SPIN
Spin is a music magazine founded in 1985 by publisher Bob Guccione, Jr. In its early years, the magazine was noted for its broad music coverage with an emphasis on college-oriented rock music and on the ongoing emergence of hip-hop. The magazine was eclectic and bold, if sometimes haphazard. It pointedly provided a national alternative to Rolling Stone’s more establishment-oriented style. The magazine stopped running in print in 2012 and currently runs as a webzine. (More from Wikipedia)
Eventually I came upon a little information about Dead Hippie. Lead singer Simon Smallwood was the frontman for Dead Hippie. When they were profiled in Spin magazine about the time their album came out in 1983, a photo on the MySpace page shows the other bandmembers as Mike Hagen, Paul Mars (aka Paul Black) and Bob Mann. Jackie Fritz and Debra Exit also show up in photos with the band.
(July 2012)
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Two other bands came along at about the same time with songs on MTV that I really liked; they even had similar names: the Vines and the Hives. At the annual MTV Music Video Awards telecast in 2002, the two bands had back-to-back performances that were simply wonderful. As it turned out, it was just the one song on the Vines album, Highly Evolved that really had that garage-rock style, but the Hives kept releasing one great album after another. Also, their live shows have been rated by Spin magazine as the 8th greatest ever. The Black and White Album above is the only one by the Hives that I actually own, but I am sure looking hard for others.
(January 2013)
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Returning to Sleater-Kinney, Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein dated briefly when the band was first started – Carrie now says that it was for “a second” – and this fact was expanded in Spin magazine to indicate that the two, if not the band as a whole were bisexual. The magazine story caught the two women off-guard; they were not offended by the labeling – mostly they were upset that no one had ever asked them the question; people just made assumptions. In 2012, Carrie Brownstein verified in an interview that no one in Sleater-Kinney is lesbian, although Corin Tucker self-identifies as bisexual.
(January 2014)
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The debut Ramones by Ramones is a landmark album released in April 1976 that initially went nowhere, peaking at #111 on the Billboard album charts. In retrospect, all of the ingredients of punk rock were there, and its influence was enormous. Stephen Thomas Erlewine states flatly in his article on the band in Allmusic: “The Ramones were the first punk rock band. . . . By cutting rock & roll down to its bare essentials – four chords; a simple, catchy melody; and irresistibly inane lyrics – and speeding up the tempo considerably, the Ramones created something that was rooted in early ’60s, pre-Beatles rock & roll and pop but sounded revolutionary.” Rolling Stone lists Ramones as #26 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time; while in 2002, Spin magazine named them the second best band, behind only the Beatles.
(December 2016)
