Great Magazine Reads: First impressions don’t always matter, like when it comes to Pearl Jam

I was always much more on the side of the Nirvana/Mudhoney/Screaming Trees family tree of 1990s Seattle grunge. I flat-out didn't like Pearl Jam for a long time. But over the years, I've acquired a taste for the Hall of Famers and even learned to appreciate the band's earliest, most popular work. 

I'll likely never want to read a full book about Eddie Vedder and the gang, but the legendary rock journalist David Fricke's cover feature in the May issue of MOJO Magazine is just about the right amount I need. The article celebrates 40 years since the first Green River demos. Here are the eight most interesting things I learned and my 39 favorite Pearl Jam songs.

• Sub Pop Records called Green River the first grunge band. Mark Arm of Mudhoney was the singer/guitarist alongside future Pearl Jammers Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament. The group had all kinds of troubles, including a tour-cancelling van breakdown, almost no audience at CBGB in New York, and broken promises from label reps. I still love a handful of their songs, including “Swallow My Pride.” Goddard and Ament were soon headed to their new band Mother Love Bone.
• Vedder moved to Seattle from San Diego and wasn’t very appreciated for a while by the tight-knit musician scene and even his new bandmates’ other friends. 
• Chris Cornell of Soundgarden was integral to acclimating Vedder into the scene, taking him out for beers, talking, and helping the newbie in very kind ways. Of course they would go on to collaborate on the classic “Hunger Strike” in Temple of the Dog.
• Vedder had been born in Evanston, Illinois and took his mother’s maiden name. His parents had divorced. He sang in a bunch of failed bands but a tape of Ament and Gossard’s music landed in his hands and he wrote lyrics to it, sang over the music, and sent it to them. 
• In 1991, Ten (named after NBA star Mookie Blaylock’s uniform number) was number 2 on the album chart for a month but could never break past Billy Ray Cyrus.
• MOJO ranks 1996’s No Code as the band’s greatest album, which is interesting because it’s the one I didn’t have in my collection until now. It’s definitely not my favorite, although “Mankind” is one of my favorite Pearl Jam songs and sounds a lot like the music I was making in bands back then.
• Nine young men died in a mosh pit crush at Roskilde in 2000 while Pearl Jam played “Daughter.” The band eventually decided to continue on in the spirit of hoping to find solutions to the world’s problems.
• Vedder found the experience of making and trading bracelets with his daughter when they attended a Taylor Swift concert a lot like the long-ago days of the punk community.

And, drum roll, here are my favorite 39 Pearl Jam songs. Any suggestions for a 40th are more than welcome:

39. Present Tense (No Code, 1996)

38. Seven O’Clock (Gigaton, 2020)
37. The End (Backspacer, 2009)
36. Once (Ten, 1991)
35. Off He Goes (No Code, 1996)
34. Comes Then Goes (Gigaton, 2020)
33. Retrograde (Gagarin, 2020)
32. Upper Hand (Dark Matter, 2024)
31. I Am Mine (Riot Act, 2002)
30. Light Years (Binaural, 2000)
29. Dissident (Vs., 1993)
28. Buckle Up (Gigaton, 2020)
27. Nothingman (Vitalogy, 1994)
26. Parachutes (Pearl Jam, 2006)
25. Worldwide Suicide (Pearl Jam, 2006) 
24. Wreckage (Dark Matter, 2024)
23. Just Breathe (Backspacer, 2009)
22. The Fixer (Backspacer, 2009)
21. Something Special (Dark Matter, 2024)
20. Got Some (Backspacer, 2009)
19. Wishlist (Yield, 1998)
18. Given to Fly (Yield, 1998)
17. Sirens (Lightning Bolt, 2013)
16. Yellow Ledbetter (Jeremy single, 1992)
15. Jeremy (Ten, 1991)

14. Sometimes (No Code, 1996)
13. Black (Ten, 1991)
12. Last Kiss (Last Kiss single, 1999)
11. Breath (Singles soundtrack, 1992)
10. Rearviewmirror (Vs., 1993)
09. Crazy Mary (Sweet Relief compilation, 1993)
08. Alive (Ten, 1991)
07. Even Flow (Ten, 1991)
06. Better Man (Vitalogy, 1994)
05. Daughter (Vs., 1993)
04. Corduroy (Vitalogy, 1994)

03. Mankind (No Code, 1996)
02. Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town (Vs., 1993)
01. State of Love and Trust (Singles soundtrack, 1992)

Fondly recalling “the trade” from my early-career journalism days, with Calvin Trillin

Even though I was a daily newspaper journalist for several years way back at the start of my career, I still love it when journalists open up about their day-to-day life and what the trade means to them. Therefore, esteemed writer Calvin Trillin's new compiliation, The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press, is set up to be a page-turner for me. 

The book includes “disparate pieces from various places in various styles” and amounts “to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years.” It’s true: Trillin has written stories for many outlets, including The New Yorker, The Nation, and one of my old favorites Brill’s Content. Broken into sections on the trade, reporters and reporting, big shots, R.I.P., controversies, niches, and closings. 

His first topic in the book is “the lede,” a term I still use often in my strategic-communications work and often feel apologetic for using, having to explain that "no, I haven’t misspelled something." Trillin calls himself a “collector of ledes.” Like many old-time journalists, he appreciates a story told grippingly from the start. It can be a one-word crime article that begins (and ends) with the word “Dead” or it can an obituary in The New York Times that packs an entire life into a first sentence.

When I started my first newspaper writing job out of college, I was paid $17,000 a year and worked incredibly hard and very long hours. I was a known entity in the community yet the people I was covering - coaches, judges, lawyers, politicians - were all making way more money. I never really thought much about this. I loved to write. I loved to report. If that's what it paid, I would have to be happy with that, even if Trillin points out that news people are odd members of society. Is it a job befitting a college graduate? About all you might be truly guaranteed is a “decent obituary.” 

I also always wanted to work at a magazine and never truly did (I freelanced for National Geographic and other magazine-like publications), but Trillin’s essay on the downfall of magazines is interesting. Time Magazine invented the genre in 1923, with Newsweek coming along 10 years later. It was originally designed like The Week (which is my favorite magazine these days, essentially an upgrade from Time and Newsweek), presenting “the week’s news succinctly to ‘busy men’ who were too involved in their important endeavors to spend time wading through a lot of newspapers.” Time started as “a rewrite operation” before moving into enterprising original reporting. The magazine’s founders invented a fact-checking system that pitted the all-male reporting staff against the all-female research staff with the thought that it “would create a sexual dynamic that could lend energy to the process.” This was in the era of “group journalism,” before bylines were introduced at Newsweek then Time. Columnists followed. 

Trillin himself left Time so he could work for The New Yorker and then, realizing that “the civil-rights struggle had been covered mostly in terms of organizations and court cases and disruptions,” he wanted to write a book all by himself telling the stories of people who had been involved. He has continued to write for The New Yorker and the rest of this book promises interesting stories about it, even if, as Trillin jokes, there hasn't been a person who has worked at The New Yorker who hasn't written a book about working at The New Yorker.

Great Magazine Reads: Lenny Kravitz examines his life and I name my 35 favorite LK songs

It’s no wonder that it seems Lenny Kravitz has always been around. His awesome debut album was released a whopping 35 years ago. MOJO Magazine's April issue featured him in "The MOJO Interview." 

