Canned Heat Biography

Los Angeles, United States (1965 – present)Canned Heat is a blues-rock/boogie band that formed in Los Angeles in 1965. The group has been noted for its own interpretations of blues material as well as for efforts to promote the interest in this type of music and its original artists. It was launched by two blues enthusiasts, Alan Wilson and Bob Hite, who took the name from Tommy Johnson’s 1928 Canned Heat Blues, a song about an alcoholic who has desperately turned to drinking Sterno, generically called “canned heat”. After appearances at Monterey and Woodstock, at the end of the ’60s the band had acquired worldwide notoriety with a lineup...

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Velvet Underground Biography

Few rock groups can claim to have broken so much new territory, and maintain such consistent brilliance on record, as the Velvet Underground during their brief lifespan. It was the group's lot to be ahead of, or at least out of step with, their time. The mid-to-late '60s was an era of explosive growth and experimentation in rock, but the Velvets' innovations — which blended the energy of rock with the sonic adventurism of the avant-garde, and introduced a new degree of social realism and sexual kinkiness into rock lyrics — were too abrasive for the mainstream to handle. During their time, the group experienced little commercial success; though...

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Sonic Youth Biography

Time warp back to the '60s. Pop songs, ditties, the British Invasion, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, blah blah blah. With very few exceptions, pop-rock music was all about tunefulness - about making music that was pleasing to the ear. Of course there was an undercurrent of avant-garde and modern classical composers putting a dent in this wall of perfect harmony, but nothing that rocked the boat on a very large scale. As the years dragged on, the ear-pleasing hits multiplied, and despite innovations from Hendrix, The Velvet Underground and their ilk, the discovery of noise and discordance took a long time to catch on. The '60s rolled into the '70s,...

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