My parents are big music fans and while I was growing up music was constantly playing on the radio, tape deck or record player, whether we were in the house, garage, car, or even out by the pool. It always seemed foreign and miserable to me when I’d be hanging out with certain childhood friends whose parents drove in silence, ate meals in silence and seemed to have missed the invention of the radio.

And while my parents each had some of their own musical tastes—dad’s love for America vs. mom’s #1-most-hated song, “A Horse with No Name” (by America)—they did agree on country, doo-wop and Motown, the latter of the three being one of my favorite genres.

Each time “Do You Love Me” came on, my mom would turn up the radio and get excited, then proceed to sing and dance. It didn’t matter which conversation anyone was in the middle of, whether she was driving in the car or we were hanging out at home, it was always the same reaction. And the joy was contagious. Watching her face light up with her bright smile, anyone in her presence couldn’t help but smile back and join in the song and dance.

“Do You Love Me” was written by Motown founder Berry Gordy and recorded in 1962 by The Contours, though it’s been said he’d originally intended on having The Temptations record it. Either way, I’m just glad it was recorded. It’s brought so much joy to my family and apparently to the rest of the United States as it was a chart topper in 1962 and again in 1988, after it appeared in the movie Dirty Dancing.

I’ve heard the song many times in the past 14 years since moving out of my mom’s house, and every single time I hear it I think of her and I smile. Sometimes I even partake in a little song and dance myself.

No matter the genre, a good song is a good song.

Perhaps this tenet best explains the ubiquitous popularity of Bob Marley‘s anthology Legend. Every college student, every music fan, every person with ears owns a copy and has experienced a period of obsession when they play the album on endless repeat, regardless of whether they have any particular interest in Reggae.

For many, this tends to happen during high school when some cooler friend hands them a cassette that they wear through in their beat up old car. (Okay, by “most” I mean me.)

Eventually though, you reach college and meet that guy. You know, the guy with the Bob Marley poster. The guy who replaced all his bulbs with black lights, the guy with Woolite graffiti all over his walls because it glows and looks cool under the black lights man.

Then you meet the other guy. The frat-bro who only has five albums, one of which is Legend of course, which he plays when he wants to chill and relax and be socially conscious and a cool-bro.

Then you meet the rasta. The guy with designer dreads who seems to own only one set of clothes and doesn’t really know anything about Jamaica and Rasta except that it’s righteous man, and that you smoke out all the time, and love love love.

Eventually, you meet enough of these guys that you write off Legend forever and even the sight of the album makes you a little bit queasy.

But then one day many years later, you’re lying in bed in Manhattan, the window is open, a pleasant breeze, birds are chirping (along with the taxis honking and the sirens blaring) and Pandora decides to play “Three Little Birds” and for a few minutes there, it’s a perfect day. Three little birds, singing a melody pure and true, “Don’t worry ’bout a thing, ’cause every little thing gonna be all right” and all you can think is love love love.

P.S., I was the awkward guy with a mustache, backwards Dodgers cap, glasses, and an endless compendium of Rush t-shirts.

Last weekend, my partner, Katie, and I attended our very first Coachella Music + Arts Festival. We got back into Los Angeles well over a week ago now and, honestly, we’re still recovering from the overall experience, which was outstanding, but massively draining too, on both a physical and a mental level. Just the process of navigating some 100,000 other people over the massive desert festival grounds while taking in as many as 14 bands in a day (our max, on Saturday), is a significant undertaking…especially when you’re no longer in your twenties. But it was awesome—we had an amazing time and I’d recommend it to most anyone. No regrets.

Well. Almost no regrets.

Friday afternoon, as we were still getting our bearings and figuring out how best to pace things, we missed one of the main bands I came to see in the first place—seminal English shoegazers, Ride. We won’t get into the particulars of why we missed Ride on these pages, just suffice it to say that not witnessing the modern era re-introduction of a longtime favorite of mine that hadn’t played live for a crowd in over twenty years was a total bummer.

I mean, you never know with this recent-ish wave of 90s band reformations. For the most part—not to be overly cynical—but I feel most bands that get back together to play a string of shows or gigantic festivals would be better served, in my mind, by remaining beautifully immaculate in my memory of them, not getting back together years later and trying to pull off what they did in their teens or early twenties. That said, I have seen a couple bands pull it off really, really well; namely mumblecore emo band, Christie Front Drive and Ride’s fellow brit shoegazers, Slowdive. Having seen both in recent years, I can safely say it can be done well…just that it usually isn’t.

