Musical ramblings from the manager
November will be an interesting month to watch the planets dance across the sky, especially Jupiter and Venus. On November 4, Jupiter will rise in the east just before Venus sets in the west. Both will be bright (magnitude -2.8 and -3.9 respectively) so they won’t be hard to see even though they will […]
Although there is no prohibition on revisiting past topics in these FTV chronicles, every once in a while a story comes up that is too good to leave in the past. With the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald only a year away, I felt compelled to revisit this historical event. In […]
Our good friend Gary Tanin at Daystorm Music in Milwaukee recently sent along Jim Eannelli’s first solo album Just Deserts which was released in both digital and physical formats on September 27, 2024. Yours truly was visiting Eugene, Oregon in late August to catch John Fogerty’s 56th Anniversary Celebration concert when the Just Deserts […]
I mourn the loss of brick and motar bookstores. Book World in downtown Houghton was my favorite because when we would stop by to browse, I always managed to find the newest issue of Classic Rock Magazine or Mojo to keep me in touch with the music scene. When the entire Book World franchise […]
The music world lost an icon when the Godfather of British blues, John Mayall, recently passed away at the age of 90. I can’t say that I knew that much about him, but in his lifetime (November 29, 1933 – July 22, 2024) he saw a lot of musicians pass through his bands. Listening […]
Comets do not always behave as advertised. Sometimes they are not as spectacular as predicted and sometimes they perform beyond what is expected. I will let our friends at Sky Calendar cover what may happen on the cometary front this month: “There’s a chance that Comet C/2023 A3 may surge in brightness around October […]
Here are five names that are included in the above title: Rhea Seddon, Shannon Lucid, Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, and Judy Resnik. If you have an idea who these women are, then you are probably a space junky like me. If none of these names rings a bell, then the sixth name will probably […]
Even if school wasn’t your favorite place to be growing up, I am going to lay odds that you have memories of at least one of your teachers. While attending school was always one of those things we were mandated to do before we were set free into ‘the real world’, there were always […]
Norman Greenbaum was watching TV one night and saw country music legend Porter Wagoner perform an old Gospel song. Norman thought to himself, “Hey, I could do that,” and thus inspired, he proceeded to write his one and only No. 1 hit song Spirit in the Sky. An urban legend went around that Greenbaum […]
On one of the occasions when my mother’s father was staying with us for a few days back in the mid-1960s, I had an interesting discussion with him while playing cribbage. Grandpa was never overly talkative so it took a bit to get him to carry on a conversation. With the CBS news about […]