Rock legends can never seem to have enough press. From Rolling Stone magazine and personal memoirs to archived concert footage, the rich history of Rock and Roll is well-documented on the surface level.
But it’s on the local level that unsung Rock and Roll veterans of their own right typically go unnoticed. Musician and journalist Michael Rabb didn’t want that to happen in the Hudson Valley.
In the late 70’s Raab – who grew up in Cornwall, NY – meticulously documented the music scene of the Hudson Valley for the subsequent decades. In 1979 he created the MusicMachine Magazine and started writing articles about bands in the region. He had first noticed a surge of live music and bands in Orange and Dutchess Counties but became frustrated when local papers didn’t cover the local scene. So armed with an IBM Selectric typewriter, he took matters into his own hands and began publishing his own articles.
“The region was ready for media coverage in the trenches where it was all happening,” Raab said. “The time was right for Musicmachine Magazine.”
Raab himself was part of a band called the Jelly Bean Bandits in the 60’s and 70’s. The group worked their way into a record deal with Mainstream Records and recorded an entire album in 12 hours in a studio in Manhattan. (Their 1967 debut self-titled LP still averages a few hundred streams every month on Spotify, Raab informs me.)
When the band first started out, they played all over the Hudson Valley in places like the Trade Winds nightclub in Newburgh and the Buccaneer in Poughkeepsie. The Bandits would eventually dissolve before releasing any subsequent records but has reunited a few times over the past decades for reunion shows and charity events in the region.
As the 80’s came around, readership continued to grow for MusicMachine and the magazine expanded. The magazine partnered with brands like Budweiser Beer and even grew to interview stars such as Southside Johnny (of the famed Asbury Jukes)
In the 90’s, Raab moved to North Carolina but continued to operate the MusicMachine remotely with the help of a friend and eventually sold the magazine to a company that ended up going bankrupt. In North Carolina, Raab also had an eye for the emerging music scene there and purchased a struggling publication called The Beat and eventually sold that as well.
Later with the advent of the internet, Raab was able to archive video, photos and articles from the MusicMachine and share them with the world. He even made a documentary titled “Hudson Valley Music of the 1980s’, which is now available to watch on his Youtube channel.
As Michael Raab himself puts it, “that’s the condensed version of an exciting 12 years in mid-Hudson music.”
To explore more of the rich history of music in the Hudson Valley in the 80’s, check out the archives of the Musicmachine on Facebook: here
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