“And that’s the way it is.” For some reason this phrase used to irk my brother Ron. Any time he heard this phrase, he would snarl, “No, that’s the way you SAY it is.” I am still not sure why this riled Ron up, but coming from Walter Cronkite at the end of his daily […]
A special pre-album release review: April of 2019 will see Happy Growl Records release a 2-CD set by Kenny Baldwin’s band Locate Your Lips. Kenny was a drummer with Tony Williams-like jazz – fusion aspirations, but he also had a regular music gig as the owner of a Milwaukee punk rock club called […]
Looking back over the past fifty years of rock music, a lot of great bands have come and gone. A few of them became gigantically successful and, amazingly, some are still out there rocking. Back when The Who sang, “I hope I die before I get old”, odds are that none of the bands populating […]
How many places have you called ‘home’? This popped in my head when I found my old American Federation of Musicians Local 219 card in one of my high school yearbooks. I was sixteen in 1970 when Mike, Gene, and I applied for membership the summer before we started playing paying band jobs as […]
Is Classic Rock Magazine obsessed with Deep Purple? In an early summer of 2018 issue, they included a bonus CD with the majority of the tracks having some connection to Deep Purple’s own label, Purple Records. This came on the heels of of earlier issues of CRM that focused on the current state of the […]
One must tread carefully when making comments comparing the worth of employees in one profession to those in others. These days, any career involves some form of education, be it on the job, in a vocational program, or professional preparation. For one to truly understand what it takes to work in any field, the song […]
No, I am not talking about the TV show Better Call Saul. I am talking about Saul Hudson. Don’t ask me why, but I have always been fascinated with the real names of actors and musicians who are better known by their stage names. Take Peter Horlebeeke, the singing drummer for one of Michigan’s […]
Greetings Great Lakes fans: I recently made contact with author Jerry Dennis about using a segment of his boot The Living Great Lakes in a future article. Dennis graduated from Northern Michigan University and now lives in Traverse City, MI. When he answered my inquiry (affirmatively I should add), he also mentioned that The Living Great […]
When Mother Nature serves up a particularly violent weather event, it will undoubtedly get the tag ‘100 year’ attached to it. In the summer of 2018, the Houghton / Hancock area experienced a 100 year flood that caused extensive damage all across Houghton County. The only reason the city of Hancock escaped worse damage was […]
Memories are those things that sometimes pop into one’s head in a seemingly random manner, but there is just something about music that tends to trigger very specific memories in my brain. When others refer to ‘the soundtrack of their life’, it makes me think of things that I associate with certain songs. For […]