A little over a year after “the day the music died” — when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper were killed in a plane crash — Eddie Cochran met a similarly violent fate on April 17, 1960, dealing another critical blow to the fledgling rock ‘n’ roll genre.
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This is an unscheduled break from my rock ‘n’ roll reporting to mark the centenary of the execution of English nurse Edith Cavell during World War I.
Read moreFree is one of my favorite words, and Los Lobos are one of my favorite bands. Combine these two elements, and I made sure I was in the front row for the quasi-homecoming show by East L.A.’s
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I’m a terrible person . . . to take on vacation.
You might want to lounge on the beach, or go shopping or eating. I just want to visit celebrity graves and miscellaneous death sites.
Read moreIt all started for George Harrison at No. 12 Arnold Grove in Liverpool, in 1943. He lived here until the age of 5 with his parents and three older siblings.
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Back in 1985 when I was in my last year at boarding school and filled with the usual teen anxieties, one of my greatest fears was that the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” would pass without appropriate recognition.
Read moreMost days I wake up about 10 a.m., and it soon dawns on me that I have nothing to do until bedtime. Such are the perils of enforced early retirement.
Read moreLally Stott would have been 75 in 2020. “Who’s Lally Stott?” you ask. Harold “Lally” Stott was an English singer/songwriter whose best-known creation vied with “Maggie May,” “My Sweet Lord” and “Brown Sugar” as one of the biggest songs of 1971.
Read moreI am big in Brazil. Well, I was for about a day or so after Folha De São Paulo, the biggest paper in the biggest city in the Americas, published a piece about Strange Days on Jan.
Read moreStrange Days: The Adventures of a Grumpy Rock ‘n’ Roll Journalist in Los Angeles was nominated in the nonfiction book category of the L.A. Press Club’s 7th annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards.
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