Category First-Person
IT WAS 60 YEARS AGO TODAY, THE BAND TAUGHT THE WORLD TO PLAY: Reflections on Getting The Beatles Bug A Decade After Feb. 9, 1964
Friday marked the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ seismic, game-changing appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, on February 9, 1964. I wasn’t old enough to have seen or remembered it, being just two months old at the time. But on second thought, maybe my parents did watch the Sullivan show that evening with me in […]
THE SWEET SOUNDS OF HEAVEN: Rolling Home With Hackney Diamonds
I was driving home early one Friday morning through the back roads of Pennsylvania, listening to rock ‘n’ roll music on the niche-specific Sirius radio station, when a voice came on and said, “I hear the sweet sounds of heaven …” Which, to my ears, was akin in spirit to “You know, you always have […]
LITTLE DITTY ‘BOUT JACK & DIANE: Holding On To Sixteen Forty Years Later
Forty years ago, one of the big hits of the day during my senior year of high school was, for better or worse, “Jack & Diane” by John Cougar (the Mellencamp moniker was still a few years away). It was a ubiquitous soundtrack playing everywhere on any given day — outside at my school’s parking lot, cranking from cars and boom boxes, and emanating across the football field.
BACK TO THE FUTURE: Sno-Cone Songs, Sherbert Pants, and other Fashion Faux Pas of the ’80s Stones
Funny how back at the dawn of the ’80s, the punks, goth kids, and New Wavers thought the Stones were dinosaurs lumbering from a prehistoric age, lumbering toward the conclusion of their two-decade run after having outlasted everyone else from the black-and-white TV generation. Little did any of us know that unlike the T. Rex — they even outlasted him — the beasts of burden weren’t even at the halfway mark.
THE DAZIES: From Blue Skies To Grey (And Back Again)
One of the things I miss most about Boston is the music and the people who make it. Over the span of nearly two decades spent as a music critic and columnist writing about the plethora of sounds emanating from the city, I never stopped being excited about discovering bands and musicians I hadn’t heard […]
PHAIR WEATHER FRIEND: Hanging Out In Guyville 25+ Years Later
It’s been a life-altering twenty five-plus years since we were all twenty five (or thereabouts), an age when most of us don’t have much of a clue about how life-altering the next twenty five years are going to be.
PICTURES AT ELEVEN: Drawing Dad Close Amid The Lines Of A Life
Leafing through one of my decades-old sketchbooks while unpacking from our exciting but exhausting move from Boston to Philadelphia last summer, I flipped through, with casual curiosity, the sturdy paper stock pages of pencil drawings, mostly of superheroes and baseball players and my dank cabin at my first (and only) sleep-away camp. As I turned […]
Rocking The 617 24-7: Inside the Vortex of a Spectacularly Noisy Universe
It speaks volumes — maybe decibels is a better word — about the consistent musical vitality of this city that I simply could not keep up with all of the adventurous, surprising, inspiring, and thrilling music that reached my ears over the years. But man, I tried.
TIME CAPSULES WITH TAPE HEADS: Filling The Road Trip Memory Tank With The Gaslight Anthem
My collection of music tapes have now taken on properties purer and more powerful than the mere music they contained: They’ve banded together to become an immortal, indispensable, untouchable part of my personal cosmos of memory and experience. It’s music that drove a landmark road trip, played through it, came from it, and helped to define it.
OF PRIMES PRE & PAST: College Back Pages and Stages in the Summer of ’85
RPM TBT: Throwing it back to “RPM’s” ’85 college daze when yours truly’s first music-related by-lines debuted for the first time in my college newspaper, the Daily Collegian (New England’s largest, or so the slogan went). Even back then, it had been a four-year run-up to pseudo-Bangs-ian bliss. I had already been writing professionally, since I was […]
RPM: Jonathan Perry's Life in Analog 