine, showing versatility and range through A

In the ‘80s, David Coverdale seemed to have two overarching concerns — sex and the blues (and maybe Aquanet, which would make three). Whitesnake’s music had always had something of a blues base, though fed through large amplifiers and played in arenas. As the decade progressed, that particular obsession seemed to wane; the band neatly took over Europe and other areas that were not the United States, and the bent-note, gutbucket influences of yore faded as quickly as you could say “Slide it In.” That blues were absent on Whitesnake’s self-titled 1987 record, which abandoned any pretext of

Throughout their existence as a band, the Grateful Dead made their reputation largely on the road, playing long shows with long jams and giving audiences long, strange trips every time they took the stage. When they were in their peak shape, the Dead were incomparable live, in spite of the occasional bum note and aimless solo. The best parts about any journey you took with the Dead were living in the moment and letting the music take you wherever it was headed. Of their prime periods, 1972 stands out for the places they took their show, as well as for being the last stand of Ron “Pigpen”

Crosby, Stills & Nash scored their biggest record as a trio with 1977’s CSN, selling four million copies of the album, which bode well for the group, considering the changing landscape of popular music at that time, with disco on the rise and punk rock scaring lots of people of age to remember CS&N’s early heyday. It took five years to follow up the record, during which time David Crosby developed a debilitating drug addiction and propensity for legal trouble, both of which had led Stephen Stills and Graham Nash to make new music without their troubled bandmate. In fact, according to Dave

On this date in 1971, Jim Morrison died in Paris, France, leaving behind a remarkable musical legacy for someone who was only 27 years of age. To celebrate his life on the day of his death, we’ve got the official Doors playlist all locked and loaded for your listening enjoyment, but we’ve also put together five things you may not have known about Morrison. Yes, we know, there’s a lot of stuff that you probably already do know, but we gave it our best shot. 1. He was fascinated by the assassination of JFK. If Jim wasn’t aware of it, he certainly would’ve found it interesting that the first job

While we continue to wait for scientists to crack the nut that is time travel, there’s still a way that we can be transported through the mists of time to the 1980s, and that’s through the power of music. This summer, Rhino is sending consumers back to the ’80s with their appropriately-titled new vinyl reissue campaign, “Back to the ‘80s,” and it kicks off today with five limited-edition reissues on 140-gram vinyl. Here are the five titles in question, each listed with the various details about their reissue, including what color the vinyl will be and how many copies of each will be pressed

Today we celebrate the birthday of self-described “folkabilly” singer Nanci Griffith, and we do so by diving deep into her catalog and saying a few words about one of her albums that might have flown under your radar: FLYER, which was released in 1994. Griffith released her debut album, THERE’S A LIGHT BEYOND THESE WOODS, way back in 1978, after which she released a trio of indie albums (POET IN MY WINDOW, ONCE IN A VERY BLUE MOON, and THE LAST OF THE TRUE BELIEVERS) before signing a major-label deal with MCA. She stayed with the label through the release of 1991’s LATE NIGHT GRANDE HOTEL, but

20 years ago this week – on July 7, to be precise – Barenaked Ladies released their fourth studio album, otherwise known as the LP which provided them with their biggest hit single to date. Produced by the band with the assistance of David Leonard and Susan Rogers, STUNT arrived on the heels of the band’s concert album, ROCK SPECTACLE, which helped raise BNL’s profile in America with its single, a live version of “Brian Wilson.” As such, the band was primed and ready for a major breakthrough in the Us, and they got it when they released STUNT’s first single, “One Week,” which blew the roof off

41 years ago today, Elvis Costello officially submitted his walking papers to the factory where he’d been holding gainful employment in order to pursue rock ‘n’ roll full-time a move which was not only best possible career move that he could’ve made but, indeed, probably resulted in increased productivity for the factory, given how little work he was actually doing. The man known to friends and family as Declan MacManus was never the recipient of an Employee of the Month award during his time at the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics factory, and if we’re to be perfectly honest, it was with good reason