Mike Mills

NEW YORK , May 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Featuring over 300 bands, the CBGB Festival announces a first music line up in addition to film premieres and screenings, a distilled spirits fest and conference panels at 30 venues over the four days from July 5th to 8th, 2012 in New York City .  Focusing on new music and emerging young bands, the CBGB Festival will stay true to the original mission of the CBGB & OMFUG club that once lived on the Bowery. Read More

It sounds like the act of creation in a lot of ways, each individual song tentatively creeping out into the light and then there's that moment—in each song, mind you—where everything falls together and the song commits to whatever it is with confidence. Read More

Jon, your new album Promising Promises is basically a reworking of Forever If Ever , right? Read More

"I mean, the thing is, we're all so in love with being in this band that it was very difficult for us to understand how you could not be."Read More

Lee "Scratch" Perry; Walt "Clyde" Frazier; Puma "Clyde" sneakers; Groove Merchant Records in San Francisco; Eddie Harris's Plug Me In ; that you could wear beanies even when it was hot outside; that billy goats had beards; Mike Mills (then just a graphic designer); Spike Jonze (then just a maker of skate videos); how to pronounce "Stuyvesant"; that diaper rash is "funky"; that the egg is a symbol of life, whatever that means; all-time hits leader Sadaharu Oh; Ricky Powell (though I had no idea what he "did"); what a "mullet" was; Ben Davis work clothing ("Union-made"); the situation in Tibet; "'Sweetie Pie' by the Stone Alliance"; that I wanted to one day move to New York. When Adam Yauch passed away on Friday after a two-year battle with cancer, it seemed that everyone around me took the loss personally. Read More

I saw R.E.M. for the first and last time on May 31, 1995 at Marcus Amphitheater in Milwaukee, during the band's momentous 11-month Monster tour. Read More

"[Peter Buck] initially didn't even want to be in a band because he said, 'All guys in bands are assholes, and I don't want to be an asshole.' And I was like, 'We don't have to be assholes. We can be the non-asshole band. —Michael Stipe on Behind The Music , 1998 Due to a combination of age, experience, geography, and media access, I didn't get into R.E.M. on the ground floor. By the time I became a fan, R.E.M. was already about seven or eight years old—still on an upswing, but already a known quantity. It was a platinum-selling, mainstream band, with songs on the radio and videos on MTV. It belonged to everybody, or at least those people who liked popular music and wanted something beyond Appetite For Destruction, Hysteria, Bad, and Licensed To Ill. I can't legitimately claim that I "discovered" R.E.M., at least not in the way that discovery was defined in the pre-Internet world, when it still seemed possible to put police-tape around little, unknown worlds and keep them sequestered from the media's glare for a while. When I found it, R.E.M. was just there , as close as the nearest living room, with the same level of accessibility as Hulk Hogan or Who's The Boss? Read More