Grateful Web's Aaron Dietrich was in attendance at Friday night's Ratdog/Gov't Mule show in Eugene, Oregon.

On June 10, a new pop album dropped on the US music scene. It is the culmination of four years of writing, travel, and soul searching by 24-year-old Alex Deep. It's a sophisticated offering for a young musician born into an Italian family in Venezuela.

Every town has its bar band that packs in the crowds on Saturday nights, but few towns have a draw like Minneapolis' group, The Feelin Band, and what they can produce, wrapped up in a good time.

Every time I write about these boys, I somehow slip into my hill country roots and all sorts of mountainisms start coming out of my mouth. I guess it's because I get caught up in the theater of the band and the fact that they don't take anything seriously—except their music. You can't believe a word written on their websites—especially the bios of each current member and former member.

For classical composer Lee Johnson, tackling the work of the Grateful Dead was like discovering the musical foundations of a new foreign country. Johnson is known for his concert pieces, choral works, short operas and musicals, planetarium soundtracks, and solo/ensemble pieces that cross into jazz and big band music.

Today's review is a show readily available for download at the Live Music Archive, 7/29/88, at the Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey California. This was the first of a three show run at Laguna Seca, and in my opinion the best of the three. I chose this show mainly because of the extremely high quality of the recording currently available at the LMA. It sounds to me to be a mislabelled soundboard or soundboard/audience matrix recording, but I suppose it's possible that its just a phenomenal audience recording.

Sure, the bands may be old and the music not quite up to date by the standards of today's young teens and adults, but Chicago and The Doobie Brothers showed that even in the millennium they can still draw in a crowd.

If there is a better party band than Ozomatli out there, then I would love to hear them.  I wasn't invited to the party at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas on May 30th, so I had to crash it.  I openly admit to not paying for a big name concert in about 5 years.  I got spoiled being a photographer/writer and getting into the shows I wanted to see with press passes.  But this past weekend I had to break my streak and actually pulled $25 dollars out of my wallet to see one of my favorite bands ever.  The las

Culture, like nature, evolves. Old ideas are made better, and become new ideas. Splits are made between schools of thought, and each side develops into something distinct from the other, even though both are the recognizable progeny of the previous generations. The growth of music over the last hundred years is perhaps one of the most notable examples of cultural evolution in action, and all the more remarkable since the existence of music is, arguably, unnecessary for the continuance of the human species.

This spring, Collin Herring's third album dropped. Its curious title, Past Life Crashing, is probably more indicative of what this talented young singer/songwriter has been about since his last release.