Gainfully Employed

My son recently started his first job. He’s following in his father’s footsteps as a gainfully employed bag boy at the local supermarket. It’s actually the same supermarket I worked at as a senior in high school. Well, it’s a newer building(the grocery I worked at was recently demolished so the city can put up […]

Weird Al, Wendy Carlos, and a Prison Town

It’s Percussion Ensemble season here. Nearly every weekend in the months of February and March are spent traveling to different high schools so we can watch our 17-year old perform with the Warsaw Percussion Ensemble. This year their show is horror-themed and called “Eternal Nightmare”. They start out with an eerie rendition of Bananarama’s “Cruel […]

At The Movies

The first movie I ever saw in North Pointe Cinemas was Mars Attacks! in December of 1996. It was also opening night of North Pointe Cinemas, which was a 6-screen theater. Prior to that, we’d had the Lake Theater in downtown Warsaw, as well as the two-screen Center Cinema. The Lake Theater and Center Cinema […]

Paper Or Plastic

I had a dream the other day that I was back in the old Owens grocery story on Market St in my hometown. This was the store my family shopped at for all of our groceries growing up. From the time when I could fit underneath the cart where you typically put bags of softener […]

You Do You(Or Whatever)

It’s Thursday night and I’m enjoying a couple pints and listening to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. It’s a brand new piece of vinyl that I procured just this afternoon. First Flight To Tokyo : The Lost 1961 Recordings to be precise. It’s stunning. I never really got into Art Blakey and the Jazz […]

Ready Lets Go : Board Of Canada’s ‘Geogaddi’ 20 years Later

As much as I’d like to say the Beatles or the Stones or Radiohead or Wilco were the most pivotal musical moment for me, I think the truth is that hearing Boards of Canada for the first time might be even more pivotal. There was something about hitting play on a Boards of Canada album […]

This Is Where We Used To Go

Growing up in a small town in the Midwest the options for shopping were limited to ordering from JC Penney’s and picking it up at the sad little storefront where your goods were shipped to. You’d walk into something that kind of looked like a Little Caesars, but without the smells and stoned teenagers greeting […]

That Orange Tone

Since the spring of 1994 I’ve been a tube amp kind of guy. My first amp in December of 1987 was this little generic practice amp. My uncle gave me his old DOD Flanger Pedal and I used to get this sound I called the “psychedelic butterfly”. I’m not sure where that name came from, […]

New Year’s Day

I always remember New Year’s Day as a quiet day. It was the calm after the New Year’s Eve drinking and laughs. As a kid New Year’s Day was spent with the curtains closed in the living room while my mom watched TV on the couch lying down, while my dad stayed in the bedroom […]

Christmas Blues : Clapton, Beck, Page, Dad & Me

It was the Christmas of 1988. I was a budding guitarist who had just received his first electric guitar, a 1986 Fender Squier Stratocaster, for his 14th birthday a mere three weeks before. Prior to that, the last two years were spent toiling on a generic dreadnought acoustic with the kind of action that’s meant […]