Category Memories
RADIO CITY’S TRANSMISSIONS AT 50 AND BEYOND: A chat with Big Star’s co-founder/drummer Jody Stephens
In the more than half a century since their inception, demise, and rebirth, the Memphis-bred rock band Big Star have been revered as everything from anachronistic power pop avatars to iconoclastic cult legends making introverted music in an extroverted era. So iconoclastic were they, in fact, that Big Star actually had to break up to […]
THE WAY HE WAS: Robert Redford 1936-2025
There was was something essential and intrinsic to Robert Redford’s being that lent his characters a magnetic, down-to-earth humanity; a knowing, watchful intelligence that imbued them with a kind of innate self-possession that offset the undeniably bright wattage of that Redford grin.
SEPARATING THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF: A Goodbye and a Reclamation
This is a preface, and a piece, I never thought I’d share. Here’s the press kit band bio I was commissioned to write by Wheat’s short-lived Rhode Island-based label Shorebird — more on them in a minute — back in 2014. It was an undertaking that was to coincide with both the label’s reissue of […]
Meditations On Memory and a Short (Story) Announcement
To my “RPM: Life In Analog” subscribers, frequent or occasional readers of my writing, or anyone who may have stumbled upon this page and decided to have a look around, I’m delighted to report that my memoir piece, “The Calm Hiss of Bided Time,” has been published in the new issue of the literary journal, […]
FROM PANTHERS TO POT TO POETRY: John Sinclair’s Life In Song and Sentences
I was saddened to hear of the passing this week of the writer, blues historian, political activist, and marijuana advocate John Sinclair, at the age of 82. I had the pleasure of interviewing Sinclair, who decades earlier managed the seminal Detroit rock ‘n’ roll combo the MC5 and founded the anti-racist White Panther Party, back […]
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.
HEART OF THE STONES: In Praise of Charlie Watts, June 2, 1941-August 24, 2021
“Charlie’s good tonight in’nit he?” — Mick Jagger, Madison Square Garden, 1969. Charlie Watts’s drum kit was a pitch-perfect reflection of the man who sat behind it for The Rolling Stones for nearly 60 years: modest yet essential. Charlie famously eschewed rock drum solos as frivolous, show-offy expressions of ego. A lifelong jazz devotee and […]
RPM: Jonathan Perry's Life in Analog 