Wednesday, September 23, 2015

TBT: Leonard Cohen, "Bird on a Wire."

›
Leonard Cohen, the Bard of Montreal, turned 81 this week. He is a poet, songwriter, singer, and novelist ( Beautiful Losers ). I first kne...

Yogi Berra, 1925-2015

›
While he'll always, and rightly, mostly be remembered as a Yankee. the photo shows him as I like to remember him, as one of my beloved...
Wednesday, September 16, 2015

TBT: Gram Parsons, with Emmylou Harris, "We'll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning."

›
I'm off to the Cosmic American Music Festival in Winter Haven, Florida this weekend. Winter Haven was the home town of the late Gram P...
Wednesday, September 09, 2015

TBT: Frank Sinatra, "September Song."

›
Yes, it's that month of cooling temperatures. We had a couple of days this week that saw thermometers registering in the low 90s, but ...
Monday, September 07, 2015

Clothes in pop music, part 2, the Sixties.

›
Just over a year ago, inspired by Moira Redmond's Clothes in Books , I posted "Clothes in pop music, part 1, 1955-63" . Sin...
Sunday, September 06, 2015

Some scenes from Cape Cod

›
The Bourne Bridge, our entryway to the Cape. There are two other bridges that cross the Cape Cod Canal onto the Cape proper. To the north ...
Friday, September 04, 2015

Michael Davitt, a forgotten hero. Remember him this Labor Day.

›
For Labor Day, in celebration of my newly found Irish heritage , I'm posting a song by Patrick Street, with a vocal by Andy Irvine, ab...
Thursday, September 03, 2015

Self-Absorbed Boomer celebrates a decade of taxing attention spans.

›
I missed it. Last Sunday, August 30, was the tenth anniversary of the birth of Self-Absorbed Boomer . Much has gone down, and much has cha...

TBT: Chuck Berry, "School Days."

›
Not only is this week's TBT by the same artist--but what an artist!--as last week's, but it's the same song. Well, at least, t...
Sunday, August 30, 2015

Happy 70th, Van Morrison!

›
It's been almost exactly 48 years since I sat in Hazen's sandwich shop on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, heard "Brown Eyed...
Wednesday, August 26, 2015

TBT: Chuck Berry, "No Particular Place to Go."

›
I'll be riding along in my (rental) automobile soon, so this by, in my opinion, the greatest rocker of all, was on my mind, despite my...
Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Grammar snobbery is the sort of thing up with which I will not put. Well, not too much.

›
There's a story, possibly spurious, that Winston Churchill was handed a draft of something he'd written; on it, an editor had writ...
Thursday, August 20, 2015

TBT: Jimmy Dorsey, "So Rare."

›
"So Rare" was written in 1937 and recorded and released that year by two big bands, Gus Arnheim and his Coconut Grove Orchestra ...
Sunday, August 16, 2015

Party on a tanker? Yes, if it's PortSide NY's Mary A. Whalen.

›
A week ago PortSide New York , headed by my friend Carolina Salguera, played host to a weekend long festival aboard their historic coastal...
Thursday, August 13, 2015

TBT: The Temptations, "I Wish It Would Rain."

›
Last week, as a nod to my friends in Florida, I TBT'd Creedence's "Who'll Stop the Rain?" This may have started a ...
Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Maritime views from an evening walk.

›
Yesterday evening I took a walk down to Brooklyn Bridge Park's Pier 5. As I walked out onto the pier, the sun had already set, but it...
Wednesday, August 05, 2015

TBT: Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Who'll Stop the Rain?"

›
This is for my friends in Tampa, my old home town, although I'm sure you've heard it many times on local radio over the past few d...
Wednesday, July 29, 2015

TBT: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Summer in the City."

›
It was ninety degrees in the shade yesterday, so this may seem an obvious choice. Maybe too obvious. Still, I like the song. It's worn...
Monday, July 27, 2015

Steeleye Span at B.B. King's, New York, July 23, 2015.

›
When my wife said Steeleye Span were to appear at B.B. King's I was surprised, thinking the group, an old favorite of mine, had broke...
Thursday, July 23, 2015

TBT: The Tams, "What Kind Of Fool Do You Think I Am?"

›
California in the 1960s had the Beach Boys; the East Coast, from Virginia down through the Carolinas and Georgia, had Beach Music. The Tam...
Monday, July 20, 2015

Tania Grossinger, 1937-2015

›
Tania Grossinger's autobiography, Memoir of an Independent Woman , begins with the following paragraph: I was born in Evanston, Illi...
Saturday, July 18, 2015

A tour of the historic Brooklyn waterfront, with the Working Harbor Committee.

›
On June 11 my wife and I went on another of the Working Harbor Committee's "Hidden Harbor" tours. A year ago we took one th...