NPR's ON POINT with Tom Ashbrook
June 23, 2011
With Robert Santelli from Grammy Museum
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Podcast Summary
Commentaries on music from NPR's Here and Now and elsewhere...
Author Tim Riley has written books on the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Madonna, and his most recent title is FEVER: HOW ROCK'N'ROLL TRANSFORMED GENDER IN AMERICA (Picador 2005). He is at work on a major new biography of John Lennon for W.W. Norton slated for 2009. His music commentary is featured regularly on NPR's HERE AND NOW, the nationally-syndicated show produced weekdays out of WBUR-FM in Boston.
About Tim Riley
Tim Riley
NPR CRITIC, AUTHOR, PIANIST, and SPEAKER TIM RILEY reviews pop and classical music for NPR's HERE AND NOW, and has written for the HUFFINGTON POST, THE WASHINGTON POST, SLATE.COM and SALON.COM. He was trained as a classical pianist at Oberlin and Eastman, and remains among the few critics who writes about both "high" and "low" culture and their overlapping concerns. Brown University sponsored Riley as Critic-In Residence in 2008, and his first book, Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary (Knopf/Vintage 1988), was hailed by the New York Times as bringing "new insight to the act we've known for all these years..." A staple author in college courses on rock culture, he gave a keynote address at BEATLES 2000, the first international academic conference in Finland. Since condemning the rap group Public Enemy for anti-semitic remarks in his 1990 Boston PHOENIX column, Riley has given lively multi-media lectures at colleges and cultural centers like the Chautauqua Festival on "Censorship in the Arts," and "Rock History." His current projects include the music metaportal, the RILEY ROCK INDEX.com, the Norton Rock Reader, and a major new biography of John Lennon for W.W. Norton (2010). In 2009 he was named Journalist in Residence at Emerson College.
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NPR music reviews
Mickey and Sylvia > Wings (1973) > Tim Riley remix
Smackdown debate: Beatles vs. Stones, Oldham Refs...
Album night devoted to AJA turned into AJA plus ROYAL SCAM, and a bunch more. see http://www.artsjournal.com/riley for more...
"The pure products of America go crazy..." Talking with Anthony DeCurtis on NPR's On Point, broadcast June 26, 2009
Arthur Phillips's new novel, The Song Is You, binds together fiction with music criticism using sharp musical descriptions to steer terrific characters. A talk with Phillips and Tim Riley, hosted by Tom Ashbrook.
Jon Nelson hosts "Some Assembly Required," which specializes in underground sound collage and mashups. As "Escape Mechanism," he's released an album of his own, "Emphasis Added." This ON POINT interview includes music from Nelson, Eno and Byrne, Eric B and Rakim, Girl Talk, People Like Us, Wobbly, Turnstylz, and DJ callers who argue for a new musicianship. Broadcast on Thursday, February 5, 2009.
The intrepid Hungarian Andras Schiff released his Late Beethoven sonatas to complete his ECM cycle last fall. Here's the review, with excerpts from his podcasts at Wigmore Hall.
A long chat with Scott Woods of rockcritics.com about the top ten Beatle books, the state of Beatle scholarship, and the state of criticism.
Visit: http://rockcritics.com
Talking about Lisa Robinson's oral history of Motown in the current issue of Vanity Fair... On Point, NPR, Thursday, November 13, 2008
The new Portishead album, THIRD, has been worth the nine years' wait.
Springsteen opened his Magic Tour at the Hartford Civic Center the other night. WBUR's HERE AND NOW broadcast this review.
Musicians revere pianist Leon Fleisher for his early concerto recordings with conductor George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in the late 1950s: his Beethoven cycle is still a marvel and still in print. But where Beethoven was robbed of his hearing, Fleisher was robbed of his fingers: in the early 1960s, right as he was preparing for a major tour, he contracted a rare neurological condition called focal dystonia, which curved and stiffened the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand and forced him into early retirement.
Over the past five years, however, Fleisher has returned to the two-hand repertoire due to some breakthrough treatment, including botox injections and rolfing muscle therapy. On August 2, HBO will broadcast an Oscar-nominated documentary about Fleisher called TWO HANDS, which includes footage of Fleisher talking, playing and teaching. His current CD is called THE JOURNEY, and our music critic Tim Riley has a preview of Fleisher's unlikely third act…
Another Sgt Pepper story, down under.
Commentary with Tim Page and Anthony DeCurtis about the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Interview with David Leaf, co-director of US VS JOHN LENNON, documentary on Lennon's political activism.
Paired with Holland Dozier Holland set and Motortown Revue Live!
12-08-01: This got filed a week after he died, deflecting a week's worth of "silent" Beatle blather.
10/20/05: Guest appearance discussing NO DIRECTION HOME with John Schaefer.
8/10/04: promoting FEVER on Wisonscin Public Radio... easily the best interview covering material from the book.
9/27/05: covering this fall's' avalanche of Beatle titles, beginning with McCartney's new album, on to Spitz bio, and then mashups and mono fidelity...
6/09/05: Promoting FEVER: HOW ROCK'N'ROLL TRANSFORMED GENDER (Picador) with Lisa Napoli.
6/09/05: Promoting FEVER: HOW ROCK'N'ROLL TRANSFORMED GENDER (Picador) with Lisa Napoli.
