In the whitewashed, pre-Beatles pop music landscape of the early ’60s, two musical entities – the Beach Boys and Phil Spector’s teenage symphonies – are generally credited with keeping pop music from being completely vapid. But an overlooked quartet of soulful Italian American kids from New Jersey matched their more vaunted West Coast contemporaries hit […]
Originally published in 2004, when 1979 was midway between Elvis and the present. What is that?” I kept wondering about the strange disco music with the guys talking over the beat that I’d been hearing all over Manhattan since stepping off a Greyhound bus a few hours earlier. I couldn’t go two blocks without hearing […]
There are three kinds of dreams: the ones you have when you’re awake (“3-2-1, he let’s it fly just before the final buzzer and — swish — it’s all over! It’s all over! Texas wins the NCAA championship thanks to the gutsy effort of walk-on freshman Michael Corcoran! Just two days earlier he was hospitalized […]
Originally published July 1999 The calls started Saturday morning and went through the day, as friends and family wanted to make sure I was all right after the news that John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane was missing and he and his wife and sister-in-law were presumed dead. Because I’ve had the image of a 3-year-old […]
Part of being a true living legend is not talking about it, so even as Johnny Gimble made his name playing hot country jazz fiddle with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys in the late 1940s and then did Nashville session work on classic albums by Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson and […]
Here’s an appreciation of Sam Phillips from 2003, written the day after he died. He had the life I would’ve most loved to live. If he could find a white man who could sing like a black man, he could make a million dollars. That’s what Sam Phillips would say over and over again from […]
The N-word and the C-word are the two most dangerous terms in the English language. Steady at No. 3 is “heroin,” which won’t get you punched, but might cause more serious repercussions in the long run. As today’s rebel youth increasingly are embracing the deadly drug, even after the high-profile overdose of street-wise flower child […]
The audience stretched as far back from the Zilker Park stage as the eye could see on the last night of the first Austin City Limits Music Festival. When Robert Randolph and the Family Band hit the stage that September night and played an old church song, the audience dug in. But then, without warning, […]
Has it really been 40 years since Richie Havens, destined to be the greatest folk performer America ever produced, was silenced by a freak dentistry accident? It doesn’t seem that long. The legend’s music continues to grow in popularity. Since he met death — so soon after the overnight stardom that came with his electrifying, […]
