PREVIOUSLY: Fred Willard Was The Obi-Wan Kenobi Of White Male Cluelessness
WIRE FROM THE BUNKER: Meet Howard Tate
Art by NIALL MCCORMACK BY JONATHAN HOULON This week’s Wire concerns Philadelphia’s own late great R&B legend, Howard Tate. I’ll send this one out to another late great Philadelphian, my dear friend Peter Stone Brown who passed away earlier this year. Peter, of course, was known both as a formidable songwriter and as one of the world’s leading “Dylanologists” as recognized in David Kinney’s book of the same name. Kinney tells a wonderful story about how Peter, as a teenager, mowed the words “Fuck You” into his parents’ lawn in Millburn, New Jersey where he grew up. They don’t make […]
REST IN POWER: Comedian Fred Willard Was The Obi-Wan Kenobi Of White Male Cluelessness
Fred Willard as Elvis Presley on SNL circa 1978 NEW YORK TIMES: Fred Willard, the Emmy Award-nominated comic actor best known for his scene-stealing roles in Christopher Guest’s improvised ensemble film comedies like “Best in Show” and “Waiting for Guffman” and on sitcoms like “Modern Family” and “Everybody Loves Raymond,” died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86. His death was confirmed by his agent, Mike Eisenstadt. No specific cause was given. Mr. Willard made an art of playing characters who, as The New Yorker once noted, are “gloriously out of their depth.” There was Buck […]
NPR 4 THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR: John Barry, author of the 2004 book, The Great Influenza, draws parallels between today’s pandemic and the flu of 1918. In both cases, he says, “the outbreak was trivialized for a long time.” MORE DISCOVERY MEDICINE: The great influenza pandemic began in 1918 and ended in 1920. Worldwide, the virus itself caused an estimated 20 to 100 million deaths most of which occurred between September 1918 and early 1919. In the U.S., with about 105 million people at the time, the virus killed approximately 675,000. Conventionally influenza causes its mortality among the elderly and infants due to their […]
35 YEARS AGO: ‘The Roof Is On Fire/We Don’t Need No Water Let The Motherf*ckers Burn’
IMMORTAL TRUTHZ: On 13 May 1985, Philadelphia police bombed the MOVE compound, killing 11 people, including five children, and destroying an entire neighbourhood which left more than 250 people homeless. The counter-cultural group lived communally and had a history of violent encounters with police. The raid stands as the only aerial bombing carried out by police on US soil. MOVE ~ a mostly black, radical organisation that believed in shedding technology and “man-made law” in favour of “natural law”. After years of antagonism with police, Move had fortified a rowhome on Osage Avenue as their headquarters. They boarded up walls, […]
ISOLATION DRILLS: Socially Distant Fest
BY VANESSA GOMEZ PEREYRA Back in my day, we would gather in groups of ten and more, with bare faces and no hand sanitizer in sight. Usually, it was someone’s cramped, stained-carpet living room where a friend’s beloved band would play. The sound wasn’t amazing, and the new guitar player could never tune his guitar quite right, but who cared — we were gathered. A sweaty keg bought with everyone’s wrinkly dollar bills stood by, and the only thing you worried about catching was your best friend’s heroin addiction. But those were the good ole days of loud and close […]
OK GO: All Together Now
DAMIAN KULASH, SINGER/GUITARIST, OK GO: I caught the coronavirus early, when there were only six known cases in California, all of them hundreds of miles from L.A., where I live. My symptoms lasted forever, but were only genuinely scary for a day and a half. My wife Kristin’s battle was tougher, though. She was only briefly at the hospital, but bedridden with breathing problems for a long stretch. As she convalesced, I struggled to keep up with our two-year-old twins, and there were times when her breathing was so labored I worried she just wouldn’t wake up. We’re extremely lucky. […]
WORTH REPEATING: Will Americans Lose Their Right To Vote To The Covid–19 Pandemic?
NEW YORK TIMES NEW YORK TIMES: A national election is a giant pop-up event, larger in scale and significance than any other private or public occasion. Two-thirds of Americans expect the Covid-19 outbreak to disrupt voting in November, according to a late-April survey by the Pew Research Center. A successful election will require some Covid-era changes. The main one is enabling tens of millions more people to vote by mail (also called absentee balloting — the terms are synonymous) than have ever done so before. It’s also important to make adjustments to keep polling places open for people who don’t […]
NEIL NATHAN: Staycation
The Go-Go’s “Vacation” retrofitted for The Plague Years. PREVIOUSLY: Neil Nathan Covers John Prine’s “Some Humans Ain’t Human” PREVIOUSLY: Neil Nathan & Friends Cover Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land”
ISOLATION DRILLS: What I’m Listening To Now
[Click HERE to enlarge] BY KYLE WEINSTEIN Elegant and cruel, Swans are beautiful birds with very ugly temperaments. That duality is the reason Swans maestro, visionary, and lead guitarist/singer/songwriter Michael Gira chose them for the namesake of his band, an ongoing art-rock concern that has been trafficking in bliss and dissonance to great acclaim since 1982. Built from the wreckage of New York No Wave scenesters Circus Mort by Gira and Jonathan Kane, Swans quickly established themselves as the most ferocious act in town, and considering which town that was, that pretty much meant the world. Their early sound was […]
WIRE FROM THE BUNKER: Meet David Allan Coe
BY JONATHAN HOULON Equally reviled and revered, the reputation of C&W bad boy David Allan Coe precedes the man by a country mile: ex-con, polygamist, cave dweller, prison philosopher, biker badass — in short, he’s an outlaw’s outlaw. From the tender age of nine until one year short of thirty, Coe was in and out of reformatories and then adult prison where he claimed to murder a fellow prisoner for propositioning him. Rolling Stone later refuted this as one of many tall tales associated with the Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy as DAC would come to be called after finally slipping […]
BAD SEED TEE VEE: Stay Home, Watch This
A stream of videos, concerts, interviews, film, and more from the world of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, playing on random shuffle 24 hours a day. New footage added regularly.
THE COLONEL REMEMBERS: Nirvana At JC Dobbs
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 conclude our weeklong tribute to The Colonel with his 2011 remembrance of the night Nirvana honored a longstanding booking at J.C. Dobbs on October 1st 1991, one week after the release of […]