Zero to 180 – Three Minute Magic
Ninety years ago, on August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law so as to provide a basic social safety net that would be of broad benefit to the general public. Social Security not only protects vulnerable populations — the elderly, the young, those
This piece chronicles ten years in the life of a young public radio station beginning in 1970, the year my mother was hired as a member of its professional staff. University of Cincinnati’s WGUC-FM – a charter member of National Public Radio – underwent remarkable growth and technological advancement during
This unforgettable album design – UNESCO World Heritage site Lisbon Goes Pop Released in Portugal (1968) This full-length release is a “split” LP that primarily includes tracks by Os Chinchilas, a quartet that featured Filipe Mendes (i.e., Phil Mendrix – “the Portuguese Jimi Hendrix”) on guitar and vocals, along with
The steel guitar, it needs to be said, was the “special sauce” in early country music of the 1940s and ‘50s. From the soaring glissando and celestial, ringing harmonics to the scorching, breakneck single-note runs and big stacked chords, whose warm, electrified sound (uniquely) spanned the audio spectrum, the steel
Last month as I was preparing to depart Ann Arbor on a Monday morning shortly before midday, I tuned into the University of Michigan’s student-run freeform radio station, WCBN, and was instantly transfixed by a loping funk groove that was imbued with a distinct Eastern melodicism and underpinned by a
The skydiving phonograph is just one of many indelible images from the Oscar-nominated documentary, Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat, a film that boldly illustrates, through juxtaposition, the entwinement of jazz music and colonial politics in mid-twentieth century Africa. And yet when you Google the term “skydiving phonograph” (using quotation marks),
Billboard displayed a startling lack of judgment when it made light-hearted reference to Plessy vs. Ferguson — the 1896 United States Supreme Court decision that codified segregation — in an educational piece from 1969 that attempts to demarcate the difference in mission between the Country Music Association and the similarly-named
Judy Lynn – “America’s Western Sweetheart” – would get her one and only 45 picture sleeve, tragically enough, for this cheerful-sounding honky tonk tale in which the singer informs us she has only seconds to live before the “kindly” stranger who offered a ride at the train station prepares to
Before the “klacker toy” had been banned by federal authorities, a New York City-area beat group with two 45 releases under its belt, The 8th Wonders of the World, seized an opportunity to record a song of praise for the dangerously hyperkinetic play object marketed squarely at the teenybopper demographic.
It’s not really a secret that US country & western music has had an influence on Jamaican music going all the way back to ska’s early years. Dave Katz — whose authoritative books on Jamaican music history (Solid Foundation: An Oral History Of Reggae and People Funny Boy: The Genius
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