Back when people listened to the radio, you kept a tape handy in your boombox at all times so you could capture the hot new hits of the week. The intro would always get cut off, and the DJ would chatt...
Some people aren't worth the trouble of being kind to, because they have neither the brains nor the power to make something for themselves out of your kindness.
Is a relic from - when else? - the '70s. This is a tape I made for the eight-grade dance. The tape still plays, even if the cogs are a little creaky and the sound quality is dismal. It's a ninety-minu...
Thanks to the greatest invention of recent years, the MP3-playing alarm clock, I can now choose the song that wakes me up in the morning.
What doesn't kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you incr...
What I get out of karaoke is a little weirder than mere musical competence. It's a love ritual that keeps me coming back, craving more, because this is where the songs are. And the songs are full of s...
That’s another reason for its fluctuating reputation: the Pepper that blew minds out in 1967 was mono, but later generations heard it in the diffuse, watered-down stereo mix, missing details like Paul...
She was the first person on either side of her family to go to college, and she held herself to insanely high standards. She worried a lot about whether she was good enough. It was surprising to see h...
Rod exemplifies the attitude that Losing It is no big deal. He saw that fate coming, and he was already planning to get over it.
No worries is the best thing to happen to sullen teenagers since I was one - even better than vampire sexting, GTL, or Call of Duty. When I was a sullen teenager, we had to make do wtih the vastly inf...
My favorite prototypical Beatlemaniac appears in the great documentary The Compleat Beatles, in a TV news clip.
I felt indestructible, or at least undestroyed, more alive than I'd ever been.
Did I learn anything? No way. But all the things you want to learn fromgrief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the t...
But the intimate candor of their voices, the wit of the guitars and drums—it all makes Rubber Soul my favorite story they had to tell. Even the American version—this is the only case where the shamefu...
Bowie arrived late for the sixties party, so he missed the idealistic hippie days and had to settle for being the quintessential seventies rock star along with Neil Young. It’s funny how much those tw...
And complaining about Paul is what the rest of us do. That’s his role in our lives. We prosecute Paul for the flaws we despise in ourselves. In real life I’ve always been attracted to Paul types becau...
It was just another temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate
You're in a physical landscape you share with this bizarre and fundamentally alien creature, not alien because she's female but alien because you're a fool in love and there's nothing not alien about...
Sometimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person’s home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversi...
I still haven't finished unpacking - by the time I do, it'll be time to move again.