1970-1979

http://youtu.be/Qn85BeeiwZo The world press, though entirely cynical nonetheless runs the stories and interviews. Like The Beatles before them, John and Yoko prepare to invade America, to carry their message to the heart of the beast. It is then that John Lennon’s visa is denied. The Ono / Lennons keep at it. They fly to Canada […]

“Give Peace a Chance” is released on July 7, 1969. In November of that year John returns his medal honoring him as a “Member of the (Order of the) British Empire” (M.B.E.) to “protest Britain’s involvement in Biafra and support of America in Vietnam.” He also says that he returns the M.B.E. to protest “Cold […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwNg4lHFj7I&feature=youtube_gdata_player This video is a link from You Tube. All copyrights remain with the original copyright holders.

They have a new record out: Exile on Main Street, a great title for the new Rolling Stones: the once-ragged band of London’s cold-water flats are now English tax refugees living on France’s Côte d’Azur. Stories of Bill Wyman lunching with Marc Chagall appear in the press. The gaunt outlaw of rock ‘n’ roll, Keith […]

I met Boz in London where Glyn Johns was producing Boz’s second album. I remembered Boz tearing at his hair, a man almost finished recording his record, most of the tracks completed, without a single lyric written. I remember Boz, a great cook, standing over a stove in Pacific Heights, San Francisco, pouring wine into […]

The Washington Post December 2, 1979 pg G1 The Mysterious Connections of John Ellsworth IT WAS AT a White House Christmas party in 1977 that First Lady Rosalynn Carter, standing beside the holly-decked mantle in the State Dining Room, was first introduced to a 300-pound, self-proclaimed Santa Claus named John Ellsworth….felon, forger and government informer […]

http://youtu.be/tT7IKoleDfA When it was announced that The Beatles were breaking up, it caused a great sadness to a great many people. As only music can (especially our age of music), The Beatles’ songs had marked the times through which we had passed. The Beatles had written and performed so many songs that there was always […]

To quote Joan Baez’s wonderful line from Diamonds and Rust about her time with Bob Dylan in the early 60s (“Speaking strictly for me / We both could have died then and there”), speaking strictly for myself, it was as if all of music (as “music” then meant to us, the explosion of talent, and […]

To the guard at the gate, I gave my name, and then drove into the Malibu Colony and found Linda Ronstadt’s white-shingled, green-shuttered new home. The windows facing the ocean were open and the breeze blew through. Linda kept giggling embarrassedly, excited by her purchase. “It cost so much,” she’d say. Then it was as […]

With an uncanny facility to tantalize and moralize at the same time, Frey and Henley described the insatiable appetites that drew so many of us into one kind of trouble or another. “What kind of love have you got?” they asked of a favorite character of theirs, a young woman just starting to worry about […]