Having spent close to three years playing gigs at K.I.Sawyer Air Force Base, it only felt like I had done a tour of duty in the military. Perhaps that is why Pastor Jay’s sermons illustrated with anecdotes about his time wearing Air Force blues always conjure up memories of my college days. Back in […]
The year 2019 marks the 40th anniversary of the release of The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ first album. The self-title record has become a cult classic and as cofounder Kim Wilson recalls, “Things were wide open back then. There were hundreds of stages where bands could show what they had.” If one remembers the days when […]
When former Boston Red Sox star Bill Buckner passed away in May of 2019, every news report I read or heard said something along the lines of, “Bill Buckher’s career should be remembered for a lot more things than the ground ball that rolled through his legs and lost the World Series for the […]
My sister had one of those cloth covered boxes with a hinged lid (the lid was red and the bottom was off white) that served as her record player. It had a lever so you could switch between 33 ? and 45 RPM records. The tone arm and needle weighed enough that it probably […]
As sometimes happens with these From The Vaults pieces, I like to go back and revisit a topic when there is something new to add to a story. If we didn’t already need to be reminded that ‘time flies when you are having fun’, I went back to find the first volume of FTV: Lake […]
I noticed an advertisement in Classic Rock Magazine not too long ago for some concert dates in England by Dave Bickler’s band. It was kind of nice to see that Bickler is still hanging around the music scene years after he became kind of a sad trivia answer when his promising career went […]
If the title of this FTV led you instantly to Creedence Clearwater Revival, you are two thirds correct. This CCR could be Creedence Clearwater Revisited (for the sake of both brevity and clarity, we shall refer to them as CCR2). One can’t really talk about CCR2 without talking about CCR, so it is probably wise […]
When John Mellencamp’s hit single Little Pink Houses shot up the record charts, I liked it immediately. Why? Like the lyrics suggest, I actually did grow up in a pink house. At the time it wasn’t my favorite color, especially when we did one of those elementary school art projects were we were asked to […]
Volunteering at the Porcupine Mountain Music Festival has become the highlight of my summer. I first got involved with PMMF #2 and now circle the PMMF weekend in my engagement calendar far enough in advance that the family plans on me disappearing for two days near the end of August. After a few years of […]
Ten years ago, my wife and son got me one of those birth year cards entitled, “1953 – Remember When . . . A Nostalgic Look Back in Time”. I rediscovered it in the summer of 2018 while rifling through miscellaneous files of cards and things that had been waiting for me to sort out […]