Revisiting the milieu of the Greenwich Village music scene

Dylan's raucous 1976 tour was one piece of an ongoing reinvention

In the mid-70s, Dylan assembled a ragtag group of musicians and poets—including Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Allen Ginsberg—he called the Rolling Thunder Revue. Rather than playing stadiums in major markets, they played smaller venues in smaller cities for a more intimate experience. The tour yielded some of the most exuberant versions of Dylan songs, captured in this 1976 performance in Fort Collins, which originally aired on NBC as “Hard Rain.”

Dylan influenced many of his contemporaries

Dylan’s groundbreaking approach to songwriting didn’t just change his career; it changed the trajectory of American popular music. This podcast from the National Association of Music Merchants’ oral history project features interviews with several Dylan compatriots and fans–including Pete Seeger, Emmylou Harris, and Robbie Robertson–who detail how Dylan changed their careers and how they viewed songwriting.

The Six Gallery, and San Francisco at large, helped the Beats grow

The Six Gallery was located in the “Harlem of the West,” where jazz musicians, filmmakers, painters and poets experimented with no regard for commercial success. “If Ginsberg had broken new ground,” historian Rebecca Solnit writes, “the Six had made it possible to go public with it.”

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Joan Didion's 1967 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' laid the hippie counterculture bare

Didion wrote a detailed account of living alongside hippies in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury area in the 1960s. Beyond their style and politics, Didion uncovered chaos, with one particularly shocking interview of a 5-year-old on LSD. Her stories challenged the movement's message of freedom and utopia in California.

CBGB, the breeding ground for punk, was intended to be a country bar

Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, Blondie, and many other bands got their start at CBGB. But its owner, Hillel “Hilly” Kristal, didn’t intend for it to be a punk rock venue. CBGB stood for “Country Bluegrass Blues,” though he included “OMFUG” (for “Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandizers”) on the venue’s marquee.

The news feature that broke grunge

The Sub Pop label paid for journalist Everett True, then writing for Melody Maker, to fly to the sleepy northwestern city to check out the scene, which was breeding a curious mix of punk rock and heavy metal. The gambit worked. "The most vibrant, kicking music scene encompassed in one city for at least 10 years," Everett wrote.

Broadway's songwriters began experimenting in the 1920s

Broadway’s early decades were heavily influenced by opera and vaudeville, but songwriters in the 1920s began exploring more narrative-based songwriting and psychologically complex characters. That trend would continue in the following decades, though it would evolve in even more nuanced ways.

The cover of "Abbey Road" was shot in a quiet London neighborhood in 1969

The unassuming setting became one of the most famous attractions in the city and was the cover of the Beatles' last-recorded album. It was shot in the late 1960s, when the Fab Four was the most famous band in the world.

How underground radio revitalized rock 'n' roll

Early FM was a wasteland and quickly became the domain of amateurs and risk-takers, including many stations and DJs who played music that flew in the face of mainstream trends. This history of the band's scrappy beginnings unpacks how it realigned the rock charts.

Before the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed was a workaday songwriter

His job at Pickwick Records, a label that churned out budget records for department stores, was to crank out generic pop fare. One of those songs was 1964’s “The Ostrich,” a dance song in the style of Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion.”

'You don't get to choose how you're going to die or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.'

- Musician and activist Joan Baez (1941-present)

Every city has a song: Music writers identify one tune that represents their hometown, from Chicago to Buenos Aires

Staffers from SPIN magazine wade into the contentious waters of official anthems, making the case for their chosen track, from Chicago's "Tonight, Tonight" by the Smashing Pumpkins to the Bobby Bare rendition of "The Streets of Baltimore."

How the Vietnam War changed rock 'n' roll

This short video essay analyzes how rock music responded to US involvement in Vietnam, from the protest folk of Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan to the popularity of rock and soul records with soldiers stationed abroad.

An ethnomusicologist breaks down bossa nova's American popularity

Kaleb Goldschmitt is a professor at Wellesley College who wrote the book "Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries," which analyzed how and why bossa nova became so popular in the US in the early 1960s. According to Goldschmitt, much of it was due to the music's seemingly apolitical aesthetic, a notion that was reinforced by the Brazilian government.

Watch a definitive girl group documentary

The 1983 documentary "Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound" features archival footage of some of the Shirelles, the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and more alongside interviews with the performers and songwriters. It's a fascinating look back at the music, told by the people who pioneered it.