But after hearing Ride’s recent appearance on KCRW just before Coachella, I had a sneaking suspicion that the band might just fall into that latter, significantly smaller camp of successful reunions, so I’m sad to have missed them.

Maybe a trip to Spain or Holland is in order.

In the meantime, I’ll blissfully bring myself back to the early nineties with the stand-out track, “Vapour Trail” from their debut full-length, Nowhere.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved “Brandy.” It was released by Looking Glass in 1972—a decade before my birth—so I’m not exactly sure when I first heard it but the song always took me on a vivid, imaginative journey. The lyrics tell a story you just can’t help but envision, and the beautiful music channels the romanticism and daily struggle characteristic of Jersey Shore sound, as well as the essence of 1970s pop-rock.

Worth noting is the song’s backstory, which, to my knowledge, is still unclear. Did Elliot Lurie of Looking Glass really write it or did he just buy the rights to it? Was it written about Mary Ellis, a New Brunswick spinster in the 1790s whose grave still sits in the Loews theater parking lot on Route 1 in New Brunswick, New Jersey? Perhaps it was actually written about Lurie’s high school sweetheart named Randy.

What we do know for sure is that the four founding members of Looking Glass were Rutgers University alumni and “Brandy” propelled the band into epic one-hit-wonder stardom (unless you count “Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne,” which wasn’t nearly as popular). They went from playing New Brunswick-area bars to being signed to Epic Records, appearing on American Bandstand, and having their song featured in numerous films and TV shows.

So just how big did the band get? Well, let’s just say the success of “Brandy” trumps that of Looking Glass. By 1974, five years after being formed, they’d undergone lineup changes and broken up.

Each went their separate way but Lurie stayed in the music business — trying his hand at solo work, writing and producing music for advertisements, heading up the music department at 20th Century Fox, and popping up to sing at random venues whose walls still echo the melodic tale of Brandy.

There are few things in life as soothing to the soul as the California open road.

Even a short trip like the one I took last week from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara can serve as a wonderful reminder.

“My California stars,
They hang like grapes on vines that shine,
And warm the lovers glass like friendly wine”

California is expansive and seemingly limitless in beauty. Full of snow capped mountains, majestic waterfalls, the hottest deserts on earth, redwoods that push to heaven, endless beaches, and that long winding coastline under drastic cliffs, possibly the most scenic drive anywhere.

As would be expected then, many songs have been written about the state and one of my favorites is “California Stars” by Wilco. The song came about when Woody Gutherie‘s daughter, Nora Gutherie, approached Billy Bragg to see if he’d be interested in interpreting some of her father’s unrecorded lyrics. Bragg enlisted Wilco and together they recorded what would become the first of two Mermaid Avenue albums.

Wisely, the song doesn’t try to tackle California head-on. Instead, by focusing on the stars above, it encompasses a sort of universal approach… no matter where you are in California, you are under the California stars.

Not just any California stars though, “My California Stars” because that’s just it, isn’t it? Despite how big and overwhelming it might seem, each person quickly discovers the little bits that make California feel unique to them. California belongs individually to each one of us and that’s what makes it so special.

First week of college, a tall blonde Kurt Cobain type walks into my room and admires the music I’m blasting to the entire dorm (yeah, I was that guy):

“I didn’t know they made music like this anymore.”

My cred on the line, I played it cool, “Yeah, right? I know. Good stuff. It’s Pizzicato Five,” even though I had never heard anything like it before and thought I had stumbled onto something truly new and unique.

We bonded on the strength of our shared music tastes… The Pixies, Velvet Underground, Jane’s Addiction. Mostly stuff I had just recently discovered but he somehow already knew well.

We remained friends throughout college, frenemies at times when he free-loaded for extended periods in the apartment my two roommates and I shared.

“I didn’t know they made music like this anymore.”

We lost touch after graduation.

Many years later, I spotted him on a movie set I was working on and called out his name several times. After testing the limits of my persistence and conspicuously ignoring me as long as he could, he angled over slowly and whispered, “That’s not my name anymore. Do not call me that.”

I knew better than to question his motive or hope for an explanation. This was after all a guy who had a doll hanging from her neck in the middle of his freshman year dorm room.

We reminisced on life, the last decade or two… he had been homeless, he lost a friend to HIV who left him some money, he had lost the money, he had become a dancer, he was now an actor, he was in-between New York and San Francisco.

We agreed to meet for a drink and catch up properly, which we never did.

