Arts and Entertainment featured

An audience with rock legend Steven Van Zandt

By Richard Burnett The last time rock legend Steven Van Zandt performed in Montreal solo, with his band Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul, was in October 1987 when he opened for U2 on their Joshua Tree Tour at Olympic Stadium for more than 66,000 screaming fans. Los Lobos was also on that bill. “Really? […]

Books

The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘N’ Roll by Ian S. Port (Scribner, $37)

“They must have amused each other – so similar were they, yet so different. If not for their overlapping fascination with amplification and musical instruments, they might not have become friends.” -from The Birth of Loud by Ian S. Port (page 34) For my fourteenth birthday my father drove me to a music store on […]