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…
Why We Built May Father’s Coffin
Part II –Why We Built my Father’s Coffin Posted by John Manchester on June 3, 2010 at 2:30pm View Blog RATE: 11 Flag This is an excerpt from my memoir: In his last years my father told me, “When I die I want you children to build my coffin.” He’d gotten the idea sometime in the seventies,…
Guilty Pleasures: The Beach Boys
Part 2 – The Warmth of the Sun I could come to the neat conclusion that the Beach Boys are part wonderful, part terrible and some strange, and leave it at that. But there’s a deeper truth hiding in their contradictions. The Beach Boys are the quintessential American band. Not just because they sold more…
Guilty Pleasures: The Beach Boys
Part 1 Given the fallen state of Rock music in recent decades, I felt it my duty as a father to try to turn my sons on to some of the great stuff of Rock’s golden age in the ‘60s. I was pleased when they went enthusiastically for the Beatles, Dylan, Motown and Hendrix with…
It’s the Sixth Anniversary of my Father’s Death
EDITOR’S PICK JUNE 1, 2010 7:06AM RATE: 19 Flag Part 1: The Reason I’m Here on Open Salon My father with JFK looking over his shoulder, 1964 (Image rights reserved John Manchester) A month ago I started merrily blogging away here and never properly introduced myself. I’m the son of the writer William Manchester. He became well-known when he…
Memorial Day Biker’s Special
I grew up, small for my age, constantly afraid of the big tough Sicilian kids I’d see hanging out on my way to school. My fear was overblown – the worst that ever happened was some kids threw me in a snow bank. What scared me worse than the kids downtown were bikers, namely the…
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