Though I love their music, I was too young to experience The Beatles firsthand. For that, I depended on older relatives to school me. I was five when Let it Be came out, so although I remember singing along to the title track and “The Long and Winding Road” with my Aunt Lois and her friends, I wasn’t old enough to appreciate either of those songs or The Fab Four’s musical genius until a few years later. Fortunately, I was a bit more lined up time-wise with Bruce Springsteen. I was ten when Born to Run released, though I remember loving the title track but not noticing much else about…
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Another Navy Story: Old Milwaukee, Tighty Whities, and the Music of Bruce Springsteen
When I was in U.S. Navy A School, I knew a guy named Walter. In many ways, Walter was an average late-teen-to-early-twenties navy recruit: homesick, restless, impulsive, and far too immature to be taking on any significant responsibility. That was all of us in those days. Unfortunately, Walter was also prone to getting drunk and inexplicably winding up in his underwear. I’m sure there were a lot of steps between Walter’s descents into drunkenness and the shedding of his outerwear, but none of us knew what they were because we never went out with him. We were young and stupid, and we were known to enjoy a beer or five,…
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The Astounding Genius of Jeff Lynne, the Real Mr. Blue Sky
It may not have seemed so at the time, but 1977 was a good year for me. I was twelve years old, and even though I didn’t realize it, I was a pre-teen sponge. I absorbed everything around me. Unbeknownst to my parents, I’d read Stephen King’s then two-year-old novel Salem’s Lot (sorry, Mom), which has simultaneously scared the bejeezus out of me and started an itch to create my own stories as a writer. That was also the year of Star Wars, which made me want to be a space cowboy. 1977 was a year of killer music, too. Though it would be a while before I could truly…
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Even Walls Fall Down: The Part of Tom Petty I’ll Always Carry
We lost another one a few days ago. By “we,” I mean people who like good music, and by “another one,” I mean, of course, Tom Petty. All this week, every time I’ve had the chance, I’ve been listening to his music, whether on Pandora or my own digital collection. I’ve been reading tributes from his friends and fellow musicians, and I’ve been commiserating with my friends over our loss. For some reason, this one’s been tougher than most. My earliest musical memory of Petty is “The Waiting,” the first song from what would eventually become my second-favorite Petty album, Hard Promises. My memory isn’t of the first time I…
