As I read this cultural review in the Times to my wife this morning:
I started crying, or at least my tears fell down my whiskered cheeks.
She asked,
“Did this touch something in your memory?”
As a therapist, she’s trained to know the right questions to ask, but I…
The perks of driving 90 miles every day is that I get to listen to all sorts of music. During the years that I’ve subscribed to Sirius-XM, I’ve bounced around stations from SoulTown to XMU, Alt Nation to Outlaw Country, Willie’s Roadhouse to The Spectrum. I have no problem with…
Having supper the other night with a couple of friends, I got frustrated because every time I launched into a story, our waitress would jet over to see how we were doing.
It’s not her fault. She was doing her job. I knew that and I know it now.
My…
I am not ashamed to say that my family and I were great and faithful patrons of K-Mart in those days before that mega-giant went bankrupt due to the Wal-Mart-ization of America. I suppose K-Mart’s idea of discount prices were a Double-A baseball team’s relationship to the majors. The old…
It’s almost mid-October, and so what better time than now to issue a brand new challenge for all Riffers! Ready, here we go.
My wife asked me the other night to remember when my family purchased its first stereo system, and while I knew the answer immediately, it set me…
My wife came up with a gratitude game for our Thanksgiving feast yesterday. We were a party of twelve — and that bourbon/apple juice-brined turkey stole the show, but I digress.
Her game was that everyone was to pick a song that they’re grateful for, and then I would compile…
Fall 2020.
Amidst the fear and panic and hope and forever consternation, anxiety, and dread — thank God T***p lost — there were painful other moments of loss and disappointment.
I wonder what all yours were; I can’t describe all of mine, so I’ll reduce them to this one:
In…
I was going to ask you about…but the voice of your hair dryer intervened.
I was about to say that I wrote yesterday of a look I had when
I was Punk, when I wore a semi-Mohawk and a T-shirt with no sleeves, when
I was teaching, but the sounds of that blower…
Scanning the rock and roll history this morning, via the compelling new study, Major Labels, by New Yorker critic Kelefa Sanneh (Penguin Books 2021), I came across this passage from his “Punk” section where the son of biracial African immigrants gets personal:
“We formed bands that scarcely existed, releasing tapes…
Some moments truly seem as if they’re on repeat, a stuck needle on an otherwise flawless vinyl record. …
