Bios and stories about the artists we feature
At the end of my first year working in the Huron Mountain Club kitchen as a busboy turned dishwasher, my stress level was reduced for several reasons. We had survived the busiest part of the summer season short-handed with only two busboys and me pushing the dishes coming out of two dining rooms three meals […]
On those occasions when my students would complain the work I had assigned was boring, I would play the ‘Helen Toivonen Card’. As an educational mentor, they didn’t come much better than Helen. If her students complained, she would agree with them and say, “You are right. This is soooo boring, why don’t you […]
As a space geek, I got accustomed to NASA (the National Aeronautic and Space Administration) using acronyms for just about everything. It only really bugged me when they would use one and not tell you what it meant, YKWIM (You Know What I Mean)? Okay, I am just toying with you a bit because […]
Okay fans of The Doors, complete the lyric begun in the title: Weird scenes . . . inside the gold mine (which comes from The End, the final track of their eponymous debut album). I purposely made this a little too easy so it would serve as a red herring. With my apologies to Jim […]
From the Vaults: Live Shows Revisited Time to dig into the past and reminisce about some of the live concerts I have been privileged to attend. The list is too long to talk about more than a few at a time. The wheels really started rolling when I did an internet search under the […]
By now, no one will be surprised in the slightest when I say, “I did not get to do a recap of the sixteenth edition of the Porcupine Mountain Music Festival in 2020 or 2021.” The idea of events, both major and minor, being canceled was a great disappointment to both fans and musicians. […]
Okay, this is a time when one of these ramblings must open with a disclaimer: This FTV is about the band, Mr. Big, but it started out as a musical trivia question posed to me at a local grocery emporium by Dan Bigge. The original question escapes me, but the answer was ‘Mr. Big’. […]
While recounting the saga of former Eagles guitarist Don Felder (FTV: Don Felder 11-20-19), we discussed the hot musical ‘coasts’ that existed in the 1960s. New York City and California were considered the east and west coast hotbeds of musical activity. Eventually we added Florida to the mix citing names like Felder, Tom Petty, […]
In the space of one week in early November 2021, two albums landed in my mailbox to remind me it was time to do a good old fashioned album review column. Regular readers of this column would no doubt agree the range of topics covered here is ‘eclectic’, but in the early days, the […]
The old saw, ‘there are no accidents,’ came from . . . whom? We all seem to use this phrase but have you ever wondered where it came from? Famous quotes tend to get corrupted, rearranged, and jumbled all the time (see Yogi Bera) with no apologies offered to whomever originated them. Oddly enough, the […]