“He had this boola-boola image that he liked to present in his songs about all the camaraderie and good times of college life, but he wasn’t very well liked. Just the opposite.”

He was part accountant, part private eye, part stumblebum, but his passion was contagious, and he always listened to the B-sides.

Even in a city of characters, he stood out, wrapped in his own language. “You speak Spanish?” a journalist asked him. “No, man,” he said. “I don’t even speak English.”

  In the end, we’re left with the music: those luminous gospel recordings she made as a young teenager, still under her father’s wing; the halting, if promising, cocktail-blues recordings from the early sixties; those earth-shaking singles…

  Sandy Denny (January 6, 1947–April 21, 1978) 1) I just finished the recent Sandy Denny biography. I was very disappointed by it. In the end, she dies. In the bio that I want to read, she’s now living in a cottage in Wales and drinking on…

  One New Year’s Eve, long ago, I was wandering around with friends and noticed a small handwritten sign on the door of Saint Peter’s Church on Lexington Avenue. I went to look—TEN THIRTY P.M.: CECIL TAYLOR FREE CONCERT. It was 10:15. We wa…

  Nobody but nobody communicated joy and pleasure better than Fats Domino. Oh, the Beatles came close, but early on John got mopey, George got petulant, and Ringo simply kept his head down, so that doesn’t count. But for Fats Domino, happine…

  Back when my son Harry was little, I’d take him out early in the morning, usually with Miss Otis in tow, and walk over to Les Deux Gamins. One of those mornings, I got there around eight. They were still setting up inside, but the morning …

  Early that fall, Amy’s cousin JJ was leaving Bertie’s Hair Salon in Fox Point and decided to try the restroom at Schuyler’s Funeral Home next door. Bertie’s facility was cramped, there was a cat box under the sink, and the loo paper …

Pale man in a coat and tie. Ham sandwich. Rye bread. Diet Coke. iPhone. “Cracker. That’s all he says. Cracker. Sometimes he says it as a question: Cracker? Sometimes like he’s answering a question: Cracker! … ”

There was someone in there hunched down on the floor looking for something under the couch. The someone was Sam Shepard.

  I was in London in November of 1978, staying at the Portobello Hotel, famous for having a twenty-four-hour bar in its basement. I came back late, two or two thirty in the morning, and there was Van Morrison in the lobby, sitting on a low …

Years ago, a psychic told me that the top of my head was open, that I had a WELCOME mat where a locked door ought to be, and I should be careful.

Lewiston, who died yesterday, spent his life touring the globe and making field recordings of musicians in Bali, the Himalayas, Tibet, and elsewhere.

Cullman, who collects records from all the nations of the world, recalls an especially arduous journey to track down 45s from Albania.

They questioned some of the scholarship kids first, boys with cheap-cut shirts and shabby jackets—the ones who tied their neckties as if they meant it.

My first girlfriend grew up in St. Louis and, as a young girl, would sneak over to Chuck Berry’s house and sit by his guitar-shaped swimming pool.

In 1973, I took a brief sabbatical from college to study in Switzerland at the University of the New World. I still have the small red course catalog somewhere. It was a school started by visionary hustler Al de Grazia, who had been a professor at Br…

George Martin, 1926–2016.In the summer of 1971, I got a lift to Marblehead, Massachusetts, to audition for George Martin. It wasn’t my idea. I wasn’t ready; musically I was barely ambulatory, but my friend Dick Shapiro had dropped out of school a…

Remembering Giorgio Gomelsky, 1934–2016.I met Giorgio through Robert Fripp in 1980. He thought Giorgio should work with me on the single my band was getting set to record. At the time, Giorgio was living in the loft that housed Squat Theatre, an East…

There was a time when I didn’t know Gordon Bishop, but that time’s not worth talking about.I met Gordon in his shop, Tropics, sometime in the early eighties. I’d been walking through Soho and noticed a store I hadn’t seen before. Inside was …

This was not quite what I’d expected. I’d come to the psych wing of Butler Hospital, in Providence, Rhode Island, to present a music seminar or, more properly, a sing-along, as part of a community service requirement for my college. This was in …

My father bought me a Swiss watch when I was seven. The strap was too big and needed adjusting, but when I could finally put it on, I felt a surge of electricity pulse through me, as if I’d just been shackled to time’s wrist. No matter what I did…

How do you say good-bye to Lou Reed? For many of us, he’s been unavoidable, not just as a musical touchstone but as a cranky éminence grise: walking his dog, sitting in cafés with Laurie Anderson and berating waitresses (“Oh, c’mon, you know h…

More and more, I find that some of the people I remember best were bit players in my life, ones who were on the edge of my consciousness but who registered more deeply than I knew at the time: the pretty singer who lived on the seventh floor and who …

Lillian Roxon died forty years ago this August. Lillian was an Australian journalist who moved to New York in the late 1950s to cover popular culture for the Sydney Morning Herald and who fell madly in love with the city and with the sixties rock …

We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2012 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year! Just past Tandy Crafts, a dark, unlovely store on the corner of Thirteenth and Sixth Ave, there was a do…

I saw Ravi Shankar at Carnegie Hall in 1966 or 1967. Because of the Beatles, of course. And I learned so much about music from that one concert. Not that the lesson stayed with me; it wasn’t like that. But it set me up for hearing music in a differ…

A young Mitt Romney type in J. Crew stood on the corner of Christopher and Hudson streets, thermos in hand, offering passersby cups of coffee, two dollars a cup. People just gave him looks. Mostly, people were neighborly. Hudson Bagels handed out da…

There was a fascinating if incomplete musing on the New Yorker website this week regarding Neil Young’s insularity and on the incomprehensible idea that he never reads. It seemed strange that someone who doesn't read would decide to write a book,…

On the rare occasions when Georges Alain is asked to list his occupation, he simply writes, “Dilettante.” Years ago, he was more comfortable describing his occupation as “surrealist,” but for as long as I’ve known him, more than twenty year…