Musical ramblings from the manager
John Lennon loved ELO. In 1974, he proclaimed that they were the “natural heirs to the Fab Four” which more or less fulfilled Jeff Lynne’s teenage fantasies generated as a Beatles fan during his formative years in Birmingham. America also loved ELO. England? Not so much. Sharon Osbourne? More on her later. Even Phil Lynne, […]
We were playing Euchre after dinner one evening when I told everyone my tale of the ‘giant sandhill crane’ that I briefly thought might carry me off like a pterodactyl swooping down on a hapless animal. It turned out to be an illusion caused by two birds flying side by side behind a spruce tree. […]
Near the end of our unusually mild February of 2016, our old NASA buddy Ralph emailed from southern Wisconsin that he and his daughter had seen some sandhill cranes. We went back and forth a bit on the topic of sandhill cranes and the conversation transported me back to my introduction to them back in […]
Although he was born in Iowa, Dick Wagner grew up in Saginaw, MI and became a Detroit music icon with his early bands The Bossmen and The Frost. These bands may not have enjoyed the national exposure of other Michigan bands (Grand Funk Railroad and Bob Seger for example), but Wagner himself is […]
R.I.P. Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister. I can only listen to Motorhead for so long and then I have to hear something else, but that does not mean I don’t appreciate the house that Lemmy built. Lemmy had just celebrated his 70th birthday in December of 2015 and it was well known that he was having […]
Call it “band musical chairs” if you wish or “out with the old, in with the new”, but however you label it, it is something that happens from the grassroots local scene to the upper echelons of music. All bands will find themselves changing players from time to time and the guitar chair is usually […]
In the wake of the first Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, anybody with a field, a long extension cord, and a flatbed truck trailer wanted to host an outdoor festival. How do I know this with such certainty? Because I played on a flatbed truck trailer in a field at a little location south of […]
Bar Scott recently gave us permission to reprint a piece she wrote entitled Grace. She had sent it along in one of the numerous e-mails we had exchanged about two CDs she had sent for us to air (Parachute and Journey). She mentioned living in Woodstock, NY for a period of years and I admitted […]
Mudcrutch. This article isn’t going to be about Mudcrutch, per se, I just like to say the name: Mudcrutch. This FTV is going to be about the mystical process of coming up with a name for a band and I just happen to be reading Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes (2015 Henry Holt & […]
I was recently asked, “Where do you get all your story ideas from?” Knowing that the standard “I don’t know” wasn’t going to cut it, I fell back on the old, “Oh, I read about things or see something in passing and an idea will pop into my head.” A perfect example of this […]