Standing in the Shadows of Stax
Last week I came upon two major examples of The Song Behind the Song. Like so many things,...
Judy Judy
Among the great women folk singers of the early to mid Sixties, Joan and Judy (Baez and Collins)...
Crazy Cat
Last week being pledge-drive time at the station (wmpg.org, it’s never too late) I brought back some old...
Iron Womb
Last week I was putting together a set of songs for my show (Dog’s Dinner, Wed eves. 8:30-10, wmpg.org)...
Ondrej Goes to Hollywood
Ondrej Havelka and His Melody Makers, whose music I’ve featured on-air a couple of times, are like Max...
The Long Fingers of Claude Debussy
In the early 1960s an album called “The First Family” appeared, comedy bits making fun of the Kennedy...
Ornithology
I’m early on reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (900 pages, journey of a thousand miles), a fact I’m sharing...
The Rising of the Moon
And so it begins. My new book — Another Fine Mess: Life on Tomorrow’s Moon — appears tomorrow,...
South America Stole Our Name #2
Randy Newman has a new album out, Dark Matter, his first in nine years. One cut that especially struck...
Nina Simone and the Inexplicable Grammy
On last night’s show I played the title cut from Nina Simone’s debut album, Little Girl Blue (1958). It’s...
The Old/New Weird America
Penny Lane’s mind-rearranging documentary NUTS! — about goat-testicles titan Dr. John Brinkley, the ur-Trump of 1930 — started...
On Ignorance
Night before last I dreamt about the (noxious, worm-eaten) electoral college. Specifically I was protesting that Hillary Clinton,...