This weekend Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival comes full circle back to Dallas Texas where the first one was held ( Cotton Bowl 2004 ). Just some of the players scheduled to appear: Billy Gibbons, Bonnie Raitt, Buddy Guy, Gary Clark…

When The Call's main songwriter/singer Michael Been passed away recently , a quote was attributed to him in his obituary where he claimed to have seen The Band in concert at age 18 , which set Been on a life's course of music literally until the day that he died . Watching Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz , The Band's Thanksgiving 1976 swan song , shows how that kind of epiphany could happen . But the earliest work of this quintet with the generic name is no less impressive : when Rolling Stone magazine writers compiled their Top 500 Albums of All Time , The Band's 1968 debut Music from Big Pink ranked at #34 . That's almost twenty places higher than The Beatles' debut !... (more)

As you will hear in this in-depth conversation with R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills, the near-death loss and subsequent retirement of drummer Bill Berry after recording 1994's Monster  shook R.E.M. to the core near the apex…