PODCAST

the riley rock report

Tim Riley

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music music history

All Episodes

13:22

John Ono Lennon 1940-1980

the riley rock report ·

2025/10/10

John Lennon would have turned 85 on October 9, cue the holiday box set. Some Time in New York City (1972) still gets underrated, as does Rock and Roll (see this), and Lennon’s vocals win those arguments handily. (Some young turk should re-mash “Luck of the Irish” to omit that cringe Ono bridge.) The Elephants Memory band can still sound amateurish, but that counted for a lot in 1972, much like Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, or Country Joe and the Fish. Sounding “slick” and

27:53

Springsteen Between Flesh and Fantasy

the riley rock report ·

2025/09/29

Peter Carlin and I met while checking out that cringey Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show LOVE way back in the olden times before Obama, and we’ve kept in touch. He was working on his Paul book while I was working on John, and he gives good blurb. Carlin worked his way into Springsteen’s crew when he wrote his biography, and created alliances that make his new book on Born to Run, now 50, a worthwhile read. I asked him to own up to all those sordid rumors, and he did not: Peter Carlin: Well, when I

35:17

Owsley Stanley III's 80-Ton Brain

the riley rock report ·

2025/09/12

Grateful Dead books now rival those about Springsteen, Dylan, and the Beatles in the rock publishing market. Brian Anderson’s Loud and Clear chronicles its quest to create a Wall of Sound concert experience that reproduced the clarity and separation of home stereos. Stanley Owsley, the audiophile designer—and the real-life inspiration for Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne”—insisted on separating as many audio channels as possible. The band poured its resources into realizing Owsley’s hi-fi ambitions,

8:16

Taboo Sex Jingles

the riley rock report ·

2025/05/23

The January inauguration has thrown everything into twisted new context: trauma gloat turns prosaic, overstimulation mocks innocence. Suddenly, Severance’s cult of Kier feels cartoonish, like a miniature theme park. The many sex-driven scripts that wrapped in 2024 now feel like quaint throwbacks, and given the cowering media, the confusion-is-sex meme has ballooned in a puff. You can’t play that P. Diddy testimony for comedy, but parsing these soundtracks cues the gap between intent and

39:13

Hearing Elvis Presley's Memphis

the riley rock report ·

2025/03/07

Historian Preston Lauterbach works the backstreets of rock’s story, the many accidental and circuitous paths the music takes before congealing into a popular style. With Before Elvis, he lands a major statement about how Presley immersed himself in the Memphis of 1948-1945, what he heard on the radio, in churches, and in clubs. We started by talking about one of Presley’s key mentors, the Reverend Herbert Brewster, the preacher who’s style and songwriting shaped the young Elvis… Preston Lauterbach:

35:33

From Sweden With Hidden Costs

the riley rock report ·

2025/02/07

When you watch the Netflix Playlist series you get a standard-if-sturdy startup story with legal hurdles and tech geeks coding outside the lines. The labels carry all that golden booty, and they will make Daniel Ek pay. Ek accomodates the gatekeepers and takes over the world; it’s almost weird he didn’t attend last month’s inauguration. Author Liz Pelly agreed that the series works like a genre piece instead of muckrack reporting: Liz Pelly: I thought that, you know, The Playlist, I watched it also

4:54

Garth Hudson, The Mighty Wurlitzer

the riley rock report ·

2024/08/09

Moondog Matinee, The Band (Capitol, 1973)Garth Hudson, the last living member of The Band, turned 88 on August 8. Hudson’s Hammond organ gave the Band regal colors, and he wove in synthesizer lines as if he had three hands. In songs like “Wheels on Fire,” his flourishes evoked the church, the speakeasy, and the carnival, sometimes in the same phrase. Where the Grateful Dead ritualized a long drum passage signaling the set’s final act, Hudson’s long live preambles to "Chest Fever" spun soliloquies of

3:52

Democracy Is Coming

the riley rock report ·

2024/07/26

The Boys, Amazon Prime original (based on the Dynamite Entertainment comic book series written by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, developed by Eric Kripke)With events in the saddle, even this RNC update suddenly feels dated:WATCHING THE NEWS break in real time on July 13, it almost felt like reality had sprung directly from a script for The Boys. In Prime’s vicious and profane (and poorly named) satire of MAGA, the Vought Corporation runs the country by puppeteering The Seven “Supes,” humans

25:29

Cynicism Is for Suckers

the riley rock report ·

2024/07/12

Two years ago, this Woody Guthrie piece ran on his birthday (July 14, 1912) to boost awareness and renew anti-fascist history. Given Biden’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” moment, Guthrie imparts yet more wisdom: beware cynicism, the right’s lethal stealth tactic. And lo, our first rerun… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

