Freddie Redd With Due Respect

Freddie & the Dreamers were the clowns of the British Invasion, playing their pop music for laughs while the other groups of the time were dead serious. Lead singer Freddie Garrity began playing in skiffle groups in the late '50s, switching to rock & roll in the early '60s. After the Beatles broke the American market wide open, Freddie & the Dreamers followed in the flood of acts that tried to duplicate the overwhelming success of the Fab Four…

After Jeff and Steven McDonald reconvened Redd Kross in 2006 (with the late-'80s line-up of guitarist Robert Hecker and drummer Roy McDonald), they seemed content to play the occasional festival show or short tour. For Redd Kross fans waiting for more music, it looked like 1997's Show World might be it as far as new albums went. The brothers had a trick up their sleeve, though, and in 2012 they released Researching the Blues, a self-produced album that not only continues their stellar recorded legacy but gives it an electric boost…

Redd Kross is an American alternative rock/punk rock band from Hawthorne, California, who had their roots in 1978 in a punk rock band called the Tourists, which was started by brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald while Steve was still in middle school…

The title track of the Switchblade Sister EP, one of the band's greatest compositions and a staple of its live set for many years to follow, contained the lyric "swinging like a new phaseshifter." The sounds on the Switchblade Sister EP would bridge the gap from the fuzzy bubblegum of its major-label debut Third Eye, and the hyper-confident after school power pop of its next album Phaseshifter; the title most likely lifted from the aforementioned lyric…

Redd Kross is an American alternative rock/punk rock band from Hawthorne, California, who had their roots in 1978 in a punk rock band called the Tourists, which was started by brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald while Steve was still in middle school…

One of the great jazz trumpeters of all time, Freddie Hubbard formed his sound out of the Clifford Brown/Lee Morgan tradition, and by the early '70s was immediately distinctive and the pacesetter in jazz.