Love Goes to Buildings on Fire – Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever by Will Hermes (This review was published in the Washington Independent Review of Books, December 2011) Music journalist Will Hermes, referring to rock ‘n’ roll critics back in the day, wrote, “… their sense that the entire world of art […]
Posts Tagged ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’
Will Hermes knows a lot about buildings and tunes
Thursday, December 29th, 2011Hipper than you – A Visit From the Goon Squad
Thursday, December 16th, 2010Elvis Costello released his third album in the snowy winter of 1979. In those days, Elvis was known as a ‘new wave’ rocker, not ‘punk,’ not mainstream, but hard to define, left of center, quirky. Kicking off side two of Armed Forces was a vaguely martial, grim tale of trying to make it as a […]
Birds of the British Isles – 1964, Swinging London and all that
Monday, November 15th, 2010What kind of screwed up world do we live in where American kids don’t care about Swinging London? Kids of my g-g-generation marked the beginning of Modern Cultural Life in 1964—specifically February—Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the subsequent glorious British Invasion of Sixties bands, fashion and…the gorgeous girls—Jane Asher, Jean Shrimpton, Vanessa Redgrave, Patti Boyd, […]
Area man reads novel excerpt
Friday, February 5th, 2010So here’s a little bit of Pepperland, read on the evening of February 3, 2010 in Chicago at the Reading Under the Influence monthly session at the Sheffield. If you’re anywhere close to Chicago, you oughta go sometime. Pepperland is set in Chicago during the winter of 1974 and it’s about the intersection of rock […]
