On The Corner
The Fall of 1974. I am meeting friends at the Bottom Line for a Waylon Jennings show. Yes, for a New York City boy, I was Country before Country was cool. Blame Buck Owen's lead guitarist, Don Rich on the first season of Hee Haw. I had simply never seen or heard guitar playing like that in my life and he was using a Telecaster, just like the ones my parents had bought me for Christmas, 1966. I also lost my mind for Tammy Wynette that year.
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Way back during the last years of the ‘60s and start of the ‘70s, I went to the famous High School of Music & Art in Harlem, USA. It was way the heck uptown in the middle of CCNY’s campus.
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In 1973 and '74, the years of Glam, if you were in a band doing your own material in New York City and infinitely cool, with the right connections (as in, you knew one of the New York Dolls), you might have been able to get a gig at Mercer Arts Center or Max’s Kansas City...maybe.
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Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan left the New York Dolls in 1975 to start the Heartbreakers (two years before us New Yorkers heard that buck-toothed blond fella from Florida). One night, to my mild shock, Johnny called me at home, announcing...
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In honor of Mr. Presley’s 75th birthday. It’s 1956, I am 3 years old. My best friend is Corky. His dad is taking us, along with Corky’s two utterly fascinating sisters, Meg, 9 and Kate, 7, to the Central Park Zoo in his green Packard “woodie” station wagon.
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This little vignette was chosen to be included in the Deluxe 40th
Anniversary Edition of the Rolling Stones’ legendary live album from
1969, Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out!, recently released on ABKCO Records..
(When last seen, Binky Philips had just caught Pete Townshend's guitar at the Metropolitan Opera in New York during the final performance of "Tommy" in the United States.)
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I was in Heaven. My hideously painful crush on Esther was finally getting some wonderfully tangible relief and hope. It was April 1970 and I had slept out for two nights to the immediate south of the marquee of the Fillmore East to get tickets for the Who's Final Performance of "Tommy"...
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A Heartbeat And A Guitar Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears is a truly absorbing book on Cash and the making of his seminal LP Bitter Tears: Ballad of the American Indian by author Antonino D'Ambrosio.
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In our popular culture we have an ongoing interest -- an obsession, really -- with discovering “overlooked” or “lost” works of arts and their creators. Music, movies, books, old TV shows, Broadway musicals, paintings--we’re as interested in old gems that slipped through the cracks as we are in new work. We have all become curators.
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Forty years ago on December 6, 1969, the Altamont Speedway was the site of a well documented free rock concert held in Northern California between the cities of Tracy and Livermore.
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