The Beatles and Bach stand at opposite poles of my musical life, two great pillars on which my career stands. Without them I’d be a geologist or some kind of computer geek. I’ve chronicled Bach’s influence on me and will do so with the Beatles in the near future. What brings the Beatles and Bach…
Ex-political Junkie in OS Rehab
When I started blogging a few months ago, I swore on a stack of Bibles (well OK, old New Yorkers) that I would never write about politics. And here I am. I make excuses, like this has material from my memoir. True. That it’s meta-political blogging. Still doesn’t make it OK. You see, I have a…
More More More!!! Part 2-The Spinners, the Stylistics, and the Genius of Thom Bell
One of the few oases that got me through the desert of ‘70s pop music was the sweet soul coming from bands out of Philadelphia such as the Stylistics and the Spinners. The genius behind them, writing, arranging, producing and playing keyboards, was Jamaican born Thom Bell. I first became aware of him in 1970…
Third Grace Update
So, my third grace Vanessa Carlton has come out as a….whatever. It’s none of my business.I couldn’t care less about her love life. What I love is her music. The big news I want to hear is when that forth album is coming out. Is it coming out at all? Well, maybe all the hoopla…
More More More! In Praise of Overproduction
Part 1 I get a lot of my ideas in the sauna. I go in there after my workout, which seems to do as much for my brain as my muscles, oxygenating synapses, clearing out some of the fog. As the temperature passes 180, the heat melts things stuck in my subconscious and they float…
“Business is Terrible”
I decided to buy a bass. I’d never owned one, but I’d fiddled with a few, and figured it couldn’t be too hard for a guitar player to learn. And then I could have live bass on my home recordings. I went down to a cozy little basement vintage shop hung with scrappy old Teles…
Vanishing Bandwidth for Music
Being born in 1950, my teenage years coincided with the 1960’s. Music was without question the dominant art form in my life. Rock concerts were the most exciting events. When my father took me to hear Martin Luther King speak at Wesleyan in 1963, I was blown away by his thundering voice, but even more…
A Whole Month’s Vacation
EDITOR’S PICK JULY 26, 2010 6:57AM RATE: 22 Flag My father announced, “We’re taking a whole month’s vacation!” It was the summer of 1960, the year he won his Guggenheim grant. With the money he got we could afford to rent a cabin on Mount Desert Island for August. He saw the promise of a very…
JS Bach Part II: A Pilgrimage to Leipzig
In December I visited my younger son in Berlin, where he was living on an art grant. He’s a painter, perhaps in part thanks to my having dragged him through art galleries when he was young. We took the train to Leipzig, on a joint pilgrimage. He’d come to see the art museum, which filled…
J.S. Bach Part 1: How He Changed my Life
In late 1968 Johann Sebastian Bach’s music changed my life. I was a freshman at Wesleyan University in a year that saw an invisible pendulum swinging from hell to heaven, from the terrible assassinations of our heroes to celestial visions of the sort that visited me one day in my first week of college. Up…
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