Story Archives of 'Rock Music'

I know people say this a lot about rock stars, but Patti Smith really did change my life. In the late 1970s, I was a reasonably well behaved kid grooving to Captain and Tenille and disco songs until I discovered my brother’s copy of Patti Smith’s Easter. I was hooked.

It was the song "Because the Night," her only top 10 hit. The hairy armpits on the cover. The Rimbaud poems. The N-word. It opened the door to a world so mindblowingly foreign to my reality at Rundlett Junior High School that I wanted to dive in.

Patti Smith was also a suburban kid who made her way to New York City in the late 1960s, befriending Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, and setting her unladylike poems to three-chord guitar riffs, a sound that helped launch her as “the godmother of punk” - a status that doesn’t sit well with her.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life is a film by renowned fashion photographer and first-time director Steven Sebring. It's mostly shot in grainy 16mm film and mostly in black and white. There’s no timeline and sometimes little action. Sebring joins Word of Mouth with more on filming Patti Smith for twelve years.

Watch the trailer for Patti Smith: Dream of Life:

The Nashville band Silver Jews released their sixth album last week, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, on Drag City Records. Since the band's 1994 debut record Starlite Walker, years of drug use and a suicide attempt, songwriter David Berman rediscovered his Jewish roots.

To find out how that may have affected his music, and the country ballads that inspired his writing, we called up our reviewer Justin Gage. He runs the music blog Aquarium Drunkard and hosts a two-hour show every Friday on Sirius Satellite radio’s Left of Center channel.

You can read Justin's two-part interview with David Berman by clicking here. A documentary film to be released in September, "Silver Jew," follows David Berman's weeklong tour of Israel in the midst of their first-ever world tour. You can watch the trailer by clicking here.

Swedish musician José González is concerned about our impact on the planet, and he sings about it on his latest album, "In Our Nature." It’s easy to sing about, but harder to act on if you’re a rock star on the road. In fact, the event industry as a whole is one of the worst contributors to carbon emissions in the world, second only to the construction industry.

(Photo by Fredric Egerstrand)

But some musicians are taking action. González kicks off a month-long "green tour" of North America on Saturday, and he’s partnered with the Portland, Maine-based environmental non-profit Reverb to reduce waste and carbon emissions while on the road. Word of Mouth host Virginia Prescott spoke with Reverb’s co-director, Lauren Sullivan, about making tours more earth-friendly.

Find out more about Reverb

The New England band Twinemen has evolved a unique sound from its roots in the Boston-based band Morphine. The band's made up of Dana Colley, Billy Conway, and Laurie Sargent, and tonight they're going to play live in the Front Porch studios. They've got a new CD, Twinetime; we'll talk with them about the ways it reflects their distinctive, sophisticated alt-rock sound.

Few names resonate in the annals of American pop music like that of Producer Phil Spector. His signature techniques gave 1960s "girl groups" a rich sound previously uncommon on AM radio. Now, at age 67, Spector stands accused of a brutal murder. Tonight on the Front Porch, we'll go beyond those grisly headlines to get a better understanding of his work and its huge influence on the past fifty years of radio hits. We peek behind the "Wall of Sound" with author and journalist Mick Brown. His new book is Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector.