Imagine 11,000 screaming fans, the majority of them girls between the ages of 13 and 17, crammed into a ballroom with a legal capacity of just 2,500.  This crowd would be the equivalent of the audience at the much larger Milwaukee Arena packed into a space the size of a large high school gymnasium on […]

      As far back as I can remember, our family had pickup trucks.  I learned to drive on our camp beater truck that was old enough (circa 1949) that it sported a standard shift on the column,  a key that was on and off only, and the starter footswitch was on the floor near the […]

      Ronnie Montrose died in 2012 after a prolonged struggle with prostate cancer and that is what music fans everywhere were led to believe.  Later reports indicated that he had taken his own life, but in that he had resolved to battled the disease without chemotherapy or invasive procedures,  one undoubtedly led to the other. […]

      It is the summer of 1967.   Herman’s Hermits and The Who are touring the United States.  Which band is the opener and which is the headliner?  This is a trick question because technically, the opening band was The Blues Magoos with The Who second on the bill and Peter Noones’ lightweight pop band Herman’s […]

  Have you had a family grill out lately?  If you did, it was probably on a gas grill or a good old fashioned charcoal grill, which is my personal favorite.  Either way, we all owe a debt of thanks to Henry Ford for kick starting this little piece of Americana tradition.  When Ford’s Kingsford, Michigan […]

      As the pitchman for the XPRIZE Foundation, Peter Diamandis knew he had his work cut out for him when Dr. Yes (Richard Branson) said ‘no’ when asked to become a sponsor of the $10 million dollar XPRIZE.  Peter drew up a list of people with deep pockets and began a six year courtship of […]

      If the title above makes you think of the iconic line in The Wizard of Oz (Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!), then your mind must work a lot like mine.  When I hear certain strings of words together, my brain has a tendency to attach them to the rhythm of some song […]

    Joan Baez was a big part of the 1960s and played a major role in defining the entire protest singer genre.  I didn’t like her.  I liked Donovan, Dylan and Arlo Guthrie, all artists who were supporting causes and writing songs very similar to Baez, but I could never quite get past her often prickly, […]

    In the fall of 2016, we spent two editions of FTV discussing the end – as in “when a band comes to an end” and not “The End of the world” (9-28-16 and 10-5-16 if you care to backtrack a little).  A couple of months ago, we spent sometime talking about the sudden end, and […]

      Part one of this column began when I was ruminating about things that get passed along to graduates by various commencement speakers.  Somehow things kind of swerved into a discussion of  how bullying each other has changed since I was in junior high those many eons ago.  Being mean to each other with pencil […]