Here are the highlights of that interview as well as my 35 favorite LK songs (overwhelmingly populated by tunes from his first two releases).

• Lenny is now 59.
• He grew up in Manhattan and Brooklyn until he was 10 then moved to L.A.
• His dad was a Ukrainian Jew and TV producer while his mom was African-American-Bahamian and known the world over from her role as the neighbor on The Jeffersons.
• Seeing The Jackson 5 at Madison Square Garden at the age of six was transformative.
• When Lenny started his music career, he was known as Romeo Blue (he thought his name was “the most un-rock’n’roll name ever”) before releasing his debut Let Love Rule, an homage to his then-wife Lisa Bonet from The Cosby Show. Their daughter is actor Zoe.
• Actor Cicely Tyson was his mom’s best friend and she was married to Miles Davis, so young Lenny had quite the musical mentor growing up, even though their friendship wasn’t necessarily all about music.
• After Let Love Rule, he wrote “Justify My Love,” which he didn’t feel was quite right for him so he gave it to Madonna.
• On his second album, the perfect Mama Said, Slash rocked the guitar solo on “Always on the Run” and Sean Lennon developed the structure of “All I Ever Wanted.”
• His 12th album, Blue Electric Light, is releasing soon. From the one song I’ve heard, “Human,” it sounds like it could be a fun listen.
• This one and his previous two albums were recorded in the Bahamas. He says he works when inspiration hits him rather than waking up, drinking a coffee, and getting to work. “I wait until I hear something, which can come in a dream, or sitting, or walking around and the Bahamas is great for that.”
• He made what could someday turn into about four albums during the pandemic.
• Kravitz has lots of other hobbies, including his design firm Kravitz Design, which has made the Architectural Digest Top 100 in each of the past three years.

For a solo artist to have 35 songs I like is pretty darn good. There isn't too much of Kravitz's genre-hopping rock that I dislike, although not a lot has drawn mean in over his past 7 or 8 releases. Here are 35 songs that would make a killer compilation in my book:

35. American Woman (5)
34. Johnny Cash (Raise Vibration)
33. I’ll Be Waiting (It’s Time for a Love Revolution)
32. Ride (Raise Vibration)
31. My Love (Are You Gonna Go My Way)
30. My Precious Love (Let Love Rule)
29. Fly Away (5)
28. Can’t Get You Off My Mind (Circus)
27. Sugar (Are You Gonna Go My Way)
26. Rosemary (Let Love Rule)
25. Stand (Black and White America)
24. Stop Draggin’ Around (Mama Said)
23. Butterfly (Mama Said)
22. More Than Anything in This World (Mama Said)
21. Spinning Around Over You (Reality Bites Soundtrack)
20. Blues for Sister Someone (Let Love Rule)
19. What the * Are We Saying (Mama Said)
18. Again (Again)
17. Be (Let Love Rule)
16. Does Anybody Out There Even Care (Let Love Rule)
15. Sittin’ on Top of the World (Let Love Rule)
14. All I Ever Wanted (Mama Said)
13. What Goes Around Comes Around (Mama Said)
12. Are You Gonna Go My Way (Are You Gonna Go My Way)
11. Black Girl (Are You Gonna Go My Way)
10. The Difference is Why (Mama Said)
09. Believe (Are You Gonna Go My Way)
08. Fields of Joy (Mama Said)
07. Flowers for Zoe (Mama Said) 
06. I Build This Garden for Us (Let Love Rule)
05. Always on the Run (Mama Said)
04. Stand by My Woman (Mama Said)
03. Let Love Rule (Let Love Rule)
02. Mr. Cab Driver (Let Love Rule)
01. It Ain’t Over ‘til It’s Over (Mama Said)

Great Magazine Reads: Flying cars are the hottest trend in future transportation, just like they were on The Jetsons

Always thinking back to The Jetsons, we keep asking whatever happened to the flying cars we were promised. I was quoted about this alongside several other transportation experts in 2016 in USA Today and wrote about flying cars in 2017 for Mobility Lab.

The question lingers, but what exactly is a flying car? One definition given in "A Reporter Aloft: Flight of Fancy," by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, in the latest issue of The New Yorker, is "the 'perfect aircraft' — something 'that didn’t require a pilot’s license, and could take off or land anywhere.'"

The flying car has been part of our collective imagination for a good 100 years. Long ago, the article notes:

The aviation company Cessna ran magazine advertisements for the Family Car of the Air, a sensible little plane that you could park in your garage, with copy like “Remember, Mrs. America likes to go places and see things. And when she finds out that she can cover 600 miles in a morning, to shop or visit in any one of a dozen cities, she’s going to fly.”

By the mid-fifties, it was almost a given that some future sedans would come with wings. If we were going to live in mile-high space needles, how else would we move about? The title sequence of “The Jetsons,” which premièred in 1962, doesn’t show the ground once; George takes his wife and children to their respective floating platforms in his domed airship, and then heads to his offce at Spacely Space Sprockets, Inc. Some of this imagery was the standard-issue utopianism of the bright-eyed mid-century, but it really wasn’t that farfetched. After all, many of the era’s predictions came to pass: portable radios, televisions with screens “the size of a pocket handkerchief,” air-conditioning, plastics.

There is no doubt that those predictions by The Jetsons and others were inspiring and have, after decades of stagnancy, taken hold again of entrepreneuers in the business startup world: 

Today, there are more than four hundred startups in what is called the “advanced air mobility” industry. The term covers everything from actual flying-carish contraptions to more traditional-looking airplanes, but it generally refers to eVTOLs (pronounced “ee-vee-tall”). For the most part, these crafts bear a greater resemblance to helicopterplane hybrids than to automobiles, and they can’t be driven on the road; they might better be described as electric aerial vehicles with the ability to hover and the no-fuss point-to-point flexibility of a car.

Those interviewed in the article make a strong and logical case that flying cars could have already been mainstream if the U.S. wasn't so hostile to innovation:

Flying cars were another victim of our unwillingness to bear the costs of progress. American society allows about forty thousand road fatalities a year but refuses to tolerate even one aviation death. “Why can’t [the Federal Aviation Administration] say, ‘If you want to develop a flying machine, go out in the desert and do whatever you want’? I remember when Amazon was trying to test drone delivery they had to do experiments in Canada.” In the sixties, a heliport was built atop New York City’s Pan Am Building. After a period of inactivity, it was put back into use in 1977, with as many as sixty-four scheduled departures each day to local airports. That May, there was a landing-gear failure. Four people were killed by spinning rotor blades; a fifth was killed by a blade that careened to the street below. The heliport was permanently closed.

Of course, heliports and eVTOLs aren't the only option. We could choose to build our transportation in other ways that actually move masses of people efficiently and effectively.

Then there’s the sheer number that would be needed. Before the pandemic, about four hundred thousand people a day crossed the Hudson River into Manhattan. Aerial commuting would require tens of thousands of drone taxis operating on regular, reliable schedules, with flawless safety records. So all of a sudden you’re into the realm of, "Why didn’t we just build a train?"

It's a good thing nobody is asking us to hold our breath for aerial mobility. I'm happy to have my e-bike for my ever-reliable 20-minute work commute across Maryland and Washington D.C. That obviously isn't the solution for everyone. But at least we all have old episodes of the Jetsons we can watch.

