I hate figures of speech. Stupid things… always over-complicating an otherwise simple message. Metaphor is a pain in the backside. Simile is like a relative who never knows when to shut up. Alliteration stupidly substitutes style for substance. Hyperbole is the worst thing ever invented by mankind. Rhetorical questions — who needs ‘em? And Apostrophe,...
There was a time when the electric organ was as essential to the American soap opera as adultery or amnesia. Of course those days are long gone now. On today’s daytime drama (itself an endangered species!), you’re as likely to see a jackalope scamper across Victor Newman’s furrowed brow as hear a Hammond organ. Nowadays,...
Which came first: the Sentence or the Song? Nowadays, some scientists say the latter. In 1998, scientists Mario Vaneechoutte and John R. Skoyles theorized that man’s propensity for music is not merely the entertaining but trivial offshoot of his biologically programmed ability to speak, but rather the other way around — that is, our primitive...
Whether he was Lee Brown, Ram Singh or Babs Gonzales, he was one of jazz’s most colorful characters. Learn more about scatmaster Babs Gonzales on this episode of NOTES.
Buddy, pull yourself together. You think you got it bad? Listen — you don’t know even know what B-A-D really spells. I hear you moaning about your mortgage… whining about the wife… grousing over the cost of gas. What’s that sound I hear? That’s the world’s smallest violin. You want to talk about a big...
The travails of the working class have often proven fruitful territory for American pop music. In 1962, for instance, Roy Orbison lamented “Workin’ for the Man.” Twenty-one years later, Donna Summer scored big with “She Works Hard for the Money,” her paean to the service employee. And while Lee Dorsey sweated his ya-ya off “Working...
Was there ever an artist more contradictory than Shel Silverstein? Endowed equally with child-like whimsy and adult perversity, Silverstein existed — thrived, even — in two very different worlds. In this episode of NOTES, we look back at the cartoonist, songwriter and performer who gave us Lucy Jordan, the Unicorn, Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, the Missing...
Let us sing the praises of the ladies of rockabilly! Let us salute the party dolls and whistle bait who scandalized while they harmonized. Let us lift a glass to the rock-bopping babies and the fujiyama mamas who moaned, hiccuped, howled and caterwauled, proving to a pre-feminist world that rock n’ roll was an equal...
This is the story of two friends, Sam and Frank. Like all chums, Sam and Frank offered one another succor and support. They kidded. They cajoled. If Frank needed a favor, he could count on his old pal Sam. If Sam was in a pinch, Frank bent over backwards to help. And to the world...
He rose from the ranks of the late ’60s folk scene to top America’s pop charts in 1970 with a nine-minute musical treatise on the history of popular music after the death of Buddy Holly, and a love epistle to a schizophrenic painter. Learn more about singer-songwriter Don McLean.
He set the world of jazz on fire with his incendiary guitar — but nearly died in a fiery blaze when he was young. The doctors said he’d never play again. They were wrong. Learn how this accident helped shape the music of one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
All roads lead to Rome, or so goes the old saying. But in the disparate domains of music, theatre and literature, all roads lead to Ron Dante. Few people can claim to have scored Top 40 hits as a member of three different bands… won multiple Tony Awards for producing top-notch Broadway fare like AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’...
