(TheBRHM.com) Every couple of years the same conversation comes back around like a chorus you’re sick of. Somebody asks which young act is destined to become the next Metallica. You hear it at shows, in comment sections, on those podcasts that burn forty minutes arguing over the snare sound on ...
(TheBRHM.com) They kept showing up. That’s the whole story once you strip it down. The obituaries kept coming. Radio moved on to whatever felt safer that season. And the people who built this music just kept plugging in anyway. There was no parade. Not one apology offered. Just another van, ...
(TheBRHM.com) Bring up Hendrix and folks reach for the tie-dye first. The scarves. That burning guitar at Monterey. Flowers in the hair, incense curling through some California afternoon in 1967. That picture stuck, and it flattened him. What got buried underneath all the soft-focus mythology was the pure menace in ...
(TheBRHM.com) The needle hit the wax, maybe three seconds of a riff rolled by, and you already knew whose record was turning. No vocals required. That counted for something back then. It meant you were paying attention when paying attention was the whole point. A buddy would flip a cassette ...
(TheBRHM.com) The argument surfaces in every rock circle sooner or later. One side insists Led Zeppelin invented heavy metal. The other pushes back, and the honest answer lives between them. That first surge of loud never had a lone architect. Black Sabbath gave doom its funeral crawl. Deep Purple married ...
(TheBRHM.com) Somewhere along the way the story got sanded down. The Beatles became the tidy soundtrack of your grandmother’s china cabinet, all handclaps and moon and June couplets, something you hum in an elevator without anyone flinching. That picture is a lie of omission. Buried in the catalog runs a ...
(TheBRHM.com) Somewhere along the way a lot of critics decided who Bruce Springsteen was and quit paying attention. They handed the man a uniform. Blue collar poet. Bard of the assembly line. The voice of some guy clocking out at the plant with grease under his fingernails and a mortgage ...
(TheBRHM.com) Ask most folks to name the architects of heavy music and you get the same short list on repeat. Sabbath. Zeppelin. Purple. Maybe Priest, if the person did a little homework. Those legends earned their thrones, no argument here. Yet a thought gnaws at me whenever that roll call ...
(TheBRHM.com) Rock crowds remember whoever owned the front of the stage. Fair enough, that is the gig. But the person keeping those careers upright was usually a few steps back where nobody bothered to look. Start with Malcolm Young. Everybody watched his little brother Angus duck-walk across the boards in ...
(TheBRHM.com) Longevity behind the microphone in rock and metal owes far less to a lucky throat than to what a singer actually does to guard it over the long haul. And plenty of them guarded nothing at all. Here is the cruel part. Every other part of the show has ...