Great Magazine Reads: Squeeze aren't The Beatles but they're really good

In 1981, Rolling Stone proclaimed Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook as the next John Lennon and Paul McCartney. That definitely did not happen, but I love at least a dozen of Squeeze's songs and got to see the band's excellent live show when they opened for Hall and Oates in 2001. 

Classic Pop Magazine explores the legacy of Squeeze as the band officially turns 50 this year. Here are some things I learned or found interesting in the article:

• They formed in 1974 "after a 16-year-old Tilbrook answered an advert in a tobacconist’s window for a band into The Kinks, Lou Reed, and Glenn Miller."
• Difford and Tilbrook both grew up in the Blackheath neighborhood east of downtown London.
• John Cage of Velvet Underground was brought in to produce the band's first album, but they say he didn't want to focus on pop songs and so those tunes don't really sound much like Squeeze. They added in "Take Me I'm Yours" at the end after Cage's duties were completed.
• It was proposed that "Elvis Costello, Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, and Paul McCartney would all work on what became [1981 album] East Side Story. In the end, the double album plan was scrapped and only Costello would end up working on it."
• Up until 1982, Squeeze was virtually a supergroup of sorts that also included keyboardists Jools Holland and Paul Carrack. Including Difford and Tilbrook, it's estimated there have been 31 different members of Squeeze over the years.
• During one of the two periods that Squeeze had broken up, Difford and Tilbrook created 1984's "Difford and Tillbrook" album that is a bit of a hidden gem.
• The band has two albums planned for release in the next year.

My favorite 12 Squeeze songs ranked:

12. "Take Me I'm Yours"

11. "If I Didn't Love You"

10. "Goodbye Girl"

09. "Annie Get Your Gun"

08. "Cool for Cats"

07. "Hope Fell Down" (Difford and Tilbrook)

06. "Is That Love?"

05. "Tempted"

04. "Black Coffee in Bed"

03. "Up the Junction" 

02. "Another Nail in My Heart"

01. "Pulling Muscles (From the Shell)"

Great Magazine Reads: Adam and the Ants were savage in their pop-punk glory days

Adam Ant was one of the first MTV music stars who I remember melding with my pre-teen worldview of wanting to like popular music combined with something a little weirder, a little more alternative, and a little more of what at the time was called "college rock" because it was mostly only heard on those low-wave types of radio stations.

He and his band were always on music TV with his classic "Goody Two Shoes." The song and video had it all: super catchy, glammy, an upbeat and pulsing horn section, beautiful women in crazy makeup, and swashbuckling Adam in full rock-star gorgeousness.

The March/April 2024 issue of Classic Pop Magazine tells the story, starting with the release of 1980's Kings Of The Wild Frontier: it's "less an album, and more a call to arms. And an extremely compelling one at that. For something so inherently bizarre, it’s shamelessly self-assured, so brimming with confidence and laden with swagger that it’s literally drunk on its own hype." The album "shifted the paradigm from punk to New Romantic."

Some of the most interesting information from the article includes:

• "Early reviews were scathing, and the band suffered much hostility from the music press. To cap it off, their new manager, Malcolm McClaren – who had been brought in to revive their fortunes – delivered the ultimate stab in the back by dumping Ant and poaching his bandmates to form Bow Wow Wow."
• "McClaren’s mutiny proved to be the key turning point. Rather than ceding defeat, Ant quickly assembled a new band [and was] ready to do battle, flanked on either side by his new secret weapons: Marco Pirroni on guitar and producer Chris Hughes on drums. Pirroni introduced a distinctive twangy guitar style, combining 1950s rockabilly with influences from Spaghetti Western composer Ennio Morricone. What’s more, Pirroni became Adam’s writing partner, a relationship that extended well into Ant’s solo years. Meanwhile, Hughes [brought] the whole chaotic mess together. Hughes’ ear for pop hooks is attested by his later work with Tears For Fears, co-writing their worldwide smash, 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World,' which Roland Orzabal had previously cast aside."
  
• "Their sound totally bucks the commercial trends of the era. The Ants avoid the temptations of synth-pop, with neither synthesizer nor drum machine in sight. While nothing else really sounds anything like them, they form part of a niche that included Siouxsie And The Banshees, and (yes) Bow Wow Wow – blending post-punk with tribal rhythms and layers of complexity. Their two-drummer line-up was integral to the sound."
• "Ant went from obscure punk to Michael Jackson’s fashion advisor. Compared to the fanfare in Britain, Ant didn’t quite conquer America in the way he deserved to."
• "Demonstrating the breadth of influence, there are echoes in phenomena as varied as Disney’s Captain Jack Sparrow through to the rubber-masked nu-metal band, Slipknot (that may sound a stretch, but check out their uniform dress code, gang mentality, parent-baiting and primal dual drumming)."
• "Some today might class Adam’s fixation with Native Americans as cultural appropriation, but arguably he was extremely progressive in his support of indigenous cultures when it wasn’t in fashion, highlighting their plight at the hands of the white man. He ... apparently declared during one live performance: 'They are human beings, and we are the savages.'"
• Oh, and Ant's real name is Stuart Goddard. He is alive and well, living in London at age 69, and still touring.

Adam Ant's discography does not go super deep for me; however, even much of what I would consider inessential is pretty interesting to revist today. Of his essentials, here are my absolute 7 favorites:

7. "Deutscher Girls"

6. "Antmusic"

5. "Stand and Deliver"

4. "Picasso Vista El Planeta De Los Simios"

3. "Wonderful"

2. "Strip"

1. "Goody Two Shoes"

Great Magazine Reads: Band on the Run was the album that helped Paul McCartney relocate his mojo

MOJO Magazine recently scored an exclusive interview with Paul McCartney, made even more meaningful because former Wings guitarist Denny Laine had literally died minutes before Sir Paul called the reporter from Brazil. 

Some highlights from the article:

• Wings started because Paul saw Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins returning to the spotlight and “playing with some country musicians I had never heard of.” He turned to his wife Linda and they decided to start a band from scratch. 
• The name Wings came to him after Linda had an emergency c-section and Paul imagined winged angels watching over his wife and baby Stella. 
• By the time one of Wings’ masterpieces, Band on the Run, came around, John Lennon suggested Paul had been right about The Beatles’ business manager being a creep. Some suggested this ramped up Paul’s confidence, creating the ballfield for the 1973 album to be arguably so much greater than his other albums since the end of The Beatles. 
• From the album, the glammy “Jet” was about Paul’s pet labrador. Paul wrote “Picasso’s Last Words” literally as actor Dustin Hoffman was telling him a story about Picasso, whose last words were allegedly “drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink anymore.” The title track’s words (“if we ever get out of here”) came from George Harrison’s comments during late-era Beatles’ business meetings.
• With McCartney in a little bit of trouble for multiple pot arrests, Wings were literally a band on the run and decided to record the album in Lagos, Nigeria. Upon arrival, they found a flooded, half-built studio. They were also mugged while there and, although not hurt, their wallets, cameras, and demo tapes of Band on the Run were stolen. Paul also collapsed at one point from a combination of the heat, cigarette smoking, and stress. All the work and inspiration was worth it since the album hit number 1 in both the U.S. and UK, turned Wings into mega-arena stars, and Lennon even called it a great album. Further, John accepted an invitation to come record with Paul in New Orleans for the follow up to Band on the Run, Venus and Mars, but then he got back together with Yoko Ono - after his "lost weekend" - and domestic life got in the way.
• Wings finally folded - after a longer lifespan than the Beatles - in 1981, at least partly due to Laine feeling he wasn’t compensated well enough for his contributions. 

