If you are football-ed out by the weekend, let me recommend a movie that opened this summer to good reviews and mediocre box office. I had purchased War for the Planet of the Apes in 3-D a while back and it took some convincing to get friends and family to watch it...
I had a wonderful long conversation with Dennis Elsas last night, reminiscing about WNEW-FM, which hit the airwaves for the first time as a progressive (underground, meaningful music, free form, call it what you will) radio station fifty years ago tonight. I wrote a...
We are writing about death far too often. The senseless carnage in Vegas yesterday, now the news of the passing of rock and roll great Tom Petty. There’s no need to list all of his wonderful songs. From the moment I first heard the jangling chords emerging from...
Hugh Marston Hefner has died at the age of 91. He may have had more influence on American culture than any artist, musician, activist or politician in the last century. He founded Playboy when he was 27, bankrolling it himself and selling out the initial run of 51,000...
Walter Becker leaves us at the age of 67. Co-founder, along with Donald Fagen of the great American band, Steely Dan. Or were they a band? A case could be made that they were a duo who employed the finest sidemen available and demanded the best from them, regardless...
Spontaneity is overrated. Greats like Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan are legendary for eschewing multiple efforts designed to hone the original performance. Orson Welles once responded to a producer, “the proper reading is the one I’m giving you.” There...
