The five hardest words Steve Earle ever had to say came when he had to open his Hardcore Troubadour Radio show in the summer of 2020. Earle had just received the news that his son had tragically passed away and it took everything within him to begin the show and be able to say, “Justin […]
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The Cowsills Hope We Avoid a “Nuclear Winter” Presidents are usually measured and nuanced when it comes to foreign policy. But President Biden sent shivers around the world when he spoke about the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons, adding that not once the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early Sixties had we come close […]
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“Do you know about Will?” Peter Cooper leaned over and looked at me with a warm smile and his soft spoken South Carolinian accent. His eyes lit up as he was prone to do when he was about to tell a story. Cooper was about to go onstage with his friends Eric Brace and Thomm […]
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Christine McVie Like many baby boomers, I’ve suffered from a sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome resulting from hearing some of my favorite songs being used to hawk products. I trace it back to Carly Simon’s use of “Anticipation” in a ketchup commercial. I think I lost it when Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours era drama “Go Your […]
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The sparse stage at the Barns at Wolf Trap had just two guitars, a grand piano and a stand for a drink. But when J.D. Souther stepped in front of the three hundred plus people gathered in two onetime barns barn turned intimate theater, he only carried a small palm size notebook with cues to […]
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The idea was to wait for the Troubadour bar to close, drive to Joshua Tree National Park in the middle of the night and shoot what happened in the desert. Armed with a bag of peyote buttons, trail mix, bottles of tequila and water and blankets, a fledgling band called Eagles joined the team […]
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(The Indigo Girls, Larry Campbell and Brandi Carlile) As Marty Stuart once said of the Ryman Auditorium, you can hear music in the rafters and you can feel the spirit of country music running through the building. As legend has it, Bill Monroe met Hank Williams in the Ryman dressing room and the two shook […]
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Southside Johnny — at Stone Pony in Asbury Park, NJ Labor Day typically marks the end of summer but some holdouts are reluctant to declare it formally over until the calendar turns on the 21st. At the Stone Pony Summer Stage, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes did their best to try and keep the […]
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Springsteen & Us In order to make sense of the present, sometimes you have to go back to the past. When The Rolling Stones wanted to charge eight dollars for their show at the Los Angeles Forum in 1969, there was considerable outrage and Rolling Stone ran the headline “The Rolling Stones Impose High Ticket […]
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When Americana Highways columnist Bill Bentley was a fledgling concert booker back in the early Eighties, he slotted an aspiring young singer named Dwight Yoakam to open up for Billy Joe Shaver. Bentley had to work some magic as Shaver, who had written virtually all of Waylon Jennings’ Honky Tonk Heroes, insisted his band back […]
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