A new lower-fi remaster of Band on the Run is set to be released this year that will include versions of the songs with the orchestra and overdubs taken out.

MAD Magazine takes a look at classic TV sitcoms of the 1970s

MAD About TV is a top-notch 1999 collection of TV spoofs from MAD Magazine. Here I’m reviewing the takeoffs on All in the Family, Columbo (side note: I just re-watched an episode and it very much stands the test of time, tons of suspense and great 1970s acting), The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and M*A*S*H.

“Gall in the Family Fare” riffs on how offensive and vulgar Starchie Bunkerhill is, and MAD pushes the envelope in terms of racist, offensive words used in the bit to portray the lead character in this, from the magazine’s “Little Bigot Man Dept.” Starchie’s old war buddy, Dolf, visits and it goes so well that network executives show up to offer him his own spinoff show. Instead of Edith, her name is Meathead. And she offers the same zany dingbat observations as usual, blind to Starchie's bigotry, and simply wanting to go out for a movie date. Gloriosky and Meek are the liberal kids who wonder why they live with such a racist. The Brady Bunch kids also stop by briefly, asking if anyone is up for a pillow fight before realizing they’re at the wrong house. 5 out of 5 stars (like the offensive and important show itself).

“Clodumbo” focuses on the 1970s TV detective’s knack for wearing his tan coat no matter how hot it may be and also his rambling lack of focus. He badgers an innocent doctor so relentlessly that the doc finally admits to the murder in order to get locked up, get some peace and quiet, and get away from the badgering Clodumbo. Like with all these stories, the artwork is nothing short of amazing and the story is pretty hilarious too. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

“The Mary Tailor-Made Show” riffs on the fact that, despite the program being about the workings at a TV news organization, there never seemed to be any reporters (other than anchor Ted Baxter, played by Ted Knight) reporting the news. Mr. Grunt bosses Mary around to do lots of important jobs like dusting off his bottle so he can start drinking in between her frequent wardrobe changes that might be a little unrealistic for a “$92-per-week office flunky.” The men of the newsroom gawk at Mary’s looks in super creepy ways that make me want to go back and rewatch some episodes to see if it was really that perverted. 5 out of 5 stars.

“M*A*S*H*UGA” is what it might mean in Yiddish to think something so foolish as “war is a heck of a lot of fun.” Spoofing this classic sitcom is tough to do and this is the weakest of these four. Cockeye and Crapper joke their way through operating on their patients and act even more reprehensible to women than in the actual show. They are both miserable and want out of their TV contract even more than out of the Korean War itself. 4 out of 5 stars.

Sports Illustrated, Pitchfork, and skiing provide great examples of the need to adapt to an always-changing world

News this week that Sports Illustrated has fired its entire staff and Pitchfork has been folded under GQ's operations is not exactly shocking, but it is very sad and yet another sign that mainstream, reliable journalism will get just a little bit harder to suss out. I had read SI since I was a little kid, always looking forward to the brilliant long-form journalism that "illustrated" so many compelling sports stories.  

The news reports have not been framed as total endings of these two esteemed publications, but the writing is clearly on the wall. And it's a big problem, especially because, for example, kids are getting their knowledge from often suspect social-media accounts and adults are internalizing and espousing information from their Facebook feeds and elsewhere that is from unknown or unreliable sources.

Those are examples of the many, many needs for the U.S. to implement media literacy in school curriculums so that, for example, we can all be spouting a lot less questionable misinformation to each other all day every day.

Another thing that is dying a bit in this country - like once-reliable media - is skiing, because snow has become so sporadic as weather patterns become different and more unpredictable. But that was not the case Saturday, when our family drive our kids and some of their friends to White Tail in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania near the Maryland border. It's about 90 minutes from home, and then it took us an hour in traffic for the last mile just to get to an over-full parking lot. I waited in the car for about another hour after that to wait for a parking spot to open up (and to deal with a dead battery in our friends' minivan that we borrowed) while the others got out and started skiing. The lift lines were nuts and it truly seemed that everyone in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia-Pennsylvania area had shown up to hit the slopes. Once getting past the base lift, however, it was pretty fun on the side mountain with the shorter lift lines and the more difficult runs, especially as the afternoon wore on. The crowds thinned because it was bitter cold and the Baltimore Ravens were playing in the football playoffs. 

The world and humans evolve very slowly, and we've moved slowly in the face of many difficult changes. Ski resorts will look very different in 100 years because of climate change. There will no doubt be some difficult times in the years ahead as those industries figure out how to adapt to changes in snowfall patterns and locations. Likewise, media and journalism has gone through monumental change in recent decades and we as humans have not figured out how to consume a much faster, voluminous, and constant flow of information yet. 

Great Magazine Reads: Giving some thought to Barbra Streisand for the first time in decades

Sure, I’ve always known the song “The Way We Were.” And I dug “Guilty” and “Woman in Love” since they were from her album of duets with Barry Gibb back in my wild-about-the-Bee-Gees days. But I’ve never really dug into Barbra Streisand’s musical catalog. Not something a self-respecting indie rocker would do, right?

But now that I’m older and presumably wiser - with the occasion of the 81-year-old, Malibu resident, and mass icon having just published her autobiography, My Name is Barbra - now seems like a good time to assess what all the hype has been about.

On the surface, going over old photos, Babs is undeniably gorgeous and completely mesmerizing. While I can’t confess to having read the nearly-1,000-page book, here is what I’ve learned about her in the November cover story of Vanity Fair:

• Streisand turned down Jackie Onassis’s request for her to write her biography for Doubleday in 1984 (Onassis worked at the publishing house then). But that’s when she slowly started taking notes that would turn into her 2023 book. 
• Babs’ mother wanted her to become a school administrator!
• In 1966, Marlon Brando propositioned her at a party, with his wife in the next room. She declined but they remained friends and talked frequently on the phone. He told her she was great in Funny Girl but that she runs funny.
• She dropped the middle "a" in her name at age 13 to make it more unique.
• She has crossed many types with the men she has dated over the years, including former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Ryan O’Neal, Elliott Gould, Don Johnson, her longtime current husband James Brolin, and possibly even tennis legend Andre Agassi. 

Vanity Fair offers an excerpt from Streisand’s book on her work making the movie The Way We Were with Robert Redford:

• Behind those blue eyes, “Bob” was such a great actor because nobody could ever tell what he was thinking, which gave him an unusual complexity. The two stars found each other to be pretty exotic, with Redford wondering what it must have been like growing up in Brooklyn and she thought the same about him and sunny California.
• He inspired her to learn how to ski and she rode with him on his motorcycle.
• But some of her favorite scenes were cut from the final edit of the movie. She has been working on updating it, possibly to release soon, with the crucial scenes back in place.

Bottom line: I’m pretty sure I’ve seen The Way We Were, but I’m definitely planning to go back and revisit it, now that I’ve done a deeper dive on Babs and realized she’s a pretty great artist. After all, the American Film Institute has called it the sixth best romance movie. 

