THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

One of the joys of teaching for almost 19 years is that I've build up quite a wardrobe. But as I'm teaching more online classes, and as I'm getting older and fatter, there's just no need or possibility for some of the stuff I've accumulated, as I don't have the face time with students that I had a decade ago. So last night, I pulled out all my pants and sweaters and shirts and suits and stuff to make some "should-I-stay-or-should-I-go" piles. And while I didn't discard as much as I thought I might, there was still a sizable swell of clothing to be worn by me nevermore. The worst of it was coming to the understanding that squeezing into good-looking yet ill-fitting pants did no one any favors. And the worst of that was saying goodbye to some long-treasured items, such as the Todd Oldham glow-in-the-dark vinyl pants pictured above. I bought them on a Chicago trip in the late '90s, when I had a head of long and flowing hair as well as a stron...

When I am hip-deep in the History of Rock & Roll, I always say that the Seventies – specifically, around ’71 to ’76 – is my favorite period, for two major reasons. The first is the depth and expanse of creative expression in any number of subgenres, from country-rock to psychedelic funk to the beginning thrusts of disco, that surpassed nearly any other epoch you’d care to examine. The second is that the aforementioned creative expression, at many points, was just fucking weird. Like, “could only happen in that time” weird. Capes. Crocheted shorts. Yeti-like facial hair. Singer-songwriter suicide notes that received saturation airplay. Did I mention capes? So it makes perfect sense that, during this brief window of WTF, that two figures from a Sixties pop band would rebrand themselves, recalibrate their musical and artistic attack, and renew the askew in an otherwise earnest and anguished rock and roll landscape. Flo & Eddie are Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, originally...

For years, I joked about it in my Intro Psych classes. “In Trump’s America, anything is possible,” I said in my best impression of a gravelly voice of doom, and it nearly always got a few smatterings of cheap laughter, the currency of community college instructors everywhere. But the more I would run through the content, from discussions of intrapersonal intelligence to an examination of motivational needs such as the need for power, the validity of Trump the President started to, well, trump the validity of Trump the Reality TV Star or Trump the Ill-Suited Billionaire. Just last week, I told one of my night classes to get used to the words “President Donald Trump,” poorly straddling the expanse of my conscious denial of the possibility with a deeper evidence-based understanding of what was about to happen. And now, here we are. It’s really the uncertainty that gnaws. Not so much for the nearly 47% of Americans (shades of Mitt ’12) that didn’t vote at all, caught at that grim ...

I've been teaching the History of Rock & Roll Era class at NCMC for over a decade, and as each year goes on, I'm more and more convinced that Revolver , the 1966 classic from The Beatles that's 50 years old this year, is the best start-to-finish album in history. It's pretty much perfect, for all the reasons that have been discussed by dozens of writers better than me, and -- when paired with Pet Sounds -- it's the point where rock & roll forever shifted from the dance floor to the studio, where the soundtrack to teenage groping was elevated to art, at least for the white artists who were allowed the keys to the sonic kingdom. When we get to this point in class, I typically do two different things, but I wasn't able to do those two things this semester due to some technological snafus in my class room. (I was able to break down "A Day In The Life" along the three themes -- dreams, drugs, death -- so it wasn't a total loss.) The first t...

When I'm asked to think of my first concert, I have to first define my personal parameters of "concert" and whether or not that's the same as a Rock Show. If we say that a concert isn't the same as a Rock Show, then I would have to say that my first concert was seeing pre-"Don't Worry, Be Happy"  Bobby McFerrin, although the details -- mid-'80s, some college auditorium in southern lower Michigan -- are a bit fuzzy. (I do remember that he did a Wizard Of Oz bit where he sang some of the songs and did some of the voices. Yes, he was pretty awesome.) In general, I wasn't interested in seeing live music for some time, as I had a weird belief that the recorded performance was the more "real" and definitive version of a song; however, in time I learned to understand the subjectivity of that belief, that there were different pleasures to be extracted from recorded music and live music, so in early 1992, I decided to drop my defenses and ...

During the '70s and '80s, if you lived in the middle of nowhere and you wanted to know about the popular culture of the nation at large, you watched movies and television (the big three -- ABC, NBC, CBS -- as well as PBS) and you read magazines, especially the reviews sections. The monoculture loomed large back then, with no clear avenues into nearly anything counterculture, so I happily lapped up mainstream films, shows, and music recommended by middle-aged white men of the establishment, hoping to one day do what they did. The first time I was paid for reviewing anything was as a grad student at Central Michigan University, working for the college newspaper CM Life in the early '90s under a variety of editors. (And there was talent in that editorial pool, too; one editor later worked for the Wall Street Journal and a D.C. insider enclave, while another editor co-created Robot Chicken for Adult Swim. I even dated one of the other editors, but that's another post.) ...

My first impression of the last record store at which I will ever work was, shall we say, not the best. When I moved to Petoskey in August '98 for my NCMC job, I looked around the town and found an actual record store downtown called Record World, which was pretty exciting for a music fan like me. However, while they had a decent stock and what appeared to be a solid staff, the prices were a bit on the higher side, so I ignored RW as a shopping destination and instead made periodic trips down to WHR #9 to work and buy stuff. (I also got the run-around from the RW folks when I tried to put up some point-of-purchase material for a Love And Rockets street team of which I was a part, so that didn't engender warm feelings and good cheer, either.) But when WHR closed their doors in '01, I bit the bullet and offered my services to Record World as a part-timer soon after. Record World was an outlier in my record store experiences, as it was just one store where the owner was the ...