Brian Jones performs w/ The Rolling Stones @ Atlantic City 1966 EDITOR’S NOTE: Sad, sad news. We received word on Sunday that Tom Sheehy, aka The Colonel — longtime Philly music publicist/scenester/historian, storied music biz vet, barroom philosopher, perennial guest list fixture, late-blooming recipient of a P.H.D. in 20th Century American History from Penn, colonel in the ‘MMaRmy, and frequent Phawker contributor — passed away this weekend. This week we will honor his memory by re-posting some of his greatest Phawker hits. Today we’re re-posting The Colonel’s 2011 remembrance of seeing The Rolling Stones at the Steel Pier in Atlantic […]
THE COLONEL REMEMBERS: Pictures Of Lily Philly
EDITOR’S NOTE: Sad, sad news. We received word on Sunday that Tom Sheehy, aka The Colonel — longtime Philly music publicist/scenester/historian, storied music biz vet, barroom philosopher, perennial guest list fixture, late-blooming recipient of a P.H.D. in 20th Century American History from Penn, colonel in the ‘MMaRmy, and frequent Phawker contributor — passed away this weekend. This week we will honor his memory by re-posting some of his greatest Phawker hits. Today we’re re-posting The Colonel’s 2011 remembrance of (almost) seeing The Who and The Pink Floyd at JFK Stadium in 1968. MORE BY COLONEL TOM SHEEHY If you think […]
THE COLONEL REMEMBERS: The Beatles At JFK
[Photos of The Beatles backstage at JFK by BOB BONIS courtesy of NFAgallery.com] EDITOR’S NOTE: Sad, sad news. We received word on Sunday that Tom Sheehy, aka The Colonel — longtime Philly music publicist/scenester/historian, storied music biz vet, barroom philosopher, perennial guest list fixture, late-blooming recipient of a Ph.D. in 20th Century American History from Penn, colonel in the ‘MMaRmy, and frequent Phawker contributor — passed away this weekend. This week we will honor his memory by re-posting some of his greatest Phawker hits. Today we’re re-posting The Colonel’s 2011 remembrance of seeing The Beatles at JFK in 1966. MORE […]
BILLY BRAGG: There Is Power In A Union
BILLY BRAGG: We’ve been experiencing what we refer to as ‘Andy Warhol Weather’ here today: fifteen minutes of rain, fifteen minutes of sun, fifteen minutes of hail etc etc. As a result, I couldn’t take my guitar amp out onto the rubble mound this week for the #ClapForNHS #ClapForCarers #ClapForKeyWorkers so I set up in the old garage in case the rain came again. As it’s technically already May 1st — International Workers Day – in some parts of the world, I thought I’d play the riff from There is Power in a Union this week as a salute to […]
THE COLONEL REMEMBERS: Me & Keef
EDITOR’S NOTE: Sad, sad news. We received word today that Tom Sheehy, aka The Colonel — longtime Philly music publicist/scenester/historian, storied music biz vet, barroom philosopher, perennial guest list fixture, late-blooming recipient of a Ph.D. in 20th Century American History from Penn, colonel in the ‘MMaRmy, and frequent Phawker contributor — passed away this weekend. This week we will honor his memory by re-posting some of his greatest Phawker hits. We begin with his beloved Rolling Stones and the time he snuck into Keith Richards hotel room in New York in 1969. We will also be re-posting his remembrances of […]
MT VENGEANCE: May Day
PREVIOUSLY: The ’90s were a helluva drug. You really had to be there, kid, but suffice it to say it was 10 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity, a pot in every chicken, 2.5 SUVs in every garage, a Clinton was president and Donald Trump ran beauty contests instead of the free world. In the ’90s, the Internet went public and we all become tech stock billionaires overnight — all of us — selling dog bones over the World Wide Web, which was what we called the Interwebs back then, as was the style of the day. Good. Times. Music […]
BOOKS: The Gospel According To Saint Nick
VICE: It felt like an extravagant gift from my past self when Stranger Than Kindness showed up in the mail. It’s an odd and substantial object—part art book, part memoir, part jigsaw artifact—by and about Nick Cave, designed to complement an exhibit about his work at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen. (The exhibit is described by the curators as eight rooms devoted to “a spatial, multi-sensory exploration of his many real and imagined universes.”) Like everything else, the exhibition is now indefinitely postponed, but the book more than stands on its own. Cave, who fled Australia for London and […]
THE POGOS: Fuck Shit Up
Delco skatepunk at its finest. RELATED: The Pogos
WIRE FROM THE BUNKER: Meet Bob Neuwirth
BY JONATHAN HOULON I figured I’d shoot a few Wires from the Bunker out to you, my loyal and multitudinous Phawker readers. We’re hunkered down here in the Houlon house. Practicing pop and lock and any other dance moves we can get our feet on. We’ll be ready whenever the winds shift. 45’s been talking about coming back with a bang. Of course, Saint Strummer said: It’s not Christmas time. It’s Armageddon Time. And He was pretty astute. No matter. When the doors open, the Houlons’ll be ready to pop, lock, and ease on down the road. But while you’ve […]
Bob Dylan Press Conference San Francisco 1965
ROLLING STONE: When Bob Dylan‘s five concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area were scheduled in December 1965, the idea was proposed that he hold a press conference in the studios of KQED, the educational television station. Dylan accepted and flew out a day early to make it. He arrived early for the press conference accompanied by Robbie Robertson and several other members of his band, drank tea in the KQED office and insisted that he was ready to talk about “anything you want to talk about.” His only request was that he be able to leave at 3 p.m. […]
NEIL NATHAN: Some Humans Ain’t Human
RIP John Prine – Some Humans Ain’t Human by Neil Nathan “I feel blessed to have seen John Prine on his last tour for The Tree of Forgiveness record. It was a joy to witness him dancing around, happy as a clam, doing what he loved. Some Humans Ain’t Human encapsulates a lot of what I love about John Prine songs, hard truths spoken plainly, laced with that uniquely dark sense of humor, which makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time. He also has a gift for making the personal political and vice versa. In the […]
RIP: Eric Taylor, A Folksinger’s Folksinger
BY JONATHAN HOULON FOLK MUSIC EDITOR In the midst of all of “this,” it would be a shame for the recent death of one of America’s best songwriters to come out of Texas or really anywhere to go unnoticed. And other than a wonderful obit in the NYT by Bill Friskics-Warren, it appears to have. I first caught up with Eric Taylor in a Quaker meeting house in Phoenixville, PA. I’d been hearing about him for years: Vietnam vet, ex-junkie, second wife was Nanci Griffith, came out of the same Houston folk scene of the late 60s/early 70s that produced […]
GOD SAVE JOHN PRINE: Please Lord, We Don’t Ask For Much (In Fact We’ve Never Asked For Anything)
EDITOR’S NOTE: John Prine passed away today of complications from Covid19. So we’re re-posting Jonathan Houlon’s tribute penned a week ago upon the news that Prine had contracted Covid19 and was in the ICU on a ventilator. Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose. Goddamn. BY JONATHAN HOULON If you haven’t heard, sad news from Nashville: John Prine, folksinger-songwriter extraordinaire and a goddamn national treasure, is on a ventilator with Covid-19 symptoms. If anyone can beat this thing, it’s Prine — he’s proven to be pretty much un-killable. He’s already stood up to cancer. Twice! One of his bouts and […]