Pro tip: Along with the other songs mentioned above, you can't go wrong with these other Streisand tunes: "Memory," "Evergreen," "No More Tears," "What Kind of Fool (again with Gibb)," "You Don't Bring Me Flowers," "People," and "It Had to Be You."

Best Magazine Reads: Ordinary people, like the Nazi evil secretary, could commit genocide in the future if we fail to understand the past

One of the most gripping magazine articles I've read this year was in the October issue of GQ. Called "The Race to Catch the Last Nazis," it's about a German government bureau that is still tracking down people who were complicit in Nazi crimes during World War II.

Those few-remaining and surely haunted souls are all in the 100-year-old range. Can you imagine living that long knowing how you could have made such terrible life decisions all those many years ago? Even more amazing is that almost none of these people have ever admitted to just plain fucking up. They had a job to do and they did it - in their sad little minds, at least.

I usually try to highlight the most interesting points from articles in my "Best Magazine Reads" series. But this one you really should read for yourself. That said, much of the article centers on an evil secretary and is more jolting than any horror movies I can recall. Here's a teaser:

Investigators [at the bureau] have sought to define and clarify the scale of the crime that was the Holocaust. Where did responsibility for the killings end? Here (one inch) with Hitler and his generals? Here (two inches) with camp commandants, doctors, executioners? Here (three inches) with military functionaries such as guards? Or here (four inches) with non-military functionaries, the secretaries, telephone operators, and so on?

The question is a live and urgent one in Germany because at this point it is really only the functionaries, the guards and secretaries, juvenile Nazis barely out of their teens when the regime collapsed, who may remain alive. Having lived this long, into an era of elevated national regret about the past, they are being fingered to bear what guilt there is that remains.

Recently, for the first time in Germany’s history, a civilian employee of a Nazi camp was brought to trial as an accessory to mass murder. “The typist" is a woman that [Germans] knew either as Irmgard Furchner or as die Sekretärin des Bösen, the secretary of evil. 

When she worked for the Nazis she was in her teens [and worked at a concentration camp] called Stutthof ... a remote blue dot in the northeastern corner of Nazi territory, close to the Baltic Sea and what is now the Polish city of Gdańsk. Neither the largest nor the deadliest of the camps, Stutthof was described by one survivor who’d also lived through Auschwitz as the cruelest. It was built in 1939, and by 1942 it held tens of thousands of captive European Jews.

[She started working there] in 1943—the year that a section of Stutthof’s fence was electrified, the year the grounds were enlarged to accommodate a crematorium. Of the 64,000 people who would ultimately lose their lives in Stutthof, some were tricked to their deaths, ushered aboard a plausible-looking train and then gassed, or ordered to stand still to be measured before they were shot from behind. Most perished from malnourishment or disease in the barracks. Furchner was 18 when she got there. She had already worked in a bank in her home village, nearby, and she could type. A photograph from this period shows a pale young woman wearing a dark dress, smiling as she posed in front of the brick-walled administration building that was now her daily place of work.

Furchner’s job was to take dictation from the camp commandant, Paul-Werner Hoppe, a figure who routinely wrote execution orders and arranged killings on-site. Sometimes he dictated memorandums to his employees that combined the terrible and the mundane. There would be a cheerful announcement of someone’s promotion and on the same piece of typed paper (just another bullet point on an agenda) advice about the sorts of wagons that would be needed for a transport of prisoners to Auschwitz.

“This genocide wasn’t effcient because of the crazy people at the top,” [said one of the investigators interviewed for the article]. “It was efficient because every day, thousands of Germans like Frau Furchner showed up at an offce and did their jobs. This is why they got so far. This genocide. It was so…so ordinary.” He hoped her case would lay a new inscription on the past: that ordinary people did this too. He hoped it would send a different sort of message to the future: that ordinary people could do this too.

Best Magazine Reads: Rediscovering one of my surprise pre-teen favorite rockers Bryan Adams

Supposedly not a cool confession to make, but when I was a pre-teen, the top of the music heap for me was Michael Jackson, Hall and Oates, and a bunch of MTV bands. OK, that’s not totally uncool, but also right up there at the very pinnacle sat, wait for it, Canada’s one and only Bryan Adams.

Now, I don’t much know what’s happened with the guy since 1985. But I’ll still put his run of four albums from 1980 to 1984 - Bryan Adams, You Want It You Got It, Cuts Like a Knife, and Reckless - up against just about anything from that era. Pure power pop goodness mixed in with a handful of spotless ballads.

I’ve heard I should check out 1987’s Into the Fire as well. But by then, the ship had sailed on to the college rock of The Jam, The Replacements, and R.E.M. and then to a late-high-school hair metal phase with Ratt, Guns N’ Roses, and Ozzy. But looking back at the broad spectrum of rock, Adams was wildly talented and, kind of like R.E.M., his really amazing stuff was overlooked because of later major stardom that actually was arguably far less inspired.

Classic Rock Magazine recently had a cover feature on Adams (and he guest edited the issue) that gave me the chance to listen back on these old favorites and to learn some interesting things:

• 
  He’s 63, a super nice regular guy, and has been a vegan for 34 years - maybe longer than veganism has been a thing!
• He’s also a professional photographer with exhibits, books, and record covers.
• Growing up, his father worked in peacekeeping for the UN, so Bryan moved around a lot, living in Israel, Austria, and Portugal, and spending time in the UK. His father often played opera and military band music very loud. But he also let Bryan get albums from his Columbia Record Club membership and the boy would pick the ones with “the hairiest bastards on the front cover,” already being drawn to the visuals. This helped him first get into Creedence Clearwater Revival and Janis Joplin.
• Once getting more settled in Vancouver, at 15, he started writing songs and even soon had a song called "Wastin’ Time" that Bachman-Turner Overdrive used. It also appears on Adams’ debut and is more rocking’ than BTO’s also good version.
• Even with 1993's Cuts Like a Knife, he was living in poverty because he had signed a really bad record deal with a low royalty rate. He says he didn’t care much about the money thing, but it was nice to finally be able to pay some bills after 1984’s Reckless, with its six top-15 hits and 12 million slbums sold in the U.S.
• He went to see Tina Turner in 1982 and wrote a song to try to give to her backstage called “Lock Up Your Sons Cuz Tina’s in Town” that he called terrible. But he wrote another song later, “It’s Only Love,” that she fell in love with and insisted on singing it with him.
• The magic of “Summer of ‘69,” Adams says is that, like most of his songs, “it’s simple, and simple is hard,” but the point is for everyone to be able to sing along to songs together.
• In the 1990s, things got crazy and he worked with everyone from Mutt Lange to Sting to Rod Stewart. He’s duetted with Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez, and Billy Joel. He was the first Western artist to perform in Nepal.

Give Adams a chance. You might just like him.

Great Magazine Reads: Lost may have been a huge hit on TV but it sounds like it was truly lost behind the scenes

Malcolm David Kelley as Walt
and Harold Perrineau as Michael 

If you've never watched Lost and don't want to go down that 121-episode rabbit hole, the least you can do is watch the pilot episode, which supposedly cost $13 million alone and was directed by the show's co-creator J.J. Abrams. I think it's still the best first episode of any show I've ever seen, and there are many other great parts of the series, even if it dovetails at the end into complete nonsense.

