Michael "Bear" Russell photo by Don Petersen, Special to The Roanoke Times

A little while back, I had the good fortune of writing a story about Michael “Bear” Russell, a bar security hombre at Awful Arthur’s Towers and a three-decade veteran of the nightspot scene. Here’s the story, if you didn’t see it when it first ran.

Russell has heard just about every local band the Roanoke Valley has had to offer over the years, so I thought I’d ask him about them as a way to bone up on my knowledge of the region’s music history. We decided to make a series of podcasts out of it. Here is the first one, in which he talks about Cimarron, January Rose and Radar Rose.