As a songwriter I hear “Go! Susanna” as one of the most fun songs a band could ever do. The song is taken from my novel, The Energy Caper, or Nixon in the Sky With Diamonds, where it is 1971, in Paris. A 24 year-old American student, working as a go-go dancer under
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“It’s OK” was written in the early 1990’s, but it was too complex for me to do well (barre chords). It only came together late last year when I decided to really try to improve my guitar chops. I went back to my “incomplete” files and this one was at the top of the
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Most of my songs take months or years to write, but this one came together at super speed. One day I was driving home when the DJ announced that it was the fifth anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination and then played an hour’s worth of Lennon songs as a tribute. I was struck by how
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“One of These Days,” by Scotty and the Skeptics. Here is a major hit for a female country singer or a band like the Drive by Truckers. My friend and business partner, the late, great, Keith Allen, plays guitar, with Marcus Webster on drums, Michael Rivinius on bass, and Phil Hersch engineering and playing
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Recently there was another mass murder, this time at a Florida high school where a white-supremacist killed seventeen people. Once again, the NRA and the GOP are blaming “mental health” as the reason. I wrote about the origins of this song twice before on these pages, but this time I’ve changed the title from “Blow
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It looks like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the new commander in the War on Drugs, is back in the business of stomping out the evil weed rather than the opioid epidemic. I’ve been very interested in the subject since my college days in the 1960s, and my first novel is based on the premise that
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