Béla Fleck took the banjo from Appalachian porches to African villages and Carnegie Hall

In a conversation recorded at a Philadelphia instrument shop, Fleck reflects on how an instrument associated with a single American folk tradition became his vehicle for bluegrass, jazz, classical, African folk, and orchestral music. He has long advocated that every living room should have a banjo, and he highlights how he has integrated the instrument across genres in this fascinating discussion.

The Bakersfield Sound challenged the music's creeping respectability

As country music leaned towards the slick Nashville Sound in the 1950s, several artists operating outside that city reacted with rougher sounds more reminiscent of honky tonk and early rock ‘n’ roll. It came to be known as the Bakersfield Sound, reflecting the California agricultural region.

Arthur Russell's avant-garde music spanned many genres

The classically trained cellist moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s, mingling with the hippie movement and the Beat Generation. After arriving in New York in 1973, he began exploring the nascent punk and disco scenes, infusing them with his classical training; however, his eclectic style might've been part of the reason he never broke through during his lifetime. That variety, though, is what draws so many devoted listeners to his work today.

Tour the iconic Sun Studio in Memphis

Sun Studio is responsible for hundreds of hours of American music history, despite its rather modest setup. This tour of the one-room studio is not unlike the tour visitors take, with anecdotes about Elvis, U2, and a pious Bob Dylan, who quickly popped in to pay his respects.

Listen to an interview with Martha Graham from 1974

This interview, from the "Bernard Gabriel Views the Music Scene" program, features a candid conversation in which Graham discusses how her career did not take off until her 30s and how she learned to ignore criticism.

Robert Fripp manipulated feedback to create his guitar part on David Bowie's 'Heroes'

The King Crimson guitarist placed markings on the studio floor that instructed him where to get the particular sounds he was seeking. Producer Brian Eno then ran the signal through a synthesizer and bent the sound waves with a joystick.

A theory about Pink Floyd and 'The Wizard of Oz' was popularized by a 19-year-old

Pink Floyd’s seminal album “Dark Side of the Moon” eerily synchronizes with “The Wizard of Oz,” offering a psychedelic soundtrack for the movie. Journalist Charlie Savage popularized the phenomenon when he was 19. He’d go on to write for the Boston Globe and New York Times winning a Pulitzer Prize.

Liza Minnelli was a regular at Studio 54, one of the trendiest nightclubs in the world

In the 1970s, some of the world's biggest stars would flock to the New York City club to dance and socialize during the disco era. See photos of Liza Minnelli accompanied by other celebrities like Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Robert De Niro, and James Spader.

The history of music explained in 8 minutes

Traditional music history focuses on composers and sees music as an object. Historian Michael Spitzer focuses on music's role in everyday activity and sees it not as an object, but an activity. This brief history illuminates the fundamental role music plays in human culture, and sounds a hopeful not for music in the internet age.

Bardcore: the modern exploration of medieval music

The medieval instrumentation and lyric interpretation of modern pop, rock, metal, and hip-hop took off in April 2020, launching a new and growing genre. Bardcore is defined by its use of musical nostalgia and internet culture’s “memeification,” according to the historians in this nearly two-hour-long podcast. Listen to this episode to hear a medievalist and music historian break down the rise, relevance, and reasons behind Bardcore.

70 years ago today, city officials in Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll to protect its youth from corruption after witnessing a 'provocative' concert the night before.

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

A small portion of The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother,' an obscure '60s gospel record, is the basis for thousands of hip-hop tracks, making it one of the most sampled records ever that's informally known as 'the Amen break.'

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

Fish populations in the Great Barrier Reef have increased after installing waterproof speakers on the ocean floor that played recordings of sounds from healthy coral reefs.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

Dorothy's famous entrance into Oz in 'The Wizard of Oz' relied on analog tricks, including a body double and sepia-toned paint, as much as it did on technology

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

Listen to an in-depth conversation on the links between Parkinson's disease and herbicide exposure and the challenging pace of scientific investigation.

Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are historically hard to sell because they're old, subject to local landmark commissions, and often unfashionable

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

Ebola species have historically been named after where they were discovered, stigmatizing residents who live there, including Bundibugyo, in Uganda.

Most of the observable universe's volume consists of voids and supervoids—enormous regions of space with little to no galaxies, stars, or light.

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

In 1963, a basement renovation in Turkey revealed a passageway to a hidden, multilevel underground city that once housed as many as 20,000 people

Bone marrow (soft tissue found inside certain bones) generates roughly 500 billion new blood cells each day