Last night I started reading the new Adam Ross book “Playworld.” It’s gotten great reviews, best of the year so far, and I loved his previous novel “Mr. Peanut.” And I was hooked by the very first sentence: “In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah […]

Subject: RE: 74 Of ’74 For an interesting exercise, compare this 50-years-after-the-fact list with the Top Album list Rolling Stone actually issued in 1974. The original list had jazz or jazz-fusion albums in each of the top five spots. In this list, the top-rated jazz album is Miles Davis at 32 – and Miles wasn’t […]

ELECTION Mainstream media doesn’t reach everybody, even though the Democrats thought it would. MUSIC BUSINESS Print means nothing, TV little, except for SNL and CBS Sunday Morning, yet the labels keep focusing on these outlets. As for radio… Find me anyone under 20 who listens to terrestrial radio, I can’t. But labels keep focusing on […]

“Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes” “Changes” David Bowie The Beatles were dismissed as teenage tripe until “Yesterday” and “Michelle,” the backwards vocals of “Rain” and “Sgt. Pepper,” and the adoption of the act by Leonard Bernstein and others in the pantheon of artists respected by establishment. The Beatles wiped out everything that came before […]