Robert Baird

For the musically literate it’s an old story but one that I never tire of telling. It was the scruffy, outlaw country singer warbling Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington and the Gershwins? He wasn’t singer enough to carry it, they all said. And even if by some miracle he did, his label was convinced it would never find an audience, it would never sell. When Booker T. Jones of Stax Records fame signed on as producer, heads were scratched, skeptical eyes rolled northward and virtually everyone had their doubts.

Universal Music is gonna throw a listening party, open the public, to preview the 14 LP The Beatles in Mono boxed set, at Electric Lady Studios in NY (Sept. 8) and the GRAMMY Museum in LA (Sept. 10).

Forget those damned blade wielding misfits from today’s mindless slasher films, real horror films need a monster...

Call it the Robert Louis Stevenson Syndrome . . .

“Until now, rock ‘n’ roll has largely been viewed as a bolt from the blue, an overnight revolution provoked by the bland pop that preceded it and created through the white appropriation of music that had previously been played only by and for blacks,”