Old-school news, just in time
by Kevin Burton The greatest songwriters will leave room in their songs so you can climb in, look around and make yourself at home. Just be careful, there is going to be a mirror in there in the place you least expect. You’re going to see yourself. You’re going to be confronted. If …
Continue reading ““If You Could Read My Mind” Is A Masterpiece”
by Kevin Burton All the cool band names are taken. Trust me. Record label names too. When last we gathered, I spun a fictional account based ever so loosely goosely on a true story. It was about a band called the Palindromes that made it big in Bermuda. The true part of …
by Kevin Burton I guess there’s a reason why melody and memory aren’t far apart in the dictionary. They go together like peas and porridge. And, for those who think there is something pejorative in the term “one-hit wonder,” well what about all those no-hit nobodies? We’re all doing our best then, …
by Kevin Burton The love we all had for radio and the vibrant world it brought to us, made it well worth risking the wrath of parents. All of us have stories of hiding that transistor radio under our pillows, trying to be quiet so our parents wouldn’t know we were still awake. …
by Kevin Burton The Band Rush made a musical comment on the state of radio in 1980’s “The Spirit of Radio.” It took me more than 40 years to get wind of it. Though they made reference to the lyrics of two of my heroes, Simon and Garfunkel, in the song, they didn’t …
I think I’m done writing about MTV and Clear Channel for the moment, but I have one more thought on that Buggles tune, “Video Killed The Radio Star.” I raised the question without answering it in my Friday story: “If you could get your favorite top 40 hits, with pictures, moving pictures, wouldn’t that …
by Kevin Burton In the old days we turned on our radios for music, for news, for sports and weather forecasts, and we got all those things. But what we really loved, and what kept us coming back for more, was the way those things were delivered, something that was woven throughout the …
Continue reading “Clear Channel (iHeart) Killed The Radio Star”
by Kevin Burton In J.G. Ballard’s short story “The Sound-Sweep,” the main character is a non-verbal boy who has the job of vacuuming up all the stray sounds in a world without music. He befriends an opera singer living in an abandoned recording studio. The opera singer is destitute, having been displaced from …
by Kevin Burton Elton John turns 76 today. So when I was nine years old listening to Crocodile Rock, he was all of 26. He wasn’t called Sir Elton back then, not hardly. He was a sight to behold. His wild costumes and antics on stage. His huge international hit songs, these …
by Kevin Burton National DJ Day on Jan. 20 sent me rocking down memory lane, recalling a time when deft tuning of a transistor radio could take you to another world. The heyday of radio, as we talk about it now in the past tense, was a whole other American era, an entirely …
Continue reading “Raised On Radio: Petty’s “Last DJ” Banned”
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