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Midweek Music Break: Cowboy Junkies, “Angels in the Wilderness”
[Image: Cowboy Junkies (from top: Alan Anton, bass; Margo Timmins, vocals; Peter Timmins, drums; and Michael Timmins, guitar)] Cowboy Junkies was the first band I ever listened two who’d been dubbed “alt”-anything. (It may have been alt-country, but I’m pretty sure it was plain old alternative rock.) This made me feel all, y’know, not quite dangerous, [...]
Intersections Close By, Milestones Passed
[Image: the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth 2 and the New York City skyline at night (January, 2011)] From whiskey river: Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range [...]
Midweek Music Break: The Ramsey Lewis Trio, “The ‘In’ Crowd” and “Wade in the Water”
[Image: Ramsey Lewis, by Kagan McLeod. (Original here, at McLeod's blog of "music-themed ink drawings" called Oooh, and I Like It.) McLeod says in the comments there that he drew this "straight to ink," without benefit of pencil sketch; both this technique and the drawing per se, I think, parallel the experience of listening to [...]
Midweek Music Break: Collins H. Driggs (on the Novachord), “Estudiantina,” and… Beer
[The Novachord, closed and open (click either photo for an enlargement); both photos per Wikipedia] When you grew up in the US during a certain window of time (and maybe in certain geographic areas, within certain socioeconomic strata), the culture you could absorb from the adult world was this weird amalgam of past and present. [...]
Midweek Music Break: The Playmates, “Beep Beep”
I’ve been thinking for a while of doing theme-type Midweek Music Breaks for a little variety, such as one on car music: songs about cars. As opposed to conventional “road trip” music, I mean, or songs by groups named after cars (like The Fleetwoods, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and, uh, The Cars). I may still do [...]
Perfect Moments: The Author’s Book, to Its Author
[Ed. Note: minor identifying details of this recently discovered letter have been obscured, to preserve the anonymity of the parties involved.] Dear J_____, So, you have finally finished me. I suppose I should offer not only thanks but congratulations to you — if so, then, sure: Congratulations! But I also can’t help thinking that maybe we [...]
Midweek Music Break: Bix Beiderbecke, “I’m Coming, Virginia”
Jazz cornetist Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke’s life sketched out the template for generations of stereotypical pop-music biographies to come: self-taught musician comes out of the suburbs of Nowheresville, remakes his chosen genre — wowing the pros — while laboring in the chains of commercialism, and dies, in mysterious, seedy circumstances, before the age of 30… leaving behind [...]
Midweek Music Break: “The Swingin’ Shepherd Blues”
Alto saxophonist and flautist Moe Koffman had been kicking around the Canadian and US jazz world for years by the time — in 1957 — he composed a number for the jazz flute he originally called “Blues à la Canadiana.” His producer suggested a title change; ever since, it’s been known as “The Swingin’ Shepherd Blues.” [...]
Catless
Yeah. That, alas — for the first time in twenty years. We’d known the day was coming, known it for months now. A sad realization, to be sure. But not the same sort of sadness as to find it suddenly so… Katie lived longer than the other two indoor cats we had — somewhere around [...]
Perfect Moments: Two Beautiful Women, a Certain Amount of Booze, and Maybe I’ve Got a Story…!
In the mid-1990s, boy, was I ever confused, perplexed, and probably (by many measures) in need of adjustment. Especially about my writing. Here’s what my quote-unquote oeuvre consisted of then: A non-fiction Op Ed memoir(ish) piece in a regional edition of the New York Times. A published mystery. (Depending on who I was talking to at [...]
