This mention comes from the co-editor of the now past Harp Magazine. It’s been announced today that the late mag will return soon as Blurt Magazine.
They say that while the much beloved former is gone, the victim of market vicissitudes, the esteemed erstwhile editors are en route with the brand new, reorganized Blurt Magazine and Blurt-online. com.
They suggest that readers check back to the Harp MySpace page for details very soon, including how to become a Blurt Friend. Or you could just hang around here for the second-hand word.

which deceased music writer or musician do you remember most fondly or miss? What songs come to mind this weekend?

Noise Boys Richard Meltzer ( May 10th, 1945 ) & John Mendelsohn ( May 12th, 1948 ) are born, much to the future delight & scorn of musicians & editors.

On May 30th 1956, Time Magazine, while trying to convey Elvis Presley’s appeal, busts it down to the lowest common denominator saying that, “his movements suggest, in a word, sex.”

Jerry Lee Lewis is booed off the stage and shooed out of England, two days after revealing his marriage to cousin Myra, May 25th 1958, introducing just how scathing the Brit press can be.
 
In a stunning twist on May 27th, 1962, Mr. Acker Bilk becomes the first British artist to have a number one record in the U.S. when his wistful clarinet instrumental “Stranger On The Shore” topped the charts.

On May 25th, 1966 when Ike & Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ stalls at #88 on the Billboard charts, producer Phil Spector deems it the low point in his career and goes reclusive for two years, that is if you don’t count his speeding over to a deceased Lenny Bruce’s house the following August screaming, “Lenny, why did you do it, Lenny?”

In May of ‘74, Nick Kent’s, The Page Memoirs, hit print in Creem Magazine. An obvious contrast to the subsequent attempt by Jaan Uhelszki, Page actually talks at length, but somehow leaves out the part about underage girls in his history.

Bob Dylan, rather uncharacteristically, talks at length about life after conversion with interviewer Karen Hughs for the May 2nd, 1980 issue of the Village Voice, thus continuing another two years of him leaving the stage mid-concert with only the gospel back up chorus singing for 10 minutes. In between it all he confesses that, “Jim Keltner and Tim Drummond are the best rhythm section that God ever invented”.

In May, 1985, Madonna graces the first cover of Spin Magazine, obviously foretelling that nothing can change the shape of things to come.

Chuck Eddy’s Beastie Boys interview hits print in ‘87; disclosing how the merry trio helped themselves into his motel room, drenching him with ice water while he laid in bed, sleeping presumably, at 2am.

*How valuable is reader feedback to your writing, both good and bad? Does it reign you in, give you food for thought, help shape the way you write? Or do you just ignore it?
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* This week’s question comes from Alex V. Cook.

The more the merrier, I say. (C’mon, folks, get out your digital cameras now…)

49. & 50. The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution & The Age of Rock 2: Sights and Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution (both edited by Jonathan Eisen) - Probably the first semi-reputable greatest hits collections of (mostly but not exclusively American) rock criticism, published in ‘69 and ‘70 respectively. While both have their share of uninteresting (occasionally unreadable) blather, there’s enough of interest in each volume to make these keepers: Meltzer (who is “interviewed by” A. Warhol in one great piece), Jon Landau, Stanley Booth, Toms Wolfe and Smucker, Lenny Kaye, and a few others. Make no mistake, the blather here outweighs the interesting by a wide margin — just as it does in most rock criticism from this era (if you want to talk about a “golden age” I think you need to leap a decade or so ahead) — but I nonetheless find the slightly schizo tone of these tomes kind of fascinating in their over-reach and haphazardness, the markings of a genuinely brave spirit at least in their (I suppose in Jonathan Eisen’s) willingness to allow in the front door all sorts of fucking around with form and ideas. Never mind that such “bravery” may simply have been an acid-besotted inability to separate the readable from the utter dreck… oh well. The pictures do suck, however.

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or age you in terms of being able to retain enthusiasm and write about it?

Do you have anything personally or professionally newsworthy that you would like to let others know? How about running it by us so we might post it up?