It’s a shame Bob Burns didn’t live to enjoy the full financial fruits of his tenure as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s original drummer. Burns left the band in 1974 and spent the rest of his life in obscurity before his death in 2015 at the age of 64.
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An interesting email from Amazon/Kindle Direct Publishing yesterday, regarding my beloved memoir Strange Days: The Adventures of a Grumpy Rock ‘n’ Roll Journalist in Los Angeles:
Congratulations!
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Back in the 1990s, the wry joke among music fans was that our CD acquisitions were mostly forced repurchases of our old LPs and cassettes.
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Jim Moginie didn’t know about his Irish heritage until he was in his late 40s and managed to track down his birth parents in suburban Australia.
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How many roads must a man walk down before his life gets turned into a deluge of movies and TV series? In an ideal world, every simple twist of Bob Dylan’s momentous life would have yielded some sort of screen adaptation by now, rendering Star Wars a cottage industry by comparison.
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HOLLYWOOD GODFATHER: THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF BILLY WILKERSON
By W.R. Wilkerson III
Chicago Review Press; $15.99 on Kindle at Amazon.
Billy Wilkerson was the founder of the Hollywood Reporter, a movie trade publication based in Los Angeles.
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Lindsey Buckingham smiled wistfully as he stroked Stevie Nicks’ right breast. Ahh, sweet youth, he might have been thinking as he gazed at Stevie’s innocent doe-eyed visage.
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Wayne Kramer enjoyed a bit of a career renaissance in the mid-1990s, recording three solo albums in as many years. I saw the intrepid punk rocker and political activist five times during this period, all at small Los Angeles venues that are long gone.
Read moreI’m not sure if it’s been reported widely before, but Pete Townshend recently revealed that he used to bump into Mick Jagger’s dad around London and that Joe Jagger suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.
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Steve Cropper celebrates his 82nd birthday next month with a little help from his friends. Translation: The beloved Booker T. & the MGs guitarist’s first solo album, 1969’s With A Little Help From My Friends, is being reissued with bonus tracks on October 13.
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