a blog for those who never gave up their turntables or records
OPINION QUESTIONS are big on Quora and I try to provide answers that are accurate but somewhat off the beaten path. The question I received this morning was, “Who are the all-time great frontmen in music?” I read the question as who are the great lead singers of rock groups, as both vocal and visual performers. [Continue reading]
IN RECORD COLLECTING, we bandy about certain terms so often that they lose their meaning. One such word is ‘rare,’ which should be considered a bugaboo not just record collecting, but all fields of collectables. Another abused word is ‘psychedelic,’ or, as it is more often used, ‘psych.’ [Continue reading]
THE MAJOR RECORD COMPANIES usually released new titles on Monday, or at least they did in the ’60s. On April 12, 1965, I rushed home from school and ran upstairs to my room and tossed my books on my bed and pulled my money out of my drawer and ran downstairs to the garage and picked up my bike and zoomed off to Joe Nardone’s record shop and bought Mr. [Continue reading]
WAS THE LEGENDARY “SMILE” ALBUM based on Brian Wilson’s experiences with LSD? Did Brian consciously or unconsciously incorporate aspects of Zen Buddhism into SMiLE? Who was Arthur Koestler and what did he have to do with SMiLE and what the hell is ‘bisociation’ and why is it a part of a conversation on Sixties rock music? [Continue reading]
THIS ARTICLE ADDRESSES BRIAN WILSON and the inspiration for his legendary SMiLE album. It bears the unwieldy title of “On Brian Wilson And SMiLE (A Convoluted Conversation Part 2),” because it is the second of a three-part article. [Continue reading]
THIS ARTICLE ADDRESSES BRIAN WILSON and the inspiration for his legendary SMiLE album. It bears the unwieldy title of “On Brian Wilson And SMiLE (A Convoluted Conversation Part 3),” because it is the second of a three-part article. [Continue reading]
THINGS WERE GETTING WEIRD in Brian Wilson’s world when he met David Anderle. By the third quarter of 1966, many significant changes had taken place in his life and his surroundings. PET SOUNDS and Good Vibrations and the SMiLE sessions that everyone in Los Angeles seemed to know about had brought a very different kind of attention to Brian that previous Beach Boys records had not. [Continue reading]
IT IS ACCEPTED “FACT” that two seminal works of popular music—the Beach Boys’ PET SOUNDS and Bob Dylan’s BLONDE ON BLONDE—were released on the same day, May 16, 1966. And there was a second reason to celebrate that date: BLONDE ON BLONDE was also the first rock double-album of all-new studio recordings, beating the Mothers of Invention’s FREAK OUT! [Continue reading]
I PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED AN ARTICLE about the use of dashes titled “On Those Pesky Dashes As Punctuation Marks” on Neal Umphred Dot Com. There I addressed the em-dash (—), the en-dash (–), and the hyphen (-). [Continue reading]