Give me your music, your art, your huddled masses of words and rhythms yearning to breathe free.
August 25, 2015: I took a road trip with “Born to Run” yesterday. It’s the 40th anniversary of Bruce’s groundbreaking album, and there’s no better way to experience it than by blasting it in your car, with the windows open and the wind blowing back your hair. Cars and tunnels and backstreets and highways are … Read more
When the cops finally busted Madam Marie, the young ne’er-do-well knew it was time to leave the seaside carnival life forever. Riding Tilt-a-Whirls and chasing factory girls underneath the boardwalk…cruising the circuit with switchblade lovers and open-shirt casino boys…it was all kid’s stuff. Someday he’d look back on those barefoot slacker days and sex-seeking nights, and rage against the dying of the pier lights that once cast a protective cover, like a soft beach blanket, over his body and hers. But now, as the fireworks hailed over his Little Eden on that 4th of July, he determined it was time to move on. And, taking a page from that ancient tome, “Seduction Tactics 101,” he made his plea to sweet “Sandy Girl:” Love me tonight, for I may never see you again. Ah, how I miss the beach life lullabies and city-sidewalk serenades that Bruce abandoned long ago! Songs like “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” are among the most visual and desperately romantic works in his catalog. And this one, in particular, is as beautiful and wistful as they come.
Way back in drab, post-war England, teenaged boys with bad teeth and sun-starved skin – bored to tears with BBC Radio’s unflinching policy of airing nothing but show tunes and classical music – were stringing wires around their small, government-built “council houses” so they could tune in to the one radio station that gave them a reason to live. What they found – from across the English channel – was the infamous “pirate station,” Radio Luxembourg. What they heard was a black-sounding white man named Elvis Presley. And what changed their lives was a moody little tune called “Heartbreak Hotel.” Here’s a tribute to Elvis, on what would have been his 80th birthday.
What a treat for a Scorpio girl born in the Season of the Witch! On August 12, 2011, I experienced Alice Cooper live in concert for the first time – just five months after his induction into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame. It’s no surprise that my childhood love of all things ghoulish – from Vincent Price and Peter Lorre to Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi – would lead to an inevitable attraction to Alice Cooper and his spooky stage show.
There’s no city in America that defined labor quite like beautiful, hardscrabble Pittsburgh. Our workers produced the big, hard, heavy, clanging things that made the world go ’round: iron, steel, aluminum, glass, massive rotors, giant generators. Nobody worked as hard as Pittsburghers. And nobody wrote and sang about the working class lives and loves of … Read more