Now, horrendous details have arrived that probably had something to do with the unevenness of the show's latter half. Entertainment writer Maureen Ryan's new book, BURN IT DOWN: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, has been released and it details how unhappy some of the writers and cast were during their time with the show.

In an excerpt from the June 2023 issue of Vanity Fair, "it’s clear that the landmark series played right into Hollywood’s most long-standing patterns, in which auteurs wield enormous power with very little oversight." Here are some of the most interesting details from the article:

• "Part of it was [executive producer Carlton Cuse and co-creator Damon Lindelof] really didn’t like their characters of color."
• "The cast ended up in a series of compensation tiers and ... the highest tier was occupied solely by white actors."
• Actor Harold Perrineau says it became pretty clear early on "'that I was the Black guy. Daniel [Dae Kim] was the Asian guy. And then you had Jack and Kate and Sawyer,' all of whom got a good deal of screen time, as did Terry O’Quinn’s Locke."
• In season 2, Perrineau talked to Cuse about the lack of depth for his character and that he was unhappy that it was written to seem he didn't care much about Walt, his son who has been kidnapped. After season 2, Perrineau's character did not return.
• One writer intererviewed says, "I can only describe [the atmosphere on set largely led by Cuse] as hazing. It was very much middle school and relentlessly cruel. And I’ve never heard that much racist commentary in one room in my career." Some of the stereotyping statements one writer heard included jokes about Asian's eye shapes, Blacks being thieves, anti-Semitism, sexism against women, and one Asian American writer who people simply called "Korean," as if that were the writer's name. "There was so much shit, and so much racist shit, and then laughter. It was ugly."
• Actor Michelle Rodriguez got arrested for drunk driving and "instead of having empathy or sympathy for her situation, [the showrunners] were just like, 'Well, we’ll just get rid of her.'"

Ryan interviews Lindelof and Cuse at the end of the magazine article and they both deny all the accusations or that they set the tone for a very unhealthy set.

Great Magazine Reads: The Pretenders in the running for the coolest ever

Honeymoon-Scott, Chambers, Hynde, Farndon (l-r)

I've always considered Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders one of the very most cool rockers - one of those people you would love to have at your dinner party. She pretty much remains the only original member of the band but she's still making pretty vital music, and she is one of those bucket-list artists I still need to see live someday.

Testament to her cool? Have anyone with a sense about rock music listen to "Message of Love" and "Tattooed Love Boys" and tell me The Pretenders are not as cool as it gets. Those James Honeymoon-Scott guitar licks are to die for and Hyde's vocal mannerisms ... there are no words.

I recently started reading Record Collector Magazine. Previously I didn't know it even existed, but an interview with Hynde quickly convinced me this monthly will be added to my regular rotation of magazine reading. (Try it and most other magazines on the Libby app, which is connected to your local library and is the best deal in town for mag lovers.) Here are some great tidbits from the interview:

• When she was 17, Hynde drove with a friend from home in Akron (why are there so many great rockers from Ohio?) to Pittsburgh to see The Kinks in concert. She bumped into Ray Davies outside of the club and they caught each others' eye. Chrissie claims Ray would probably not remember that moment. Nevertheless, she wound up having a daughter with Davies in 1983.
• After Hynde started The Pretenders, bassist Pete Farndon and lead guitarist James Honeyman-Scott drummer both died from drug use. Drummer Martin Chambers stayed on for many years, but now Chrissie says, "It's not like I've retired Martin, but I'm a bit nervous about him on the road, because he's had some health issues."
• The reporter asks her why she feels guilty for the deaths of her bandmates and she says, "Well, I didn't discourage the drug-taking, and I was part of it. So, you know, not that I was their mother, and we went on the road, and it was very hardcore."
• Back On the Chain Gang was the first song Hynde and Chambers recorded after Jimmy and Pete died, which definitely adds levity to an already-great jam.
• Like her friend Sir Paul McCartney, Hynde says, "I can't read music; I still go by the dots on the guitar. I don't even know most of the chord names. I'm not a great player, I just do my little thing and figure it out, but as far as the counting and everything, if someone says, 'You've missed a beat there,' in the early days, I would say, 'Well, that's how it goes, so just memorize it.'"
• Way back, she left Akron and adopted London as her hometown, which is probably part of the reason she seems so exotic to those of us back in the U.S.A. When she first moved there, she got a job in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's famed boutique Truth Loves To Go Naked, which later became Sex, and was ground central for the Sex Pistols. She pretty quickly go fired.
• The article notes that "the guitar all the way through Woman [by John Lennon] – it's just like Brass In Pocket. And John wrote it in Bermuda just a few months after Brass In Pocket had topped the chart." Hynde says "that's amazing" and says, "John, he is still my favourite singer of all time."
• The interviewer asks, "The 1981 tour was a catalogue of atrocity. You were all drinking a lot and you got yourself arrested in Memphis – what for, exactly?" She responds, "I picked up this guy on the road who I'd known from Ohio. He showed up in Orlando, and he had a Corvette Stingray, and he was fun, so I brought him on the road for a while. We were in a bar called Friday's in Memphis [as featured on the back cover of Big Star's Radio City]. Everyone was in there – all the band and crew. I had to go to the loo and there was a long queue to the ladies’ room, so I went in the men's room, and this guy I was with, Scotty, he really had a go at me. He was trouble, and he was like, 'What are you doing, going in the men's room?' and I was saying, 'What's your problem?' Anyway, we ended up in a back room at Fridays, having an argument, and one of the waiters or managers came up to us and said, 'You have to move from this section, we're closing it.' And because I was loaded, I really took exception to this, and I said, 'Fuck you' – I wasn't going to leave. So, I ended up being stood on by a security guy while they called the police, who put me in the back of this police car with handcuffs on. I somehow slid my hands out of the cuffs and rolled the window down and said, 'Excuse me, constable, I believe these are yours.' So then that kicked off, and next thing you know, they're putting me in leg shackles and handcuffs behind my back. And again, because I was loaded, I kicked all the windows out of the police car. So, I had to spend the night in jail."
• She had her second daughter with Jim "Don't You Forget About Me" Kerr of Simple Minds in 1985.
• The Pretenders covered "Angel Of The Morning," which had previously been a huge hit for Juice Newton and which ended up on the Friends soundtrack. She didn't know anything about the show and it's eventual massic cultural impact, and she even traveled to L.A. to perform the song in the background at a coffee shop in an episode.

Finally, here are my favorite songs by The Pretenders:

Honorable mention: Creep (the band's live version of the Radiohead song is pretty, of course, cool)

11. 2,000 Miles (one of the great underrated holiday tunes)

10. Show Me

9. Mystery Achievement

8. Stop Your Sobbing

7. Kid

6. Back On the Chain Gang

5. Talk of the Town

4. Precious

3. Brass in Pocket

2. Message of Love

1. Tattooed Love Boys

Great Magazine Reads: Remembering School of Rock 20 years later

The perfect storm for a great comedy, in my book, mixes how touching a film is, hilarity, and a great soundtrack. That’s probably why School of Rock landed at #16 on my top 60 funniest movies ever list.

