Bun E. Carlos: Rockford’s own Cheap Trick (“I Want You to Want Me,” “Dream Police”) always gravitated toward Chicago (where the band recently announced plans to build a music complex on the South Side), and the linchpin of the band’s beat has always...

Last fall marked the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. As watershed moments in music history go it was surely one well worth noting. But in terms of my own continued enjoyment of the record, not so much. But I did like the idea – the idea of refle

Both sets are generous packages. Nestled in gorgeous, candy-gloss lift-top boxes, each record is polished up a tad (I couldn’t find my original copy of Gish for a comparison, but I can verify that Siamese Dream is slightly louder and a tad sharper,...

It gave a passing glance to the emerging alternative-rock culture that worshipped Pacific Northwest grunge, but it was more in tune with unfashionable ’70s influences. The Chicago quartet looked mismatched from the start: Singer-guitarist Billy Corgan’s...

The ambitious double album topped critics' year-end best lists, sold 10 million copies and won a Grammy, and the band was selling out arenas worldwide. It was on the Mellon Collie tour that things finally fell apart in a haze of drug abuse, arrests and...

Yeah, it features qualities that would launch the band to superstardom — Corgan’s love-it-or-hate-it snarl, mixes with an over-stacked amount of guitars and Jimmy Chamberlin’s jazz-inspired drum parts — but it’s obvious the group hasn’t really arrived...