A Bulletin from a Past Life!

If you'd like to read some of my work on country music from the Old Days, you now have a great opportunity!

THE COUNTRY MUSIC READER, assembled and annotated by Travis D. Stimeling, himself an author of note and Assistant Professor of Music History at West Virginia University, and published by the Oxford University Press features a long excerpt from my first book, THE OUTLAWS — REVOLUTION IN COUNTRY MUSIC, which has been out of print for, like, forever (and, ironically, still a 5-star Amazon book, based on reviews from the 2 people who read it! LOL!).

THE COUNTRY MUSIC READER is a great book for anyone interested in country music. Stimeling did a super job of sorting through TON of material...heck, it exhausted me just reading the footnotes! Two other essays I would strongly refer you to in THE READER are Aaron Latham's classic piece from Esquire, back when Esquire wasn't something one scrapes off one's cowboy boot, "The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America's Search for True Grit"...yes, it's better than the movie...of course, what isn't?...and Alanna Nash's long essay on Emmylou Harris, one of my favorite artist. Emmylou was NEVER easy to interview, and Alanna, who wrote for me when I ran Country Music Magazine, did a splendid job.

I have to say their is a certain weirdness when reading your old work. It's not that it has been so long none of it is even remotely familiar — which is true — rather, I can't summon up the mindset I had when I wrote the words. I do remember sitting in my bedroom "office" under my loft bed in my NYC Greenwich Village walk-up late at night, frantically sprinting toward the end of the 6-week deadline. I bought what I recall as a Remington knock-off of an IBM Selectric typewriter because I couldn't afford the Selectric. I got the Remington at some Canal Street dump where it had probably fallen off a truck. It was such a POS that I eventually threw it out of a second story window in the middle of the night. I remember carbon paper, swilling beer with Lester Bangs and and crazed trips to Nashville where I only had the money to stay in flophouse motels like the Loveless and spent all my quarters playing sweaty pinball all night long with what would prove to be a Who's Who of country music. BTW, that motel's legacy, the Loveless Dinner, still serves the best Southern food short of my long-departed grandmother. I eat there whenever I can.