(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) Few acts in rock history have blurred the border between musicianship and merchandising as completely as the four New Yorkers who turned greasepaint into a fortune. Here’s the thing nobody wants to say at the cookout. The legend got built on lunchboxes. Now hold on before you fire off ...
(TheBRHM.com) The heaviest corners of rock owe their blueprint to two bands that never fit neatly inside the genres they helped create, and that contradiction sits right at the center of how aggressive music actually grew up. Somebody in my family was always confused about my taste. My auntie saw ...
(TheBRHM.com) Few acts in popular music have completed a more total reversal of identity than the London blues outfit that spent the sixties positioning itself as a threat to decent society and now operates as one of the most efficient revenue machines in live entertainment. That reversal deserves an honest ...
(TheBRHM.com) Genre labels tend to outlive the accuracy that earned them, and no American act has lived more comfortably inside an incomplete label, or profited from it more handsomely, than Van Halen. Ask a room full of purists and half of them will swear those four dudes out of Pasadena ...
(TheBRHM.com) Aerosmith engineered one of the strangest comebacks in American music, and hardly anybody frames it as a cautionary tale. Eleven years separate Permanent Vacation from the moment this band finally scored a number one single, and across that stretch an outfit the industry had written off became a permanent ...
(TheBRHM.com) There is a persistent myth in music writing that says loud guitars were dying in 1987 and five degenerates from Hollywood arrived to resuscitate them, which is a nice story that happens to be false in almost every detail. Guitars were doing just fine. You could not escape them. ...
(TheBRHM.com) Every time somebody in the group chat drops that “greatest rock composition ever” take, they reach for the same six minutes. Mama, just killed a man. Scaramouche. The headbang scene in Wayne’s World. I get it. I grew up with it too, and I’m not about to sit here ...
(TheBRHM.com) This music had me before I had the words to explain why, and the band has held my attention long enough that honesty about them feels earned rather than borrowed. So here is the truth of it. A Brother who came up on loud guitars, often the only face ...