Rolling Stone has a great oral history of the film in its latest issue, celebrating a look back at the 2003 classic, which was clearly Jack Black’s crowning achievement. Here are some of my favorite insights from the article:

• Director Richard Linklater’s film made about $20 million, which was the record for music-themed comedies at the time. It’s aged very well and has been a huge net good for society as real schools of rock have proliferated since then.
• The screenplay was written by one Mike White, who not only co-starred in School but also went on to create the must-watch TV show The White Lotus. Black says of White, “He just made me laugh so much. I was always fascinated by his strange magic.”
• Linklater, already a hot commodity from Slackers and Dazed and Confused, didn’t want to direct the movie because he thought it was cheesy, unrealistic (all that noise in a classroom?), and formulaic, but “Black, Linklater, and White all met up at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles to discuss the script.” It turned out that Linklater and White didn’t get along, so that was another hurdle at the start.
• Linklater, as he famously does, picked a cast of kids that were not necessarily even child actors, but he did want ones who could sing and play instruments.
• At first, Black was nervous about working with kids. He says, “In retrospect, it seems ridiculous because I’m such an immature idiot that it was a perfect match to be with a bunch of kids. We had a blast — horsing around and making jokes and making fart noises in between takes.”
• Linklater had to fire one kid a week into shooting because he was complaining of not having a big enough part, but there was no room for egos when the rock was needing to be delivered!
• Sonic Youth’s Jim O’Rourke was brought in to be the music consultant and started the kids off working on simple songs, like Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane.”
• “The character of Summer was not a great singer, but [the actor] was. O’Rourke had to teach her how to mangle an off-key ‘Memories’ from Cats.”
• Linklater had tried to get the rights for a Led Zeppelin song for Dazed but was unsuccessful. This time, he had Black and the kids make a video pleading for them to be able to use “Immigrant Song” and it actually got the band’s attention and worked!
• Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow, the Osbournes, and the Jackass guys inspired some of the kids to put Jack in their Cokes at the film’s L.A. premiere.
• The kids still have a group text called Schnayblay.
• Kevin Clark, who played Freddy the drummer, died in 2021 when a driver hit him while he was riding his bike. “In his last few years, he had been teaching at a School of Rock.”
• Black now says, “… That character with the love of rock and not really fitting in the world of rock … it does mirror my experience with the entertainment industry. It felt like the planets aligned and I got to do the movie that I was born to do.”

Business Insider also has a good roundup of what the kids have been up to since School of Rock.

Best Magazine Reads: Andy Roddick opens up about his tennis career

It’s hard to believe it was more than 20 years ago that I sat on the bleachers, mere feet away from the action, watching Andy Roddick play doubles at Washington D.C.’s then-named Legg Mason Tennis Classic. Besides the incredible power of his shots, what I remember most was that I was close enough to overhear him whispering to his partner to just let Roddick return everything to their opponents.

It’s equally hard to believe, as a new GQ feature on Roddick notes, that it’s been 20 years since Roddick or any man from the U.S. has won the U.S. Open. Here are some other great nuggets from that article about one of my favorite tennis players of all time:

• He has thrown away nearly all his trophies.
• He lives near Charlotte, North Carolina and has a “lodge-like getaway in Cashiers, North Carolina, a remote village in the Blue Ridge Mountains.”
• Roddick co-owns a whiskey brand named Sweetens Cove, with Peyton Manning.
• He has a bulldog named Bob Costas.
• Of course that one major he won was mainly due to the poor timing of his career. He was at #1 for 13 weeks before losing that spot for good to upstarts Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic. Without the arrival of those big three, commentator Jim Courier says there’s no reason to believe Roddick, had he played a few years earlier, couldn’t have had another five major championship wins.
• Roddick and Chris Evert remain the only two tennis players ever to host Saturday Night Live. How in the world is John McEnroe not on that list?
• Speaking of legends, in 2006, Roddick’s ranking had dipped to #10 when he hired the reclusive Jimmy Connors as his coach. Conners got him back up to #3 in the year-and-half they worked together.
• His only regret was not winning Wimbledon, which he really wanted. Connors, too, really wanted Andy to win Wimbledon at the end of their run together and was said to have been seen bawling his eyes out in the locker room after Roddick lost there when he was coaching him.
• He is excited about the major chances of great young U.S. players now like Frances Tiafoe and Taylor Fritz. But he doesn’t think he’ll coach any of them since he has a lot of other things going on, such as his Tennis Channel commentating gig, the virtual healthcare business he’s cofounded called ViewFi, and the Andy Roddick Foundation focused on helping low-income Austin kids through summer and after-school programs.

Best Magazine Reads: Remembering Gram Parsons

Gram Parsons has always left me spellbound. Songs like “Brass Buttons,” “The New Soft Shoe,” “She,” “A Song for You, and “Streets of Baltimore” are songs made by someone who must have been out of his mind and body as a young man who essentially invented the genre of so-called alt-country, even if the man himself tended to call it “Cosmic American Music.”

Parsons died 50 years ago this month and MOJO Magazine has a great memorial article titled “Cry One More Time.” Here are some of the best nuggets of info:

• He had big hands!
• Before music, Parsons grew up in 20,000 person swampy Waycross, Georgia as a kid of parents rich from his grandparents’ Florida fruit fortunes. His mom was called Big Avis and his dad was Coon Dog, a World War II veteran who killed himself two days before Christmas 1958.
• Parsons had been “kicked out of The Byrds, fled his own Flying Burrito Brothers, and been booted from a Rolling Stones bacchanal in France.”
• He had a major trust fund, but everyone else around him didn’t. So priorities were a problem for the rockers surrounding Parsons.

  

  Emmylou and Gram

  
  
• At one point, Emmylou Harris became his muse and the two of them played a bunch to practically nobody at Clyde’s in Washington D.C.
• When his band started to tour on his debut solo release GP, Gram was blitzed on cocaine and the band barely rehearsed. The so-called Fallen Angels band was derailed nearly as soon as it began.
• Eventually they got their act together and wowed Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt in Austin, and the two even joined them on stage, later inviting Parsons and his band to “an all-night hootenanny.”
• In the end, after his Grievous Angel album release, “he was falling apart. He didn’t get what he needed growing up” even though his colorful parents were well off financially “and he wasn’t strong enough to survive Hollywood.”

Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy turns 50

Issue 312 of Classic Rock Magazine digs deep on the metal god’s fifth album, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and was the result of what singer Robert Plant called the band’s “buccaneer musician” spirit, “ready to try anything.”

While IV and II are typically cheered as Zop’s best, I consistently come back to Houses and Physical Graffiti as absolute perfection in rock ‘n roll. Of course, most critics at the time judged the band by how heavy it was and that this was a relatively lightweight affair. I’d say they were right about that last point, but they were wrong in claiming that because it was lighter, it was of little importance.

Here are some things about that time in 1973 you may not know:

Plant was 23 and in full golden-god mode. It probably goes without saying that he was “dripping in pussy.”

Drummer John Bonham was also 23, in full beast mode, and was said to be a family man off the road. “But Zeppelin were never off the road.”

Several of the songs recorded for Holy ended up on Physical Graffiti, and they had a brighter quality to them than their previous music - good reasons the two albums have a similar feel lodged in the middle of their catalog. Many of the songs were recorded at The Rolling Stones mobile studio in the English countryside.

The album was delayed from 1972 partly over the artwork. The naked children climbing a cratered hillside and a child sacrifice on the inside replaced the original art, which had been an electric green tennis court with a tennis racquet. Page hated that the art insinuated that the band’s music was some kind of racket, in business terms.

