Your Sound Choice
Musical ramblings from the manager
Let’s begin this month’s AstroCal with the evening planets. Venus will be the star of the show near the western horizon shortly after sunset. Shining at magnitude -4.3 (remember, the lower the number, the brighter the object) will make it the brightest object in the fall sky after the Sun and the Moon. During […]
At Christmas of 1970, you could have held my accumulated knowledge of George Harrison in a thimble. My brother Ron came home from his first year teaching job in downstate Chesaning bearing a boxed set of cassettes and a music book for Harrison’s massive All Things Must Pass triple album. It would have been a […]
As sometimes happens when searching for a title for one of these From the Vaults articles, I am torn between telling readers too little or too much information from the get go. Such was the case with the title of this particular title. Truth be told, the whole title should be: Everything I learned […]
Black Sabbath have called it a day, but they won’t disappear anytime soon. Classic Rock radio and magazines will continue to play their music and talk about their legacy. The last time I visited Amoeba Music in Los Angeles in 2013 (just prior to the WOAS West Coast Bureau relocating to Oregon), I picked […]
While researching information about Woodstock, I hit upon a video of the Jefferson Airplane performing their song Volunteers. Like any good earworm chorus, the ‘Volunteers of America’ got stuck in my head. One thing led to another and the constant recycling of the lyric started touching off random memories connected with the word ‘volunteer’. […]
August means cooler evenings, a noticeable shortening of the daylight hours as we reach the midpoint between the Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox, and (hopefully) clear skies to provide some prime sky watching conditions. It is also the time of year when people eagerly anticipate the annual Perseid meteor shower. The peak of this […]
“‘That’s some tale, old timer.’ Yeah, and it gets better everytime I tell it.” Where this conversation came from doesn’t pop to mind immediately, but I know that it has served me well for several decades. Not the part about ‘getting better every time I tell it’, mind you. I use it to remind myself […]
When their first record came out on January 29, 1968, the eponymously titled Steppenwolf album turned heads mostly because Born to be Wild became such a massive hit. The album as a whole was one of the greatest ‘first albums’ released in a period when bands were kicking out music that would become the […]
We left The King – Part 1 just as the Russian and American space programs were preparing to attempt the first manned space flights. In his 2021 book, BEYOND – The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space (Harper-Collins), author Stephen Walker goes deep into the inner […]
No, not Elvis. Not LeBron James. Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. If the name does not ring any bells, that is okay because any references to him were scrubbed from the records in his native Russia so thoroughly after 1957 that even the CIA could not identify him. Nobody working for him in the Soviet space […]