On Thursday night, the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in New York City hosted a Lone Star Cafe reunion. According to the venue’s website: “The Lone Star Cafe, the brainchild of Mort Cooperman, was THE joint in New York City […]
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It wasn’t Atlantis, but the most magical moment of Donovan’s musical career did occur “way down by the ocean.” On a noisy, congested little island filled with taxi cabs near the Atlantic Ocean on Oct. 17, 1969, Donovan sang his […]
It’s hard to say how music gets inside us. It often happens in a sudden childhood experience of discovery, like a flash of enlightenment. For Irish immigrant and veteran singer-songwriter John Byrne, it came in his hometown of Dublin, Ireland, […]
By now, the story is familiar: angry folk music purists were incensed at Bob Dylan, whom they had begun to revere as an eccentric, but ingenious, songwriter. Like a Messianic figure, he had come out of nowhere to New York […]
The more I listen to Jimmy LaFave’s music, the more I think the recognition he has received doesn’t come close to being commensurate with his talent. Two releases of vintage material—both arriving shortly after the terrific new The Night Tribe—provide […]
Rod MacDonald says the first concert he attended – Ray Charles & His Orchestra at The Bushnell in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1963 – was the best one he has seen. “I suppose the ones that really open your eyes leave […]
When Bob Dylan appeared with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival, in July of 1965, he virtually stopped the folk revival of the 1950s and ‘60s in its tracks and awakened folkie youth culture to the joys of […]
Why cover songs? Earlier this year, Bob Dylan said, in his now famous MusiCares speech, “Big Bill Broonzy had a song called ‘Key to the Highway’… I sang that a lot. If you sing that a lot, you just might write […]
Reading Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan & the Night that Split the Sixties (Dey Street/Harper-Collins Publishers, 2015) reproduces in wonderful, eye-opening detail the environment of the Newport Folk Festival during July of 1965, when Bob Dylan appeared onstage on […]
As Van Morrison strode onto the stage carrying his saxophone at Forest Hills Stadium in New York City June 19, numerous memories came to my mind. There were thoughts of many incredible concerts I saw Morrison perform at other venues through […]
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