Bios and stories about the artists we feature
Remember Rodney Dangerfield’s most famous catch phrase? Rodney built entire routines around the phrase, “I don’t get no respect.” Catching up with guitarist Brad Whitford on the eve of Aerosmith’s ‘Peace Out’ world tour, the phrase kept popping into my head. I am not saying Whitford is disrespected by his bandmates. No, the negative […]
Alrighty then. What do Britney Spears, Max Martin, Backstreet Boys, Denniz PoP, Kelly Clarkson, and N’Sync have in common? If you ignored my imaginative spelling in the title (done as an homage to Mr. PoP), then you probably already guessed ‘hits’ as in ‘hit records’. I could have tried to get you off track by […]
Friday October 13, 2023 turned out to be our lucky day. Like the visit paid to us by John Carlisle and Ryan Garza from the Detroit Free Press back in April of 2023, we weren’t really at liberty to say much about NBC Nightly News visiting WOAS until our story aired. The Freep guys […]
Holly Knight’s rise from a wanna-be rock musician to a respected songwriter was addressed in this space in FTV: Holly the Songsmith (11-8-23). Telling her story only took us up to the first major hit she and her publisher, Mike Chapman, wrote for Pat Benatar in 1983, Love is a Battlefield. Digging further into […]
Holly Erlander was a struggling musician trying to catch a break with her band Siren. The New York City music scene, much like its counterpart in Los Angeles, had a lot of bands trying to get noticed so her story isn’t exactly unique for the late 1970s. Holly had a knack for getting to […]
There are bands that simply play music. While some engage with their audiences, others are what are referred to as ‘shoegazers’. ‘SGs’ are bands that don’t make eye contact or go out of their way to make small talk with their fans – they just play. Rick Wakeman is a peg that does not […]
On June 3, 1964, The Beatles had a full schedule ahead of them. They were to spend the morning posing for a photographer from The Saturday Evening Post before they did an afternoon and evening recording session at EMI Studios. The next day, they would fly off to begin their first ever world tour […]
Back in May of 2023, we covered the origins of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band (5-3-23) a month before I had the opportunity to see the current version of the band in Eugene, Oregon. This FTV article explained how a thirty-year old promoter named David Fishof proposed an idea to Ringo. In 1989, Fishof asked […]
The disclaimer: I like music. I will listen to any type of music but there are some genres I can take or leave. I have listened to enough Punk rock, Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, and hard core metal bands like Slipknot to know they aren’t my cup of tea. I understand why legions of […]
As my 70th birthday crept up on me in the fall of 2023, I started thinking about how time passes between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next. My 60 years spent as an student in public school (K-12), college (5 years including grad school) and teaching (43 years in […]