“Don’t Pass Me By” is a rollicking faux country blues honk and the fiddle part is as crazy as Ringo says. It’s charming, funny, and totally Ringo. For a first effort, it’s […]
Don’t Pass Me By… because everybody loves Ringo….
Yasukuni rain
Second in my S&R Tokyo series… Yasukuni Shrine is an interesting place, but I won’t make more of visiting it than doing so deserves. Suffice it to say the Japanese struggle spiritually […]
Random thoughts about the record album – part 2: the Beatles up the ante…
“Full grown men, full of emotion and on top of the world. Meet the Beatles.” – Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone (Part 1 here) When Bob Dylan met the Beatles in late August […]
Cry Baby Cry…darkness in the nursery
“Cry Baby Cry” is exactly what we would expect a nursery rhyme to be: a charming sing-a-long with a dark message at its core. “…I think I got them from an advert […]
Darkness/lightness
First in an upcoming series on Tokyo, Japan, and life generally… This is brief recounting of two men from very different walks of Japanese life, whom I encountered in Tokyo near Ueno […]
Random thoughts about record albums – part 1: Dylan’s LP idea…
…and how the invention of vinyl changed music forever. “I agonized about making a record, but I wouldn’t have wanted to make singles, 45’s – the kind of songs they played on […]
In My Life: Lennon remembers…
There’s something Shakespearean about Lennon’s meditation on life and meaning. “I think ‘In My Life’ was the first song that I wrote that was really, consciously about my life, and it was […]
The kitten, the junkie, the dog, and Steven
Extremes enrich an abundant life… In my chosen profession there are extremes which exist outside of me and are mine (or yours) to take or leave. The world is ugly, and the […]
Carole, Joni, and Carly: sometimes it’s hard to be a woman…
“A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so […]
Love Me Do – the first one…
“Love Me Do” was their first song, but it was far from perfect… “‘Love Me Do’ is Paul’s song. He wrote it when he was a teenager. Let me think. I might […]
