I can’t remember when we heard tickets were going on sale for The River tour, but it must have been October 1980. I was a freshman at SUNY-Buffalo, a recent convert to the cult of Bruce Springsteen (starting right after Darkness on the Edge of Town, which was, at that...

45’s are the chickens of the audio world. There is no format so abused. Most used LPs I run across are salvageable. A thorough cleaning renders them playable. Singles are another thing entirely. They are nearly always out of sleeves, stacked on each other, strewn upon...

Kristen Wiig was completely wasted in The Martian. Why was she even in it? To provide a few seconds worth of reaction shots? They could have gotten a nobody for that role. It wasn’t that she was bad in the movie, but her brief and pointless scenes left me wanting more...

I don’t think of myself as a big David Bowie fan. The 15 albums, CDs and tapes I own may indicate otherwise, but when every record purchase was dear, Bowie was never high on my list. By 1980, I owned two albums – Changesone and Scary Monsters. In college I had friends...

There are a bunch of albums that I don’t recall getting rid of, but somehow disappeared by the late 1970’s – The Archies, The Osmonds, The Partridge Family and the first All in the Family record. I was probably embarrassed by having them, not realizing that, in time, t...

The new Star Wars movie is the latest in the “don’t talk about it” saga that began, in large measure, with social media. Sure, Hitchcock and others used advertising to swear people to secrecy, but, in practice, the only way to share what you knew back then was through...

1971 was the last year my mother threw out my cards. Now this isn’t one of those “my mother threw out my cards without telling me” stories. I was a willing accomplice. She’d ask me after every year whether I wanted that year’s haul, and I’d say no.

It’s weird to me tha...

The thing I love (loved would be more appropriate) about Amy Winehouse was that she was out of time. She would sing like 1950’s Sarah Vaughan, but about desperate modern women nearing 30, looking to get fucked (“Fuck Me Pumps”) or cheating on her boyfriend, but not rea...

I used to make the point with great frequency that Karen’s shopping habits were different than mine. Her clothes, shoes, dishes, whatever was on her hit list, were qualitatively different than what I bought. My records, cards, stereo equipment had value, meaning moneta...