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The Rolling Stones at a press conference in October of 69. Sam Cutler is second from right Sam Cutler, a young man from London, was the tour manager for the Rolling Stones on their infamous 1969 U.S. tour, which ended at Altamont, after which he remained in the U.S. for years, taking over the same role for the Grateful Dead.

POLY STYRENE: BREAKING DOWN THE BONDAGE A new documentary film, Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, clears up some of the mystery around the remarkable biracial woman born Marian Elliott. The film, directed by Paul Sng and Celeste Bell, Poly’s daughter, is also a welcome reminder... All Please Kill Me PostsCool PeopleGirl PowerMusiciansPunkRichie Unterberger WE NEVER LEARN: GUNK PUNK IN THE 1990S Eric Davidson, front man of the Ohio-based New Bomb Turks, is equally adept at rocking, rolling and writing.

Donovan. Once George Harrison picked up the sitar to add exotic sounds to John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood”, the pop world turned toward the East, as did luminaries like John Coltrane and composer Philip Glass. Suddenly, the pop charts resonated with sitars and drones and tablas, in hits like “Heart Full of Soul,” “See My Friends” and “Paint It Black” as well as songs by Donovan, Traffic, Richie Havens, the Box Tops, Joe South and the Incredible String Band.

The Knack hit the ground running in 1979, with the megahit single “My Sharona” off their debut album Get The Knack. Partly because of their meteoric success and the resultant media hype (not the band’s fault), the actual music the band made, in its initial 3-album incarnation, is lost in a haze of sour grapes and rock-purist gripes. The truth, upon reexamination three decades later, is that The Knack was a talented pop band with a, yes, knack for MTV-ready hooks and melodies.

A new documentary film, Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, clears up some of the mystery around the remarkable biracial woman born Marian Elliott. The film, directed by Paul Sng and Celeste Bell, Poly’s daughter, is also a welcome reminder of the power of X Ray Spex and London punk scene to shape cultural conversations. It arrives soon after the appearance of Dayglo: The Poly Styrene Story, co-authored by Bell and Zoë Howe.

Eric Davidson, front man of the Ohio-based New Bomb Turks, is equally adept at rocking, rolling and writing. During the 1990s, the Turks were rolling, too, through the clubs of the Midwest, South, West, Northwest and even a few cities in Europe and Japan. They released more than 10 albums and EPs in the 1990s and early 2000s on numerous indie labels.

The enduring image of Walt Whitman is as a bearded old sage living out his years in his Camden home. And yet, he was still a relatively unknown writer into his 40s, living with his mother in Brooklyn and wandering Manhattan’s streets at night. During this time, he went underground (literally) to Pfaff’s, a below street-level saloon catering to artists and writers at Broadway and Bleecker.

Los Angeles may have found her Virgil in an Anglo-Irish-American detective novelist named Raymond Chandler (1888-1959). The character Chandler led through L.A.’s underworld in 7 now-classic novels was Philip Marlowe, a wise-cracking private eye whose clients dragged him through the heart of the city’s darkness but whose native wits saved him, more world weary but no worse for wear.

Some filmmakers choose to kowtow to the good graces of the studios financing their pictures while others march to the beat of their own drums. Alex Cox is in the latter percussionist camp. Indeed, he could be called the Buddy Rich of filmmaking: lively, idiosyncratic, and explosive. For those not familiar with the director behind Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, and Straight to Hell Returns, Alex Cox has woven in the punk dystopia of the mid-Eighties with his love for American Westerns.