1. Hey Baby – Bruce Chanel / Delbert McClinton 2. Artificial Flowers – Bobby Darrin 3. Handyman – Jimmy Jones 4. Jailhouse Rock – Elvis 5. Stagger Lee – Lloyd Price 6. Smokey Places – Corsairs 7. All My Lovin’ – The Beatles 8. You Really Got Me – The Kinks 9. 123-Redlight – 1910 [...]
A telephone call from Joseph Stalin to Dmitri Shostakovitch in the middle of the night during the 1920s – think Bob Newhart’s telephone comedy routines. Stalin: “Dmitri – This is Joseph – Joseph Stalin. How are you this evening? I saw your new opera last night – too many notes Dmitri – too much dissonance [...]
In 1980 I was working in Athens as an architect designing a large section of a new city to be built from scratch in the desert in Saudi Arabia. This new city was to have a projected immediate population of 500,000. It was going to be constructed on a site adjacent to the Red Sea, [...]
Bill Spooner, mastermind of The Tubes, is a great songwriter, arranger and guitar player. Bill was the music director-guitar wizard in my band Mr. Gasoline for two years. We played a few dives but no gig was a throw-away for Bill. He played as masterfully in the rat holes for an audience of ten as [...]
“You either swing a band or you don’t” Buddy Rich
Rock and Roll is a distillation of Fascism. The viciously insistent 4/4 beat, the small palette of rhythms and chord progressions. A history of rock band politics from myriad garages to the vast arenas of the West would reveal scenes that would make Napoleon, Mussolini and Stalin appear as benevolent as Mr. Rogers. It is [...]
Garth Brooks has sold more albums than any other solo artist in history. The great majority of these fans are hardworking middle-class American men and women i.e. scrimpers and savers struggling to survive from payday to payday. If one votes with one’s pocketbook then Garth Brooks has ridden this enormous wave of populist support to [...]
Bob Dylan’s recent relationship to his music / lyrics is similar to that of late Picasso in that they both evince a casual-seeming language of expression. Perhaps the reason Dylan doesn’t think too much of late Picasso is that he sees too much of his own relentlessly casual yet urgent laziness in him. Advice to [...]
Bob Dylan creates a large musical playing field in the 1960s, a field upon which a generation of talented singer / songwriters played. Tom Waits is one of these artists playing on the field of Bob. It is interesting that after forty years Dylan has his pick of which of his students to mimic for [...]
An idea for a take home final exam in Law School. Calculate the county jail, state and federal prison exposure for crimes committed, threatened or implied in the lyrics of the Beatles song catalog between 1962 and 1970. The low-hanging fruit: Maxwell Addison – murder one with circumstances – life in prison – that silver [...]