Today’s challenge: write over a thousand words about Jimi Hendrix without gushing over his guitar playing! Challenge accepted—with the caveat that I can succumb to that natural urge, briefly, but only in the context of evaluating his songwriting. Why ruminate…

With one notable exception, the original cast of This Is Spinal Tap were wildly successful thespians playing complete fuckups. Arguably the most iconic character of the lot, the exploding drummer “played” by everyman Ric Parnell, was another story altogether. The…

Undiscouraged by cardiac surgery complications, wildfire smoke, or a nation's harrowing turn toward autocracy, the improbable pairing of The Milkmen's Lory Kohn with The Manfreds’ Marcus Cliffe and Simon Currie has dropped a farm-fresh single. “Suits That Fly,” a paean…

One vibey summer evening in 1986, at the opening of R Lee White’s show at McClaren Markowitz Gallery in Boulder, after some brief flirtation, I got lucky and went home with “Phone Call For You, Sweetie.” 

“Phone Call For You,…

Three plastic storage bins worth of passé storage media: reel-to-reel mixdown tapes, analog cassettes, VHS home movies. A runaway mixdown and a disappeared DAT tape. Digital dilemmas and divine intervention. Heart-stopping drama and a comedy of errors. A longstanding-quest and…

Milkmaids and milkmates from Ecuador to Estonia have been getting after me to refocus this blog on the Men of Milk. You were mildly amused when I assumed the role of musicologist, studiously analyzing the merits and warts of more…

The opening scene of Gilmore Girls Season 1 Episode 12 parlays Britpop 'n pop tarts as hot thirtysomething mom Lorelai and teenage babe-spawn Rory ready themselves for work and school. The punchy, psychedelic-tinged soundtrack that practically leapt out of my…

Sixty years later, the goofy "The Mr. Ed Theme," crooned by by a talking horse stabled inside a suburban barn and a song pitcher, remains indelibly etched in the collective unconscious. "A horse is a horse of course of course"…

"Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown" never really flipped me when it came out in 1966. Apparently, it just needed a little time—a mere fifty-five years is all it took—to grow on me.

First Impressions
Here we have a pro shoot of the…

A lot of folks ineligible for Social Security might be astounded to learn just how much "ink" print media lavished on music reviews in the sixties and seventies. Magazine spreads ran two, three, four pages or even longer. Eagerly-anticipated albums…

With other accomplished songsmiths content to regurgitate past glories from their stay-at-home digs, the task of penning an uplifting anthem for our phantasmagoric times fell to the all-but-forgotten Men of Milk. With nothing less than the future of the free…

It all started in the swingin' 60s, at the height of what was being called the folk craze, with "Marijuana Smoke," a burst of juvenalia about the joys of weed that remained stashed away ... until now! Here it is…