It Might Get Loud

Director Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary love letter to the electric guitar, “It Might Get Loud,” is loaded with unbelievable moments. First, he manages to shoot Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page’s visit to Headley Grange, the East Hampshire, England, home studio where the band recorded “Led Zeppelin IV.” Page is regal in his puffy, white shirt…

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Home Is Where Your Friends Are

God bless The Nadas. First they ask me to contribute a song to their “Crystalline” project, a compilation of Authentic Records’ artists covering The Nadas in honor of the band’s fifteenth anniversary. So I recorded a bang-up version of “Feel Like Home” with Chris, Jamie and Tony a few weeks ago which Jon Locker (sustaining…

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The 2009 Brickyard 400 (Or, Speedway Nights: The Ballad Of Jimmie Johnson)

First rule of Nascar is you don’t talk about Nascar. It’s not that facts, statistics, cultural judgments, stereotypes or general biographical data aren’t valuable. They are. Of course (like you), I knew nothing of Nascar until last year’s Brickyard 400. This (now seasonal) confab was born of a conversation at my bachelor party and the…

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The Space Between Apollo And The Great Beyond

There’s been a lot of talk about space in the news lately. Monday marked the fortieth anniversary of NASA’s Apollo 11 lunar landing. On Sunday, an amateur Australian astronomer discovered a fresh hole in Jupiter’s atmosphere the size of the Pacific Ocean. And this afternoon, residents from the Ganges River in India to remote islands…

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Rock ‘N Roll Reconsidered

For years now, I’ve tossed around “rock ‘n roll” as an adjective. Sure, it’s a popular musical genre that evolved in the United States after World War II that combines African American rhythms and blues culture, country and gospel. And yeah, its instrumentation is typically guitars, bass and drums (typically a boogie woogie blues rhythm…

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Walter Cronkite (1916–2009)

In the fall if 1989, I sat deep within the blue light of Conestoga High School’s dusty, off-white library single-finger typing my Northwestern University application into one of the school’s ten, well-worn IBM PCs. I don’t remember much about the assignment, or my thesis, or even what made me think I should be a journalism…

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Panic At Funland

There is no panic for a seventeen-year-old like the panic incurred by hoisting and spinning a dozen toddlers eight feet in the air, then leaving them there for so long that they began to cry for their parents and attempt to leap from their seats. That seventeen-year-old was me twenty years ago this month. I…

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Woodgrain

Master Luthier Carlo Greco’s dusty workshop sits two stories and two thousand miles above 48th Street through an unmarked, glass door, one flight up a rickety staircase from an accordion maker. Carlo was the General Foreman of Guild Guitars from 1959-1977. A classical guitar builder from Italy by way of Argentina, he traveled to South…

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A Life Less Ordinary

I’m not sure whether my life is more moving, or that I’m more open to being moved. Either way, I choke up pretty easily these days. A few weeks ago, for example, Abbi and I bought Ethan a grab bag of magic tricks for his sixth birthday. He and Edward sat transfixed, wide-eyed and amazed…

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Michael Jackson: The Memorial

There’s so much to be said about today’s Michael Jackson Memorial. But the chorus of pundits, critics and sycophants is at fever pitch. Three things, then. It was difficult to take in the once-in-a-lifetime event as a fan or even a regular member of American culture. I was in the back row of the MTV…

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