Gregory McNamee

Find Stories by Gregory McNamee

Browse by:

Category:

Year:

Latest Articles

Dead Man Blues: Jelly Roll Morton Way Out West

By Phil Pastras(University of California Press; 224 pages; $24.95)

By Gregory McNamee
Aug 16, 2001

Sometimes talking a good game will get you out of trouble. Sometimes it'll get you famous. Sometimes it'll get you dead. Ferdinand Morton (1891-1941), known to musical history as "Jelly Roll," was, to judge by jazz buff Phil Pastras' intriguing bit of cultural archaeology, one of the world's great talkers...
Rock Til You Drop: The Decline From Rebellion to Nostalgia

By John Strausbaugh(Verso Books; 306 pages; $25.00)

By Gregory McNamee
Jul 26, 2001

A few weeks ago, in Chicago, I wandered into one of those cheese-and-toothpick parties that the entertainment industry likes to throw for itself. The event itself wasn't much, but the musical guest of honor was: the superannuated Eric Burdon, fronting an accomplished if Spinal Tap-ish quartet called The New Animals...
Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta

By Chuck Klosterman
(Scribner; 288 pages; $23)

By Gregory McNamee
May 10, 2001

If Greil Marcus, the dean of intellectual rock-as-pop-culture journalists, had grown up in some repressed, oppressive, cold and remote farm town up on the Canadian border, subsisted on tallboys and fried food, read Mad magazine instead of Heidegger, and kept Whitesnake's debut album in heavy rotation on the boombox, then...
Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years, 1903-1940

By Gary Giddins (Little, Brown)

By Gregory McNamee
Mar 15, 2001

It's understandable if the only mental image you carry of Bing Crosby is that of a grandfatherly, cardigan-clad duffer crooning Christmas carols with the likes of Rosemary Clooney and David Bowie. The most popular entertainer in the world in the 1930s and '40s, a friend and champion of bluesmen and...
A RIVER RAN THROUGH ITA TANGLED DEBATE SURROUNDS THE SAN PEDRO RIVER, ARIZONA'S ECOLOGICAL STOREHOUSE

By Gregory McNamee
Jun 1, 1994

The point where southern Arizona's San Pedro River crosses Interstate 10 is not a memorable sight for passers-by zipping merrily along to Los Angeles or El Paso. At the crossing, marked by an almost ironic sign, the riverbed is little but a thin band of tan dirt and stream cobbles,...

More Articles by Gregory McNamee »