Chicagoland Beatles Fans: Here’s your chance to see one of the band’s best live performances in its entirety on the big screen, with fully remastered sound. more ›

On Feb. 7, 1964, the Beatles landed at JFK airport and started the British Invasion that changed American music forever. more ›

Sub-Pop label mates, Fruit Bats and Vetiver, played Lincoln Hall Thursday night, churning out their folky brand of back-to-basics songwriting and classic Americana rock ‘n roll to a sea of plaid shirt-wearing twenty-somethings. more ›

This video, a compilation of people in infomercials doing things wrong, is a tribute to all you whose home is both your castle and your office. more ›

For almost three hours and over three dozen songs Paul McCartney delivered a concert set that only picked up steam as it went along. At one point in the evening we wondered just how do you critique a musical legend who still plays like he's excited to be there? Unlike other nostalgia acts who seem to be primarily motivated by ever increasing paydays, and have the stilted stage shows to prove it, McCartney wrung new life out of tunes that were were three to four times as old as quite of few of the folks in the audience. more ›

Today we look back at one of the classic local labels, Vee-Jay Records. more ›

On February 9, 1964, The Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Yada, yada, yada, they became the biggest rock band the world has ever known. Tonight you have a chance to look behind the patina of myth and rose-colored memories at two of the primal documents of Beatlemania. And it's free. more ›

We’ve been itchin’ to write about Chicago quintet Secret Colours for a while now. They’re a group who, like the Brian Jonestown Massacre before them, borrows pretty liberally from the 60s-era psychedelic playbook while omitting Anton Newcombe’s sarcastic, post-modernist lyrics from the equation. If that makes Secret Colours sound like a photocopy of a photocopy, well, no argument here. So why did we want to write about them then? Because we thought we would love them. It seemed like a match made in musical heaven. And yet, it wasn’t made to be. more ›

Sometimes making music can be much like making a great culinary dish. You have the ingredients, you decide on the quantities to use, the quality of products to place in the dish, and all of this results in the essential decision on how finished or high-end the result will be. Sometimes you want something on the higher end of the spectrum like fougeres and then there are times you are just happy eating something easy and no-frills but delicious like hamburger helper. Yeah, there is a lot in-between the two, but as much can be said for each end of the scale. more ›

After Keanu Reeves starred in that remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, we thought we'd seen the bottom of the barrel. What idiots we are. Courtesy of Variety we've just learned of something even worse. Much, much worse. more ›

Like a lot of people, we like The Beatles (our favorite Beatle: George) and their music (our favorite album: Revolver), having first first discovered them at the ripe age of 13 in the form of our parents' dusty LPs. So mark us down as very likely to get ourselves up to Evanston and check out a new exhibit happening at the Northwestern University Music Library. What the Tribune is calling "seven handwritten specimens from the band's creative peak" (which we take to mean "handwritten lyrics and doodles") have made their way to the library, courtesy of donations from Yoko Ono and composer/musician John Cage. One of the highlights of the collection is a version of Paul's "For No One" written on a manila envelope, including some missing choruses. While you won't get to the originals (for security reasons), the Library will be displaying super duper high-resolution scans for the viewing. According to Northwestern University, the seven manuscripts featured are "Eleanor Rigby,” “Good Day Sunshine,” “For No One,” “The Word,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Yellow Submarine.” The manuscripts are only on display for a few weeks, until mid-April, so get ye to the Purple Line post-haste! [Trib] more ›

It’s all fun and games until someone calls sell-out, but how is almost every artist not a sell-out when it comes to putting tunes behind a commercial these days? From the use of “Lust for Life” to get us aboard a Royal Caribbean Cruise to Wilco shilling for Volkswagen, what are the best or worst songs used in commercials? Mark Caro wants your comments about that over at his blog, Pop Machine. Do we care... more ›

Tonight sees the rare appearance of a most endangered species, something seen almost as rarely as the cicadas that currently roam our land; tonight sees Chicago's Hushdrops dusting the cobwebs off their instruments and hauling their gear onto the stage. more ›

Birds Of Avalon's debut, Bazaar Bazaar, hits so many sonic reference points it can tend to be an exhilerating and dizzying experience at first. It sounds like Sloan gone psych. No, it sounds like Led Zeppelin gone pop. No, that's not quite it either. Black Sabbath meets The Beatles? more ›

OK, so we're actually stretching the truth a little. Maybe. Tomorrow at 11 a.m. there will be a ceremony outside the Chicago Theater, and Mayor Daley will present Chicago's "It" girl with a plaque in honor of "Jennifer Hudson Day." State Street will be closed between Lake and Randolph for the ceremony. more ›

The Sun-Times ran an AP wire story today that's mostly good news with a sprinkle of bad news for lovers of music, though that depends on your persepctive. Overall, music sales were up for the year 2006. While sales of physical albums declined 4.9 percent, digital album sales doubled, and sales of digital singles increased 65 percent. What’s refreshing about this story is that it doesn’t feature any dunderheaded analysis (or fulminating quotes from industry... more ›

The Trib's On the Town music editor decided that since it's Friday the 13th, he would deal with one of the most pressing issues of our time - which band is it necessary to see before we all go to that gig in the sky? more ›