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Like many people around his age--48--Ernie Isley remembers watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan: how old he was (12), who else was there (his older brothers' guitarist, Jimi Hendrix). But [...]

Back in 1992, when she was still about the hottest item in Nashville, Patty Loveless made the country-music equivalent of a pilgrimage to kiss the Pope's ring. At the invitation [...]

When a thumb injury side-lined the master pianist Murray Perahia in 1991, he immersed himself in Bach. He's since recorded three all-Bach CDs, including the Grammy-winning 'English Suites' and his [...]

Even when the beats hit the hardest, rap music really comes down to the voice: not just the boasts, yarns, protests and exhortations, but the tone, timbre, rhythm, pitch, articulation [...]

To be a hip-hop DJ, keeping a rock-steady beat while cutting back and forth between records on two turntables, takes a jeweler's precision. (How do they hit just the right [...]

Our Opinionated Guide From [1 to 5 Stars] TV & VIDEO Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (CBS; Feb. 27 and March 1) The biggest crime in this four-hour mini-series about the [...]

I can tell you just when and where I first heard Beck's 'Loser' (1994, 3 a.m., car radio, back road in East Hartford, N.Y.) and just what I thought: who [...]

Country music's reverence for tradition has yielded some of the best cover records ever--Willie Nelson redoing Roy Acuff's 'Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain'--and some of the looniest, like Webb [...]

See if you sense any ambivalence here. Eurythmics, the great British pop-music duo of the '80s, reunites after 10 years for a new album and a world tour to benefit [...]

Two of this season's most appealing CDs, the Chemical Brothers' 'Surrender' and Moby's 'Play,' are bound to get pigeonholed as 'techno' or 'electronica'--catchall terms for music assembled with samplers, sequencers, [...]

His lost tunes found. A new bio. Still more CDs. An American icon is back. LOUIS ARMSTRONG DIED BELIEVING he really was born on July 4,1900. Only in the '80s [...]

Squirrel Nut Zippers WE DON'T GET IT EITHER. Why are alternative-rock stations playing 'Hell,' by Squirrel Nut Zippers, about every five songs? This Cotton-Club-meets-calypso warning of eternal damnation has a [...]

Thirty years ago, you could hear Roger Miner's crossover country hits--'Chug-a-Lug,' 'Dang Me,' 'King of the Road,' 'You Can't Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd'--on Top 40 radio along with [...]

It's a jolt for an old member of Joe Henry's loyal cult following to hear this paragon of acoustic purity describe how he works nowadays. 'I've completely gone away from [...]

The Maestro of reggae has a little something for everybody A COUPLE OF PUBLICISTS, A COUPLE of journalists, his manager, a hovering waiter, a small Jamaican restaurant in Manhattan--not much [...]

On Garbage's 1995 debut CD, the band came on like a self-consciously corrupted '90s version of Fleetwood Mac. Catchy melodies, sure-fire hooks, tasty, understated guitar, immaculate production (by the group's [...]

SEAN LENNON MADE his debut two years ago on 'Rising,' the edgy comeback album by his mother, Yoko Ono; back then he told NEWSWEEK that 'it's impossible for anybody to [...]

JEFF TWEEDY, LEAD SINGER AND SONG-WRITER for the neo-roots-rock band Wrico, says he wanted 'our influences to be right on the surface' in their new two-CD set, Being ?here. This [...]

BACK IN THE '6OS, THE STAPLES SINGERS brought gospel music--and gospeloid versions of songs by the likes of Bob Dylan-to the folk and rock audiences that ignored such older performers [...]

THE 1994 FLUKE HIT 'LOSER' BY the singer and songwriter Beck remains one of the great weird pop singles. In a mind-blown sendup of slacker martyrdom, a sullen white boy [...]

Tennessee Ernie Ford (1919-1991) became country's highest-profile crossover act between Gene Autry and Dolly Parton because of a single song, his 1956 cover of Merle Travis's 'Sixteen Tons.' Miller lasted [...]

MERLE HAGGARD. Country-music cognoscenti have longed for a CD reissue of Merle Haggard's 'Same Train, a Different Time,' his 1969 double-LP tribute to founding father Jimmie Rodgers; their vinyl copies [...]

Reports on a series of Bob Dylan releases. "Young Bob," by John Cohen, which is a pictorial look at the musician around the age of 20; Dylan's work on his autobiography; Release by Columbia Legacy of a 15-CD set of remastered albums.

Mentions that ABCKO Records remastered every album of the Rolling Stones up through 1969, and reviews the 'Forty Licks' recording which covers the period of 1964 to 1997.

Comments on three reunion events in the pop music world. Frank Sinatra's much-anticipated `Duets' with long-established mainstream stars Streisand, Minnelli, Tony Bennett and others; `Honky Tonk Angels,' by Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette; The reassembling of the original Velvet Underground on `The Velvet Underground: Live MCMXCIII.'

Reviews two albums. Roy Orbison's `King of Hearts'; `Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds,' by the ex-Guns N' Roses guitarist.

Reports on Bob Dylan's visibility in the markets. Release of "Young Bob," by John Cohen which is a pictorial look at a young legend; Release of a 15-CD set of remastered albums from "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" to "Love and Theft." Autobiography which is in progress.

Rates several motion pictures, theater productions, and music recordings. 'Holy Smoke'; 'Galaxy Quest'; 'A Map of the World'; 'Next Friday'; 'The Missing World'; 'On the Rez'; 'Dirty Blonde'; Sheryl Crow's 'Live From Central Park'; Caravana Cubana's 'Late Night Sessions.'