Photo by PETE TROSHAK Life is about the journey not the destination. Last night,  Sixto Rodriguez, one the great Cinderella stories of the modern pop era, performed before a sold out house at the Keswick Theatre. Midway through his set he performed “Sugarman,” the title track to the Oscar winning documentary about  his extraordinary life story.  Superficially, it’s a song about medicating the pain of life with drugs, but ultimately it’s a song about needing to find that one thing in life that you love and enables your to not just tolerate but transcend the dismal grind of the everyday. […]

  PHILLY POST:  In a city that is as impoverished as ours, it is unconscionable to fence off public space and charge the citizenry of Philadelphia the princely sum of $95 a day to stand on land they already own. That is just plain wrong, even if Skrillex is spinning. Before we go any further, let’s go over some numbers. In Philadelphia, a whopping 26.7 percent of the people live below the poverty line—i.e., an annual income of $22,314 for a family of four or $11,139 for an individual—which puts us way out front of Chicago (21.6 percent), Houston (20.6 […]

Not really sure what a ‘houndmouth’ is but this dude’s got one, and not sure how I’ve done without all this time. I could listen to him sing the phone book. Their album comes out June 4th. They just played World Cafe Live and we couldn’t make it, here’s hoping they return some day.

FRESH AIR As the U.S. economy struggles to recover from the financial crash, and Europe is buffeted by a series of banking crises, attention has focused on the presidents and prime ministers who’ve tried to cope with it all. Journalist Neil Irwin, an economics writer for The Washington Post, says there’s an elite group of policymakers who can make enormously important decisions on their own, often deliberating in secret, and in many ways unaccountable to voters. In his new book, The Alchemists, Irwin profiles the central bankers — the men and woman who control the money supply in their national […]

  NEW YORK TIMES: Annette Funicello, who won America’s heart as a 12-year-old in Mickey Mouse ears, captivated adolescent baby boomers in slightly spicy beach movies and later championed people with multiple sclerosis, a disease from which she suffered, died on Monday in Bakersfield, Calif. She was 70. Her death, from complications of the disease, was announced on the Disney Web site. As an adult Ms. Funicello described herself as “the queen of teen,” and millions around her age agreed. Young males enjoyed watching her blossom into womanhood, while females liked her because she was sweet, forthright and plain nice. […]

Photo by PETE TROSHAK Last night those Texan riders on the psychedelic storm known as The Black Angels rolled into town like high plains drifters and took no prisoners. They played a 19- song set drawing from their entire recorded history — from their debut EP to their the just-out and most excellent, Indigo Meadow — for a raucous, grooving capacity crowd at The Union Transfer. The band takes its name from “Black Angel’s Death Song” by The Velvet Underground, of course, and judging from their impressive multi-media stage show they are also students of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. There […]