Posts by Leslie Michele Derrough

Last week, the guitar player known for his dreads, his tattoos, his penetrating stare, his aggressive guitar style and for finding God amidst rock & roll debauchery, published his new book, With My Eyes Wide Open. It’s not the first time Brian Welch, better known as Head of the band Korn, has taken pen to […]

In 1990, Tesla was on the rise as a band, having released two albums and a couple of really cool hits, “Love Song” and “Modern Day Cowboy.” They were very hot on the touring trail, putting on concerts with so much energy and vitality it was knocking fans back in their seats. Tesla stayed grounded […]

Last week when Def Leppard played the Cajundome in Lafayette, Louisiana, it was to a virtually sold out arena full of happy fans, glad that the band kept good on their promise to reschedule the date they’d cancelled after doctors advised Joe Elliott to take a rest earlier this year. “He would have carried on […]

If more people’s gears turned like Ally Dickaty’s then the world might be a better place. The front-man for the British punk rock band The Virginmarys takes his songwriting quite seriously, choosing to follow his heart by writing about the world around him. It’s a punk thing to do, to question and criticize the powers-that-be […]

Hell no, we won’t go! That was the rally cry for late Saturday afternoon at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. After a cloudy, humid, albeit windy, start to the day, the raindrops started small and turned big; Very big. Midway through Dr John’s main stage set, the rain, wind and lightening finally got […]

Hello Sunshine. Hello Crawfish Monica. Hello sweet refreshing snowball. With nary a raindrop in sight, and not as much mud as you’d think, Friday at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival was hot-hot-hot … in more ways than one. And what better way to celebrate than with Bonerama and Glide’s Artist Of The Day, […]

After sunny skies and hot temperatures blessed the grounds of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival during it’s first weekend, it was inevitable that the rain gods would have their turn to play on the second weekend, which kicked off on Thursday. The at-times big, fat raindrops may have pounded down on Fest goers during […]

Where were you in 1985? High school? College? Working at a ho-hum job dreaming of something else somewhere else? Vicky Hamilton was living in a Clark Street apartment with her friend Jennifer and a couple of rock & roll musicians who had taken over the living room as their own personal party space, leaving the […]

With a partially reunited Guns N Roses headlining Coachella in California and Gregg Allman and Widespread Panic bringing their usual jamband charm to the Wanee Music Festival in Florida, you might believe the 2016 music festival season won’t get better than these two this past weekend. But no festival holds a candle to the mystique, […]

There are three things that you will notice when watching the newly released DVD Johnny Winter: Down & Dirty. One is that the music is so incredibly passionate, feisty and unfettered with special tricks, that chills run up your spine. Two, that Winter’s Firebird guitar is so damn cool. And three, if you haven’t gone […]

Brian Fallon had a good March this year. He released his first solo album Painkillers and played some shows, with more in the near future. Coming from a band with a good-sized fanbase, doing something without your normal bandmates by your side can seem a bit daunting, scary, stressful. But for Fallon, he felt just […]

Vivian Campbell has been talking most of the day. He’s been talking about Dio and Def Leppard, touring and guitar playing, the new Last In Line record and the death of his bandmate Jimmy Bain. “It gets confusing,” he replies with a laugh. “I can’t remember if I said something to you or the person […]

“We didn’t make it out of the Midwest by being a ballad band,” REO Speedwagon bass player Bruce Hall told Glide during a 2013 interview. “We rock, we rock hard.” With a set-list full of hits from their near-50 year career, the band from Illinois proved their claim to fame is not all super-ballad based. […]

A band’s second album is often harder to conceive than their first, especially if that debut caught a lot of people’s attention. The pressure is on – should they keep metamorphosing or stay the same, write brand new songs or pull out some from their past to tweak, do they stay out on the road a […]

“We were on tour in Germany and a girl said to me, ‘Can you teach me how to sing like you?’ I said, ‘Girl, you got to get butt naked’ and she said, ‘What!’ (laughs) I said, ‘You have to get butt naked to bare the soul.’” For Debbi Blackwell-Cook, once you hear her voice, […]

You can’t really do the same thing over and over again,” vocalist Chad Cherry of The Last Vegas told me during an interview a few weeks ago, “because personally it would be boring.” For a young rock & roll band like The Last Vegas, they have tried to stay true to their harder-edged roots while […]

It’s always been solely about the music. That is the most poignant statement that comes through the recent documentary, The Ritchie Blackmore Story. Through intimate interview clips with Blackmore and some of his guitar brothers-in-arms, personal photographs and video footage from Deep Purple, Rainbow and Blackmore’s Night concerts, it’s always about the music. Blackmore may […]

“Music is like color,” explained Lukas Nelson recently. “When I listen to the musicians who affected me when I was growing you, I take from the primary colors to find my foundation. Then I apply secondary colors and the music becomes more and more complex.” For Nelson, music is a whole palette of colors, each […]

About forty years ago, a German guitar player named Uli Jon Roth was in a band called the Scorpions. They had released an album titled Virgin Killer and were on the heels of releasing their follow-up, Taken By Force. But Roth was already venturing down a different path musically than his band0mates. His songs were […]

Believe the hype. From virtually the beginning of their young careers, both Rival Sons and blues guitar player Tyler Bryant have been receiving acclamations for what they were creating. For Bryant, it was the blues via Stevie Ray Vaughan and Lightnin’ Hopkins; a sound which he has taken and expanded upon, especially with his band […]