Many of the singer-songwriters who came after him will tell you that Bob Dylan invented their job including his son Jakob. You can add some our best folk and rock troubadours to that list from John Prine to Leonard Cohen. His example transformed the Beatles and the Stones into songwriters...
I first heard about Bob Dylan in Broadside Magazine, a small mimeographed publication founded in 1962. Even with its small circulation, Broadside was noteworthy for introducing topical songwriters like Dylan, Phil Ochs, Eric Andersen, and other Greenwich Village performers to a wider public. A few months later my friend (later...
When 18-year-old Elvis Presley walked into Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue on July 18, 1953, he could not have known he was about to make music history. Phillips was the owner of Sun Records. The recording service was a way for the soon-to-be legendary rock producer...
Before Chess Records became identified with the birth of the Chicago Blues, there was a label in the Windy City, called Black Patti. It was founded by a black producer for Paramount Records named Mayo “Ink” Williams. Williams cut an unusual figure among African-Americans in the early 1900s. He graduated...
EASTPOINTE — Dan and Denise Zieja, owners of Melodies & Memories at 23013 Gratiot Ave., have been in business for 30 years and recently sold an extremely rare copy of Frank Wilson’s “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)” to Third Man Records founder Jack White, of the White Stripes. ...
RICHMOND, Va. -- It was the smooch seen around the world. Sixty years ago this summer, Elvis Presley, and a young woman were captured on film kissing in a Richmond hallway. For decades, Barbara Gray, the woman in the picture, went unidentified, but now she is reflecting on kissing The...
There’s a special neglected part of every vinyl record you own: that space between where the grooves end and where the centre label begins. That area is known as “dead wax,” the place where the physics of the tonearm tracking doesn’t work well and is used instead as a place...
A few months ago, a neighbor died and his adult kids were having an estate sale. I got wind that a slew of his old records were being sold, so I dropped everything and hustled down the sidewalk straight to his collection. It was clear he was a fan of...
Jack Lord was born John Joseph Patrick Ryan on December 30, 1920, and is best known for his starring role as Steve McGarrett in the American television program Hawaii Five-O from 1968 to 1980. Lord also appeared in several classic feature films earlier in his career, among them Man of...
