Travel Blog: Pop Culture Travel
Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’: Do His Songs Still Resonate in the City That Inspired Them?
by Michael Yessis | 07.03.07 | 10:22 AM ET
In 1973 Lou Reed recorded Berlin, an album inspired by the German city that Rolling Stone called “one of the gloomiest records ever made—slow, druggy and heavily orchestrated.” At the time, the Wall cut through Berlin and the city struggled with a heroin epidemic among teens. “In other words, it was not a happy place, although it was certainly an interesting one—Berlin, in that era, had become a mecca for some of the most creative heads in rock music,” Time’s Stephanie Kirchner writes in an intriguing “Postcard from Berlin” on the magazine’s Web site.
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Yahoo! BuzzThe Critics: ‘Chasing the Rising Sun’
by Jim Benning | 06.22.07 | 7:19 AM ET
The Los Angeles Times has a review of Chasing the Rising Sun, writer Ted Anthony’s account of his quest to find the origins of the classic folk song, “House of the Rising Sun.” It’s a quest, in part, to learn where and what The House in question was: Brothel? Gambling house? Prison? In addition to being a book about music and history, it’s also about travel.
Bookstore Tourism’s Portzline Jams With the Rock Bottom Remainders
by Michael Yessis | 06.06.07 | 10:44 AM ET
We learned a lot about Bookstore Tourism founder Larry Portzline in our Q&A. We didn’t learn, though, that he rocks. At BookExpo in New York last week, Portzline jammed with Dave Barry, Frank McCourt, Amy Tan and the many other literary all-stars in the band the Rock Bottom Remainders. “It was truly bizarre and amazing,” he wrote me in an e-mail. “Plus it was surprising to hear how well these guys play. In strictly bar-band terms, they’re actually good!”
Rolling Stone Picks Best 25 Road Trip Songs Ever
by Michael Yessis | 05.23.07 | 12:30 PM ET
“Route 66” didn’t crack the list, so feel free to not take it seriously. Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” topped the 25 picks, with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” rounding out the top three.
Paleo: 365 Days on the Road, 365 Songs
by Michael Yessis | 04.12.07 | 7:39 AM ET
David Andrew Strackany, aka Paleo, has spent the last year traveling around the U.S. and writing songs—one every day since April 16, 2006. Pop Candy’s Whitney Matheson says “the tunes are actually good,” and she interviewed him in her latest podcast. After almost a year on the road, Paleo tells her, he still finds traveling exhilarating. To listen for yourself how the road has treated Paleo and inspired his songs, visit his website. Every song he wrote during the course of the project is online.
Visiting Bob Marley’s Jamaica and ‘the Government Yard in Trench Town’
by Jim Benning | 03.02.07 | 4:05 PM ET
Trench Town, the tough Kingston neighborhood made famous in Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry, got some love from the New York Times today. Tens of thousands of visitors are expected in the Caribbean during the next two months for the Cricket World Cup, and Marley’s old neighborhood is one place that could see an increase in visitors. “In Trench Town, where street gangs battle over turf and where people live in shacks about the size of the garages at the glorious homes in the hills, expectations for the cricket tournament are high,” the Times reports. “Community leaders will have tour guides at the ready to take visitors around a neighborhood they say has a proud past.”
Valentine’s Day Comes to Ghana
by Jim Benning | 02.14.07 | 4:45 PM ET
Why is the holiday taking off in the African nation? In part, one cultural anthropologist told USA Today, because “radio airplay of love songs by Celine Dion, Bryan Adams, Lionel Richie and others is year-round and has fed the idea that Valentine’s Day is for sweethearts.” It’s tangential, but that reminds us of the intriguing Lionel Richie-Libya connection.
From Abbey Road to Arctic Monkeys: Mapping England’s Pop Music Heritage
by Michael Yessis | 02.08.07 | 9:20 AM ET
Judging from this Google image search and this Flickr cluster, not too many music fans visiting England haven’t walked in the footsteps of John, Paul, George and Ringo across Abbey Road. But England, of course, has a rich music heritage beyond the Beatles, and the country’s tourism agency wants to show it off. VisitBritain just released a map—and a sweet Web site—with more than 200 destinations associated with famous musicians. “For decades the done thing has been to bury Britain’s rock heritage rather than praise it,” writes Jeevan Vasagar in the Guardian. “Two of the country’s most famous music venues—the Cavern Club in Liverpool and Manchester’s Hacienda—ended their lives under a wrecking ball. But the era of official neglect is over.”
Compay Segundo House Opens in Havana
by Jim Benning | 11.20.06 | 9:04 AM ET
Ry Cooder’s 1997 Buena Vista Social Club album, and the Wim Wenders documentary of the same name, not only introduced millions of people to traditional Cuban music but launched thousands of visits to the island nation—and for good reason. The music on the album is at once haunting, playful and soulful. No song embodies this more, I think, than “Chan Chan,” written by Compay Segundo, the legendary Cuban musician featured prominently on the album and in the film. He died in Havana in 2003 at the age of 95, and now, his Havana home is being preserved as a tribute to him. It’s sure to become a pilgrimage site for Cuban music aficionados the world over.