11:34

The Thin Side of Led Zeppelin's Heavy

the riley rock report ·

2024/06/30

John Bonham (1948-1980) would have turned 76 at the end of this month (May 31). As a drummer he had chops beyond his years, and ears as big as any Page riff. When I covered Led Zeppelin’s mandatory box set release in 1990, it changed how I heard all those albums… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

12:46

College Radio Dropouts

the riley rock report ·

2024/06/30

When I spoke with Jewell about her lucid and engaging history of college radio, my Covid case had grown pronounced enough that it bled straight onto the tape. She makes a smooth narrator, though, so the few places I do croak through you can hear just how ill I felt. I started by asking her what kind of history she teaches at Fitchburg State outside Boston… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit

32:28

Grandiosity Incorporated

the riley rock report ·

2024/06/30

Academic presses now fixing holes and taking risks where giants stutter, and the rest of us await the Big Leap Forward in long-form digital narrative… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rileyrockreport.substack.com

22:10

Stick Dancing

the riley rock report ·

2024/06/30

The quote that leaps out at me now comes from a violinist, who requested anonymity: “He tries very hard with Mozart and Haydn… But he doesn’t know the meaning of the word elegant. He doesn’t have classical ideas about sound. Elegance and charm—he doesn’t know from that. That’s a terrible thing to say, and I feel bad saying it, because he hired me. It’s not like he’s not trying; he’s just barking up the wrong tree, looking for answers in the wrong places.” So note how that New York Times “essential

12:46

Randy Newman

the riley rock report ·

2024/06/30

Watching an episode of Black Mirror ("Fifteen Million Merits," 2011), I looked up the song that Jessica Brown Findlay sang (“Anyone Who Knows What Love Is”), and reeled back to find Randy Newman’s name next to Jeannie Seally. I started going through discogs.com and finding a buried history of tracks he’d written for others during his long apprenticeship before landing his own record deal in 1968. Many of these, including a baller like “I Think It’s Goin to Rain Today,” took hold long before he

6:38

Taylor Swift's Multiplex

the riley rock report ·

2023/11/11

YOU FEEL FLATTERED watching Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film, and not just because you catch a contact high from her adoring audience. In a field of immaculate divas and country popsters, Swift creates her own rainbow fingernail category: rural Pennsylvania prom queen sets her diary to song with a charmed charisma and a singer’s dance moves. A lot of rivals now circle her career’s new gravity. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner put it in her New York Times Magazine profile, at a Swift concert “the

3:49

If Smiles Could Sing

the riley rock report ·

2023/10/27

The master guitarist Ali Farka Touré died in 2006 at the age of 67, widely praised for developing an “African desert blues,” woven from his Malian roots. This Earthworks domestic debut rode the Graceland world music wave alongside Salif Keita. He probably made his highest-profile album with Talking Timbuktu in 1994 with Ry Cooder. This US debut lingers with more meditative swagger, and when this ran in the Boston Phoenix in 1989, I chanced upon him at the Jazz & Heritage Festival in New Orleans. The

8:50

Waiting To Be Forgotten

the riley rock report ·

2023/10/11

Big fat media blip for the Replacements, a band with a casual brilliance that chafed hard against success. Make sure to read Bob Mehr’s pungent book (Trouble Boys) and crank up the Ed Stasium remaster. I caught a smashing Boston Opera House gig in 1988 when we were still scratching our heads about Bob Stinson’s replacement, but it remains a golden favorite, especially for “B******s of Young” and “Alex Chilton.” The next year they opened for Tom Petty as if to make his sturdy Heartbreakers sound

3:59

Memories Can't Wait for Living Colour

the riley rock report ·

2023/08/25

When Living Colour reached No 13 on the Billboard album chart with its fourth album, Stain, in 1993, a lot of seasoned observers talked about watching the Jimi Hendrix phenom play out all over again on a twenty-five year loop. Seeing this band in a small club remains a high point of writing for the Phoenix, and Greg Tate’s comments on Mick Jagger’s involvement sounds like prophecy. (By the way, did anyone else notice how the Stones may have dropped “Brown Sugar” from their live set, but not off

46:19

Blow-Up

the riley rock report ·

2023/08/22

To celebrate the anniversary of Help!, released this month in 1965, I talked with Steve Matteo. Matteo’s 33 1/3 title on Let It Be had a big influence on my 2011 Lennon biography, and his new book, Act Naturally, talks to fresh sources who worked on these projects. Turns out A Hard Day’s Night features the same cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, who had just finished filming Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. I started by asking Matteo why he chose the Let It Be album as his first book-length project…

5:02

Rebounding With Hooks

the riley rock report ·

2023/07/17

Kristin Hersh tours Europe in September after celebrating a birthday on August 7. So I went back to where I first tried to make sense of what made her Rhode Island band so compelling, and so fragile. just as they crested into alt-rock prominence. Sleater Kinney soon dominated the hipster crowd, but Hunkpapa holds up like a jangly oddity that makes sense of many other records. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit

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