Tony Rettman

For someone such as myself who likes to both revisit and discover sounds from before my time, the amount of reissues in the realm of hard rock and metal was not enough in 2012, but the few that squeaked out were extremely special. From the obvious to the obscure, the year saw a moderate smattering of sounds coming from everywhere from forty to five years in the past...

It's tough to pick up a print music magazine at this point in time and think of it as a legitimate channel of information and not some hunk of crap done up in the name of novelty. I guess in these days where an artists' entire catalog can be downloaded, evaluated and reviewed in the click of a mouse, we forget the joy of gripping a hard copy magazine, going into the john and learning a thing or tw

At its genesis, rock 'n' roll was a visceral art form; an antidote to overblown Broadway musicals of the time and the mind-numbing pop pap coming from Patti Page and the like.

When and if the musical history books ever bother to acknowledge the merger between hardcore punk and heavy metal, the obvious band they will point the finger to is Raleigh, North Carolina's Corrosion of Conformity Their second LP, Animosity, released in 1985 is the bible when it comes to that shit...

You can say what you will about Aerosmith in their present time and place. Make all the comments you want about Joe Perry's cooking show appearances or whatever Steven Tyler did on American Idol. All that crap doesn't hinder them in my eyes and ears one bit ...

Some people have called the sole LP released by Road in 1972 a ham-fisted and over indulgent piece of wanna-be super group plop. As you would have guessed, I am not one of those people. Who knows what illusions of grandeur danced in the heads of the folks who ran Natural Resources – a very sub-subsidiary of Motown Records – when they put Noel Redding (bass player of the Jimi Hendrix Experience), R

Men of my fathers' generation usually show mistrust in any guy that doesn't enjoy a good, stiff drink. For men of my age bracket the general rule is this: Never trust any male who didn't have a childhood obsession with KISS. For many children of the seventies like me, KISS was the first band to not only capture my imagination, but showed me the way around a good riff as well...

Whether you're a geek packed to the brim with musical trivia or someone who simply loves the music, many rock fans love to exchange bits of folklore about their favorite musicians' craziest antics. From Keith Moon driving a convertible into a hotel pool to Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a dove, these stories provide mountains of entertainment for both the rock nerd and novice alike.

If you're looking for a place to lay the blame on the cultivation of hardcore in the early '80s, then lay it smack dab down on the suburbs of Southern California. From the humdrum tract housing of the Orange and Los Angeles counties came a punk roar that was utterly unique...

Facebook.com In the wake of the recent massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, many media sources have taken shooter Wade Page's association with the underground white-supremacist music scene and blown it up to sensationalist proportions. All of a sudden, switching on your television set is like taking a time machine back to the late '80s, when white-power skinheads were featured on every news rep