Kelefa Sanneh on “The Hold Steady States of America”
by Michael Yessis | 10.02.06 | 3:02 AM ET
We mentioned last month that the title of The Hold Steady’s new album—“Boys and Girls in America”—comes from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The album comes out this week, and today New York Times music writer Kelefa Sanneh profiled the gruff, beery band from a great angle: He looked at the band as travelers and prowlers of America’s “shady neighborhoods.” Online, an interactive map of The Hold Steady’s America features clips from songs about cities across the country, including Chicago, Minneapolis and Ybor City in Tampa, Florida.
The Hold Steady Pays Tribute to Kerouac’s “On the Road”
by Michael Yessis | 07.31.06 | 12:45 PM ET
The upcoming album from The Hold Steady will be called “Boys and Girls in America,” part of a line from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Lead singer Craig Finn told Billboard magazine, “The line goes, ‘Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.’ Basically, the songs are about guys and girls, and love. It’s not a concept-type record like the last one—it’s more of a theme record.” The Hold Steady will likely be performing some of the new songs this weekend in Chicago at Lollapalooza. I’ll be there, and I’m looking forward to seeing the band for the first time. Via Syntax of Things.
New Road Music: Tom Petty’s “Highway Companion”
by Jim Benning | 07.25.06 | 11:00 PM ET
Tom Petty knows how to write a road tune. “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” from his 1990 album Full Moon Fever, featured an infectious guitar riff and celebrated the freedom and promise of a good road trip with verses like this: “I rolled on as the sky grew dark / I put the pedal down to make some time / there’s something good waitin’ down this road / I’m pickin’ up whatever’s mine.” Petty’s new album, released today, has a title that suggests it, too, will play nicely on the road: Highway Companion. Writes Rolling Stone in a review: “His songs are filled with images of motion, travel and the road; the sharpest writing appears in the cryptic, evocative ‘Down South,’ describing a journey that includes plans to ‘see my daddy’s mistress,’ ‘sell the family headstones’ and ‘pretend I’m Samuel Clemens / Wear seersuckers and white linens.’”
Jimmy Buffett: Celebrating Changes in Latitudes
by Jim Benning | 04.28.06 | 3:45 PM ET
Last Saturday, on a drizzly Southern California evening, I took in my first Jimmy Buffett concert, joining thousands of rabid Parrotheads festooned with Aloha shirts, shark-fin hats and other tropical-inspired accoutrements. I invested in the requisite margarita. A couple of friends wearing grass skirts greeted me and my wife with offerings of plastic leis. And as Buffett launched into his classics—“Margaritaville,” “Coconut Telegraph,” “Volcano,” and my favorite, his cover of the Crosby, Stills & Nash song evoking a ruminative sailing trip to Papeete, “Southern Cross”—I was transported.
Make Springsteen Albums, Not War
by Jim Benning | 02.06.03 | 4:50 PM ET
When Eric Alterman traveled to Europe to investigate the new anti-Americanism, he found that most Europeans had big complaints about U.S. foreign policy but weren’t, in fact, anti-American. Exhibit A: the Bruce Springsteen concert Alterman attended in Paris. “You can tell a lot about a continent by the way it reacts to Bruce Springsteen,” he writes in The Nation. “Tonight, at the Bercy Stadium, the typically multigenerational, sold-out Springsteen audience could be from Anytown, USA. Everybody knows all the lyrics, even to the new songs. Toward the end of the evening, Bruce announces, in French, ‘I wrote this song about the Vietnam War. I want to do it for you tonight for peace,’ and 15,000 Parisians, standing in the historic home of cultural anti-Americanism, scream out at the top of their collective lungs, ‘I was born in the USA,’ fists in the air.”
He Said That While Playing a Solo, he Would Often Find Himself Thinking About Eating a Sandwich
by Michael Yessis | 11.07.01 | 9:38 PM ET
The Funerals, an Icelandic “slow country band,” recently embarked on a spontaneous tour of their home country. Iceland has less than 300,000 citizens, so the tour only took four days. Still, much happened along the way. New York Times music writer Neil Strauss tagged along as the band endured, among other things, broken-down buses, broken ankles, payments of smoked fish and a sighting of Einar Melax, the reclusive former guitar player for the Sugarcubes. “On a Saturday night the band arrived in Akureyri, Iceland’s second-largest city, after Reykjavik,” writes Strauss. “It was therefore a disappointment when the only audience members were three women. Nonetheless, the band pledged to perform its best show and delivered, having a lot of fun in the process. ‘I’ve done a hundred rock ‘n’ roll shows,’ [guitarist Olafur] Jonsson said afterward. ‘But tonight I did the best show of my life. And for what? For three ladies in Akureyri. Isn’t that the story of my life?’ ”
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