Happy 70th Birthday Mick Jagger

1 Son of a gymnastics teacher and a hairdresser.
2 Began singing in his church's choir when he was a child.
3 Was a Business Economics major.
4 First ambitions were to be either a journalist or a politician.
5 Said in 1972, "I'll never tour when I'm 50"....

And before anyone says that neither Mick nor anyone else should be performing rock & roll at this age, I'm bending over. Please kindly kiss my ass.

Happy Birthday, Mick!

Not a Drop of Royal Blood in Sight

With all the focus on a certain royal baby this week, I’d like to brings things back to a reasonable level of sanity. This royal obsession strikes me as especially obscene. Wait. Maybe I should first write a disclaimer...

Life is Good - Time to Breathe

We really are having a lovely summer this year. About once every 10 days or so a small but sufficient rain and thunder storm rolls through, cooling things off and keeping everything green. In the 13 years that I've lived here, I've never seen a summer like this one...

I Wouldn't Change a Thing: Notes for My Memoirs

I never write only one book at a time. While I'm assiduously working on my main project, I'm also taking notes for the next, even if they seem to be unrelated. In my present case that's not actually the situation. While researching and writing about rock & roll in the 1960s and '70s for Beyond The Bridge, it has been easy for me to find things I'd like to use in A Polite Little Madness, my upcoming memoir.

Recently, I've been reading two books as I write: Ready, Steady, Go!: The Swinging Sixties and the Invention of Cool by Shawn Levy and Faithfull: An Autobiography by Marianne Faithfull, both of which lend a great deal to my understanding of my own evolution as a musician...

Ringo Starr - Keepin' the Back Beat Strong

It seems impossible that Ringo Starr should be celebrating his 73rd birthday today, but that has less to do with age than it has to do with how much time has passed since we first encountered him in February of 1964 when the Beatles were set loose on the American public via the Ed Sullivan Show...