Critical Conditions is pretty great newsletter (via Substack) by former Creemster and Newsdayer, Wayne Robins. I’ve loved some of the writing in here, including Being the Billy Joel Beat, an extended memoir of sorts about Robins’s long time coverage of “Long Island’s biggest homegrown star” (with maybe the most balanced writing anyone has ever done on Joel), and a beautifully written piece on Jay Black, recently deceased singer of Jay & the Americans (and a cousin of Robins).

I interviewed Wayne a few years back when he was attending an event in Toronto. Spent a very thoughtful two hours in his hotel room, discussing a variety of subjects (cheeseball that I am, I think I even got him to sign a Roxy feature he penned for Creem c. 1974), but for complicated reasons even I can’t recall at this point, I never managed to pull a proper piece together. I still have the audio files, though, perhaps I should, uh, finally get on it.