love to the big man.
Give my regards to Junior Walker and King Curtis.
–
more later, when I can manage it.
obits Archive
for babs.
and if there’s one thing
could do for you
you’d be a wing
in heaven blue
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Attn: GIST Research, 10 Brookline Place, W. Brookline, MA 02445
Big Star Tribute, New York, 3-26-11
There is not much to say, not much that needs to be said. The night was about playing the songs, making them as big and bold and bright as the fantasies everyone had the first time they heard them, songs that made them pick up a guitar or write a song, take a chance.
RIP, Don Kirshner
Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert changed my life.
I was watching it long before I probably should have. I would strike these deals with our babysitters on Saturdays, if they let me stay up to watch Don Kirshner, I would make sure the rest of the kids (and there were four of us) would behave and go to bed with no problem. This worked on all of our sitters except Ann from next door, who – because she LIVED NEXT DOOR – felt a need to be more accountable than the other random girls who showed up at our house to watch us while my parents went out.
Visiting Johnny & Dee Dee
When I was in LA in July, I made a side trip to pay my respects to both Johnny and Dee Dee, who are buried in the same cemetery in Los Angeles. On the occasion of Johnny’s birthday, I thought I’d mention it here.
this one goes out to Miami Janet.
I called her Miami, because she (like me) had a thing for Steve Van Zandt, back when he was Miami Steve, back when this was a band that wore hats! She wore hats, too. We all had nicknames for each other, stupid, dumb, nicknames – I quite honestly cannot remember any of mine – because we wanted to be a gang, an exclusive club with nicknames and handshakes and secret rituals and inside jokes.
Within Your Reach
As much as I always wanted to, I never made it to Minneapolis until this year. Probably because I was smart enough to know that it wasn’t like every band I cared about would be standing on the street corner waiting for me as I got off the bus. The closest I came was when I was moving back to NYC from Seattle, a logical overnight stop was just outside of Minneapolis, and I took a morning detour long enough to stand in front of the Let It Be house for a few minutes and take a few pictures.
malcolm mclaren has died
I hated Malcolm McLaren when I was old enough to have an opinion about him for the same reasons I hated Aerosmith and KISS back then: I saw him as having ruined, and then stolen, the best of my beloved New York Dolls. Through the lenses of my blinding teenage love, the Dolls broke up because he killed them, while their pale, feeble imitators were able to make a living at it.
never travel far without a little big star (rip alex chilton)
I owe everything I know about Big Star and Alex Chilton to the dB’s, who namedropped them to enough of an extent I had to check it out. And then it was the Eggleston cover photo that drew me in, teenage photography snob that I fancied myself to be, followed by listening to Radio City nonfuckingstop.
Patti Smith: A Salute to Robert Frank
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
17 October 2009
I keep trying to figure out what it means to be American.
When I look at myself I see Abyssinia, nineteenth-Century France, but I can’t recognize what makes me American. I think about Robert Frank’s photographs – broke down jukeboxes in Gallup, New Mexico, swaying hips and spurs, ponytails and syphilitic cowpokes, hash slinges, the glowing black tarp of US 285 and the Hoboken stars and stripes.
Patti wrote the words above in 1971. I thought about those words as I walked through the new Frank exhibit at the Met. I thought about Bruce Springsteen describing Bob Dylan a few weeks ago – “it was the country I recognized” – and how both of those sentiments describe what it was like being in the same room with “the Hoboken stars and stripes”.
elsewhere