Over the Hills and Far Away and D’yer Maker (top 20) were released as singles in the U.S. and there were no singles released in the UK. But their chart popularity was clearly never the point, as Zep were breaking The Beatles’ records left and right for attendance at their shows across the U.S. 

A strong argument can be made nowadays that Led Zeppelin were the rock ‘n roll Beatles of the ‘70s. The band’s music is timeless and, like that of The Beatles, there are almost never times when I don’t want to hear it.

10 interesting things about Smog’s Bill Callahan

It’s hard to believe I’ve loved so many rock bands for so long. Forget the super classics like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. All these later, 90s bands have imprinted themselves on my mind - heck, my life - for 30 some years. Bill Callahan of the one-man Smog is no exception. Famed Replacements' book writer Bob Mehr interviewed him in the December 2022 issue of MOJO Magazine. Here are 10 things I learned:

1. I rank Smog as my third-favorite band ever associated with the Drag City label, behind Pavement and Silver Jews/Purple Mountains and well ahead of King Kong.

2. He once dated Cat Power. Talk about a one-person-band power couple! He eventually married a filmmaker when he was nearly 50 in 2011.

3. Iggy Pop is a huge fan. So was Lou Reed.

4. One of his sisters got him into punk and new wave as a kid and the other sister has made about 10 albums.

5. Callahan was born in Silver Spring - where I lived for eight years - and moved to England before returning to spend his teen years in Maryland outside Washington DC. He loved WHFS and going to the 9:30 Club.

6. As a kid, he started a fanzine called Willpower dedicated to The Replacements.

7. The first show he ever did was opening for Pavement on Coney Island.

8. He feels like his songwriting touchstone is Lou Reed and his playing one is John Lee Hooker. He also identified with country songs by the likes of Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash and felt - rightly - that he could sing in those storytelling, voice-up-front styles.

9. He did an early interview with the legendary and defunct Magnet Magazine and felt they totally got his quotes wrong. When he complained, the magazine said he should be grateful anyone was writing about him.

10. This was the point he made in the article that I found most profound, and it even inspired me to get the basics down on my own, in-the-works Smog-inspired new song. Callahan said he thinks people write books and songs because each one is like another life they are getting to live. He said, “I want 500 lives, but I can’t have them. But I can write 500 songs.” I really like that thought.

TV Snide: November 2022

Book of the Month: The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll: I’ve always been mildly interested in what some of the most tried and true self-help books espouse, but this one I actually put into real, easy-to-see-it-exists practice. Perhaps I identify because I’m always looking for an outlet for my writing, but I’ve started writing in my “bullet journal” every day. It’s always been easy for me to get distracted and this is a way for me to put all my lists, to dos, and other buckets of materials (like thank-you reminders, dream and discussion recaps, and how to organize all the things I want to read each day) into order. I like to use the journal to write out my thoughts a little more deeply sometimes as a way of increasingly trying to understand who I am. 5 out of 5 stars

Best Magazine Read: “Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals,” by Susan B. Glasses and Peter Baker in The New Yorker: This is an essential read that left me flabbergasted that President Trump, despite his many attempts, failed to get us into a major Third World War. It was lucky for all of us that his utter incompetence and lack of understanding of history and the world order was likely the reason we escaped those dark four years at all. Trump demanded complete allegiance from his top military brass and, in one example of a time when he suspected disloyalty, he said he wished they could all be more like Hitler’s military leaders. He was then informed that those leaders tried to assassinate Hitler at least three times. Trump told them that wasn’t true. 5 out of 5 stars

IT Chapter 2 (HBO Max): This 2019 movie was far better than the first part. It also should have probably just been a TV series. Regardless, much as I love Stephen King's novels, they have been very hit-or-miss when turned into movies. But the excellent cast plays the kids all grown up since Chapter 1 as they return to Derry to fight off Pennywise the Clown and his army of scary CGI monsters. The creativity and storytelling is top notch. 5 out of 5 stars

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” short story by Ursula K. Le Guin (1973): This is a short, entertaining tale of a city of happiness. The people get to live there is complete happiness in exchange for the complete destruction and ongoing sorrow of one boy locked away in a damp broom closet. If people choose to go see the boy, they could then feel guilt, which would in turn ruin the city, so they simply walk away into the darkness. 5 out of 5 stars

“Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes,” short story by Raymond Carver: In the pulp author’s story, someone has stolen a boy’s bicycle and the mother invites two fathers of friends over to get to the bottom of it. Two of the fathers get into a fist fight and nobody gets to the bottom of it, but the winning father and son perhaps get a little closer in the process. Hard to derive real meaning out of the story, but it is an entertaining read. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Elvis (HBO Max): This is a sprawling and somewhat dialogue-light rock bio told in true Baz Luhrmann fashion. It's garish and gaudy. But if anyone is due for a movie of his life told in this overwrought way, it's Elvis Presley. Like Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby before it, this movie is a thing to behold. I only wish I had seen it on the big screen. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Fleabag - Season 2 (Amazon Prime): The last half of this two-season series improves the formula. Phoebe Waller-Bridge remains captivating to watch as she makes rebellious but increasingly - somehow - more mature decisions. Much of the season deals with what she should do about falling in love with a hot priest, as her sister’s and father’s directions in their own love lives become more and more convoluted. I really enjoyed this. 4.5 out of 5 stars

"The Red Convertible," short story by Louise Erdrich (1981): I was on a Sherman Alexie kick back in the 1990s, but since then, I haven't read much fiction about Native American life. This story is great, about two brothers who ride around and have fun in their car until the older brother goes off to war. He returns as a shell of himself, but just as the two finally start to regain a connection, the older brother drowns himself and the younger brother drowns that convertible. 4 out of 5 stars

Barbarian (HBO Max): Justin Long and Bill Skarsgard (of Pennywise fame) are among the players trying to get to the bottom of the secrets in a creepy abandoned Detroit neighborhood home being used to potentially lure unsuspecting AirBnB customers. A really well done creeper flick. 4 out of 5 stars

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins: This Oprah-approved but highly controversial novel was a slog for me. Not so much because of the controversy but more because of the fairly bad writing and unformed characters. It begins promisingly as Mexican mom Lydia and son Luca hide in a bathroom while their husband and dad Sebastian and 15 other friends and family are gunned down outside at a BBQ. In flashbacks, Lydia has become friends at her bookstore with a man named Javier, who it turns out is a cartel leader her husband has profiled in his job as a journalist. Javier is the one who leads the carnage at Lydia’s house, leading to her escape with Luca across the border alongside many other immigrants. While the book should by all means be important, it also could have been so much more interesting. 2.5 out of 5 stars

Cutter’s Way (Sling TV): Not even the legend Jeff Bridges can save this 1981 stinker about a bunch of jerks involved in sex and violence and general worthlessness. Depressing. 2 out of 5 stars

Cult Classic by Sloane Crowley: Lola is getting married to a man named Boots but is pulled into a Manhattan situation that may or may not be a cult. In a refurbished high-rise synagogue, her old boss Clive leads a startup to provide closure for people who are obsessed with their exes on social media. Lola is a likely subject because she has so many exes. The novel, apparently about the importance of closure, is poorly written. While there are enjoyable passages, the net result is kind of a mess. 2 out of 5 stars