Give me your music, your art, your huddled masses of words and rhythms yearning to breathe free.
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
Most recording artists in the 1960s were singing about lovin’ your brothers and sisters regardless of the color of their skin, but few practiced that ethos better than Sly Stone, who assembled the first – and one of the few – interracial, dual-gender rock bands of the era: the iconic Sly and the Family Stone. … Read more
At a show at New York’s legendary Apollo Theater a few months back, Bruce Springsteen joked that he was the “hardest working white man in show business.” Bruce made this remark in homage to one of his idols, the late James Brown, the soul-funk sensation long known as the “hardest working man” in the business. … Read more
All The King’s men. That’s a royal court that could include every seasoned rocker whose creative spark was first lit by the sight and sound of Elvis Presley. They started out wanting to be him, and spent their lives dying to meet him. Some were fortunate enough to encounter The King long before their moms … Read more
Hello, ma’am. I’m working to clean up the neighborhood from parasites. Do you mind if I take a quick look around your house? I’m afraid you may have hippies. If you’re familiar with the darkly funny animated series “South Park,” you know there’s nothing that tubby 9-year-old Eric Cartman hates more than hippies. In the 2005 … Read more