The great, the late … When I was just newly a teenager, my older sister Michele’s next-door neighbor friend Lori kindly loaned me a bunch of albums, stuff she thought maybe I’d be into. Much of it I didn’t go for, and still don’t, like REO Speedwagon, which was way too treacly sweet for my …
I’ve never shared a link to one of my own pages of past newspaper writing here as its own blog post however, the response in just the couple of days since I originally added this almost-30-year-old story to this site, and then mentioned it on social media, has been kind of amazing. It really seemed …
Earlier today, with no forewarning, I was blindsided by a 1978 TV clip of Donnie and Marie. As in Osmond. As in Devil, get behind me!/Jayzus take me now! They were performing, as a corn-fed TV-variety-show number, “Reelin’ in the Years,” the disarming 1973 hit by Steely Dan. The great Steely Dan. That now defunct, …
Dylan on a Sheridan Square bench in the West Village, New York, N.Y., Jan. 22, 1965. Photo by Fred. W. McDarrah/Getty Images, as also with the one below. My adoration of Bob Dylan 1965-66 is akin to what rowdy religious types have for crucifixions and blue-eyed saviors, upward-mobility reincarnations and a heaven tripping over itself …
Hey, 2019, how’s about not being a fucking bastard, huh? Because after these past couple of humdinger years, I seriously don’t trust any of you any longer to get it right.
When I die, and everything I have seen thus far in life suggests this will happen, despite my best efforts to pretend that black-gowned bony fella with the scythe who keeps inching closer in my rear-view mirror is just a very persistent and poorly dressed itinerant wheat farmer with a moonlighting Amway gig, and everything …
I find myself increasingly disconsolate. I have been singing (mezzo-baritone), as you know, in that five-man barbershop quartet, Ring-a-Lung-Dung, which interprets the works of overzealous German nationalist composer Richard Wagner (of “Ride of the Valkyries” fame) through hand-puppet mime performances. We routinely give our all, outfitted in “Scream” masks and tight beige leotards, to overemphasize …
As I have delved even deeper into the music and writings of Leonard Cohen since his passing, searching for a particle of solace in what has been for me a profound loss, I am struck, again and again, by the thought that we simply did not deserve him, this sage of a man, nor his …
Never have given half a rip for country music, as country music is today, all truck-lovin’ light-beer bros in over-styled cowboy hats gulping on the last note or two to get it to twang. But Merle Haggard. Now, Merle Haggard. Deeply grateful I once got to interview this raucous gem of a man, by phone, …
So I’m in my kitchen doing kitcheny stuff, and my son, Luke, from the other room, starts banging out the drum part on the Jimi Hendrix gem “Crosstown Traffic,” on whatever version of Rock Band he’s wrapped up in today. And suddenly, there I am in my last angry years of high school, slumped down …