Lucian Perkins was a summer intern at the Washington Post in 1979 when he snapped a set of black-and-white photos at punk shows around the District. He’d stay at the paper f...

Lucian Perkins was a summer intern at the Washington Post in 1979 when he snapped a set of black-and-white photos at punk shows around the District. He’d stay at the paper f...

Indie guitar whiz Marnie Stern has watched her guitar collection dwindle down from several fine instruments to one beloved model. “I used to have a bunch of guitars but I’...

In school, we learn that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in his lab in Menlo Park, N.J. He had the idea and he developed the technology to make it a reality. The truth i...

As an artilleryman in the Army’s 1st Armored Division, Roy Scranton was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and 2004. He draws from his experiences in Iraq as a fiction writer and co-e...

The Smithsonian owns a set of vibes that once belonged to Roy Ayers — and for good reason. During the 1960s and ’70s, the vibraphonist melded jazz, R&B and funk into a...

Pianist Eddie Palmieri pounds the keys so hard he’s called “The Piano Breaker Man.” Born in Spanish Harlem to Puerto Rican parents in 1936, he became a fixture of the Ne...

Noel Heroux was only a high school freshman when he played his first show in New York City. He and his band, Hooray for Earth — which included close friend and bass player C...

The 11-member Debo Band, led by saxophonist/ethnomusicologist Danny Mekonnen, has members from multiple continents, but its musical roots are deep in Ethiopian soil. On its 20...

Barring the apocalypse, Gwar will release its latest thrash-metal opus next summer. While preparing for global domination and enslavement of the human race, the band is playin...

Veteran stoner-metal band High on Fire released its sixth album this past spring, the blistering “De Vermis Mysteriis,” an ambitious collection about Jesus’ time-traveli...

Kaki King doesn’t just strum her guitar. On her sixth studio album, “Glow,” the Atlanta-born musician pounds the instrument like it’s a drum, tapping manically along t...

Stephin Merritt hates touring. The frontman for indie legends the Magnetic Fields is bored by the constant travel, the grueling routines and the anonymous accommodations. “I...

Every toiling indie musician dreams of getting into a breakout band, selling hundreds of thousands of albums and filling venues all over the country. But for members of the Po...

Self-described “dissident feminist” writer and professor Camille Paglia has made a career of questioning (usually with pointed, arch humor) pretty much everything in cultu...