I imagine I will see him again sometime, here or there, and can only hope that by then, they’ve started making music like this again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPzp1_155aI

Alright, not to get too self-referential here, but activity of late on Facebook celebrating 25 years of my alma mater’s college radio station—WXJM—got me thinking about the old pop-punk band I was in, Daytime Television.

Ever since high school and all through college and a little bit beyond, I had always been in some band or another, with varying degrees of ‘indie band success’…or lack thereof. Most often the latter.

Daytime Television wasn’t my first band—that was, ahem, Disco Circus Wonder Kult (yes, with a K)—or the band I enjoyed the longest stay with or was the most proud of—that’d be Speedwell, our college + post-college emo band. But it was probably the band most tied to WXJM.

It formed from the ashes of my first band in college, Shiloh, a melancholy poppy band with now-comedian + improv rap dynamo Eliza Skinner on vocals, my longtime friend (mentioned in last week’s post) Brian Minter on bass, Whitney Skillcorn on drums, and me on guitar. That band broke up pretty quickly, but, with Whitney moving to guitar, Brian taking over a majority of vocals, and bringing in Sam Uzwack on drums, it providing the founding for Daytime Television, a hyper mess of a band at most times that was anything but polished and a ton of fun.

We screamed out vocals until hoarse, thrashed on our guitars until we bled, slept on beaches when we couldn’t find hotels on tour, and epitomized the beautiful naivety of youth while we tried to ‘make it’ as a band in the mid-ninties.

“If Anything’s Wrong” is probably the most emblematic DT song of that era. Just listening to it brings to mind a seemingly endless string of sweaty basement house shows and the many, many music-makers + music-lovers that came out of XJM. We were far, far, far from the best or most original bands to come out of that hub of independent music—that mantle would likely be worn by Sleepytime Trio, in my opinion, who maybe we’ll feature here in the future—but we did exemplify the messy, stupid, over-dramtic fun that was college life for most of us in those days. Hats off to that and congrats to WXJM, celebrating 25 years of awesomeness that continues to this day.

Special thanks to Speedwell’s old drummer, Jon Roth for sending this recording on some years back.

Below, the 7″ sleeve interior, with a fearless toddler Sam Uzwack holding a dead squid on the beach. Also, “we would like to thank everyone who deserves it”. Punk as fuck, man. Punk as fuck.

PS—don’t call that phone number. No idea who’ll answer.

I was clearing out my top 40 cassette collection one day during my high school junior year. Nirvana, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, and Pavement albums were taking over my cassette rack space and there was no more room for Richard Marx, Jon Secada, Bobby Brown, and Paula Abdul. I couldn’t believe I used to enjoy listening to some of those as I was chucking those cassettes into a box awaiting its one-way trip to the garage. Only a few albums were allowed to keep their slots with their new “alternative” neighbors. Along with Madonna’s Immaculate Collection and a pair of Michael Jackson albums, George Michael’s Faith wasn’t going anywhere.

The catholic organ intro of the song “Faith” had me curious. Then its catchy melody and classic rock and roll rhythm had me hooked almost instantly. Then the album Faith became the first music I bought with my own money as a sixth grader. It ended up being a solid purchase as a string of singles that followed Faith kept the album in the top 10 for almost an entire year between 1987 and 1988. Luckily my family didn’t have cable television so I was spared the ridiculous video of Michael in his tight Levi’s shaking his behind for most of the song (it lead to some great Dana Carvey SNL impressions of him trying to get Dennis Miller to stare at his behind, while claiming compasses are calibrated to it).

George Michael

Even amongst some great albums that came out in the 90s after trading in my cassettes for CDs, I always had room for George Michael’s Faith amongst his compatriots Oasis, Blur, Pulp, and Radiohead in my CD rack. Even with the repulsive Limp Bizkit cover (which I’m convinced Fred Durst made to make sure people couldn’t stand him), “Faith” always remained on heavy rotation in my stereo system.

Now in the digital age when I can barely keep up with all the new music, “Faith” kind of got buried somewhere in the mess of the 15,000 songs in my iTunes library. It was last week when my wife was playing a Mariah Carey cover of Michael’s “One More Try” that I dug up “Faith” and rest of the album. Once again, “Faith” is on heavy rotation in my playlist. It continues to be my guilty pleasure for almost thirty years despite providing plenty of ammunition for my friends to ridicule me with over the years. And I still continue to stand by the song and album Faith as one of the greatest works of music.