Drink the long draught, for the Hip Priest : R.I.P. Mark E. Smith

People only need me when they’re down and gone to seed – Mark E. Smith I can’t say I’ve been a Fall fan my whole life. I’ve really only gotten to know the world of Mark E. Smith the last 9 years or so. But in that time I’ve gotten to love this ever-curmudgeonly Brit with a […]

Malcolm

AC/DC was the first band I ever got truly obsessed with. I was 11 years old and at the cusp of maybe, possibly wanting to learn to play guitar. Anything with crunchy, choppy, standout guitar would catch my ear. I put my mom and dad’s Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits cassette through the ringer, listening to “Last […]

Monk at 100

Not that the man is celebrating given that he’s been on the other side now for over 37 years. But if Thelonious Monk was still among the living he’d be celebrating a century on this earth. Even though he only lived to be 64-years old, the man blazed a musical trail of legends. His work […]

The End Of The Rainbow Is Always A Long Ride : R.I.P Tom Petty

There are a few musicians that I connect with on a very personal level. The music feels like walking through the front door on a particularly lousy day at work, and the warmth of home melts all those bad vibes away. A certain song takes me back to a car ride in the summer of […]

Saturday, Harry, and Beaches

We’ve gone from an incredibly mild beginning of the month to slowly making our way back to some summer heat. Hell, we had a high of 65 degrees just a few days ago and are back to mid-80s and balmy(thanks Obama!) After I ran to the bank(and the comic book shop and Karma Records) I […]

Goodbye Kid Charlamagne : Walter Becker 1950 – 2017

Image by © Neal Preston/Corbis It wasn’t until I was in my early 20s that I fell for Steely Dan. It took one of my oldest friends to make me a tape mix of the “highlights” of their storied 70s discography for me to finally get it. I picked up the famous Steely Dan Gold […]

Tobe Hooper : 1943-2017

I was sad to wake up to the news that we lost yet another “Master of Horror”, Mr. Tobe Hooper. While he never quite had the career or accolades of guys like Wes Craven, John Carpenter, and George Romero, he still contributed to the genre in a big way. His biggest and most prominent work […]

King of the Dead : George Romero 1940-2017

The first movie that ever truly got to me was George Romero’s Creepshow. At 10 years old I watched the George Romero/Stephen King horror collaboration and was more and more horrified as each story unfolded until we reached “The Crate” and I felt my blood run cold. Something about that scene where the college student […]

Burning Dinosaur Bones : Revisiting Soundgarden’s ‘Badmotorfinger’

It was October of 1991. It was a Tuesday which meant it was new release day. I’d gone on a field trip with my Art & English class to Indianapolis to visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art as well as a synagogue(we’d just finished reading Chaim Potok’s ‘The Chosen’.) The bus got back to the […]

R.I.P. Chris Cornell : Long Live That Voice

Truth be told I haven’t followed Chris Cornell’s music career since that first Audioslave album. Call it moving forward with ones life or just not really being into what he’d been doing since “Show Me How To Live” burned into my brain. But that’s not to say he didn’t make a HUGE impression on the […]