Without resorting to research, I tried to remember ‘60s love songs I hadn’t heard in years due to their falling off the radar. Half of these I used to sing, the others remain stuck in my heart. 1. “A Woman is a Prism (And Not Made of Stone)” (Eric Andersen) This old folkie might be…
Musical Athleticism
I am no fan of music athleticism, be it in rock, jazz or classical music. By athleticism I mean aspiring to and celebrating music on the basis of its being high, fast and tortuous, and therefore very difficult to perform. Musical athleticism should not be confused with virtuosity, the general mastery of an instrument. The…
Learning To Lose
“She knows there’s no success like failure And that failure’s no success at all” –B. Dylan Love Minus Zero/No Limit A month ago I was on a roll. It started when I became frustrated with the glacial pace my memoir had been taking as it crawled from agent to editor and back to me, sleaker…
Guilty Pleasures: The Carpenters
I was watching the horror movie “1408,” based on a Stephen King story. I was pleasantly surprised to find it better than the reviews had led me to expect. John Cusack stars as a ghost story debunker who finally finds a story he can’t debunk in hotel suite 1408. The wicked spirits that haunt the…
A Conversation with Captain Trips
“What a long strange trip it’s been,” Robert Hunter, “Truckin’” Forty years ago this weekend, on July 3rd 1970, I spent a couple of hours talking with Jerry Garcia. I was 19, and he was as close to a hero as I had. How my own journey came to brush up again the Grateful Dead’s…
Bach and the Beatles
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…
Luminous Muse
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