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
For several years in the early 1980s my dad and I carpooled to work. Daddy was an early riser – looking like he just stepped out of a bandbox, in blinding white shirts and highly-buffed shoes (I swear he even polished the soles). He insisted we leave the house in his “sleeps-6-in-the-trunk” Buick Electra at … Read more
“What did you do in the war, Daddy?” That’s a question most kids eventually get around to asking when they learn their fathers served in the armed forces. Almost all of my childhood friends had dads who served in either World War II or the Korean War. In those days it wasn’t uncommon for veterans … 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
Snow came down like coarse sea salt on a big ugly Tupperware bowl of pale popcorn. It was January 1977, the coldest month in Pittsburgh history. I was a pint-size high school senior living in a small town 40 miles east of the Steel City, serving my time and awaiting the day in late May … Read more