Johnny Black Something I really enjoy is waking up in the night and hearing our house coming to life. I did it this morning, waking while it was still dark outside, with just an occasional car passing by, briefly illuminating the curtains. I could hear my room creaking and croaking as the warmth of the coming … Read more
I don’t believe we really appreciated it at the time, but the late 1970s were a pretty hectic time for Carol and me. This post is illustrated with a couple of pages from our 1978 diary, covering our activities in the days from Dec 12 to Dec 18. I was working as a press officer … Read more
If you happened to wander past a club where the poster at the door announced tonight’s band as Blue Sunday And The Cockroaches or perhaps Hornets Attack Victor Mature, you probably wouldn’t give it a second thought. You almost certainly wouldn’t bother to go in. But you’d have made a serious mistake because both of … Read more
In 1964, the great Canadian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote a stunningly powerful song called The Universal Soldier. The idea of the song was that if the young men of the world simply refused to join armies, there would be no wars. It’s a fabulous idea, and I still love the song because of … Read more
Back in 1988, Neil Young wrote a song called This Note’s For You. He was angered by the extent to which rock and pop musicians were entering into partnerships with major corporations, thus effectively becoming part of their advertising strategies. The song included the lines, “Ain’t singing for Pepsi, Ain’t singing for Coke. I don’t … Read more
Rock music is a business. I understand that. I know that Bob Dylan would never have been able to deliver his revolutionary messages to the youth of the world if he hadn’t been signed to a giant multi-national music conglomerate. (One which I worked for at one point in the 80s) So, I get it. … Read more
One aspect of the Black Blog, aka The MusicDayzBlog, is going to be the publishing of pages from my diaries, which I started in 1974 and which are continuing to this day. To kick off this nostalgia-fest, here’s a couple of pages from the diary, written on November 10, 1993, when I had travelled up … Read more
Don’t get me wrong. I like a good bonehead as much as the next man but how did rock music, especially heavy rock, become so inextricably linked with the imagery of skulls? Brain dead? Sometimes it seems that, like the ubiquitous skulls themselves, the designers of HM and heavy rock artwork have nothing between their … Read more
It was recently estimated that there are 360 million blogs in the world. Fortunately, there are currently 7.7 billion people in the world, so the market place isn’t quite as saturated as that first alarming stat might suggest.
This is my first sally forth into the realm of the blogosphere and I’m not even going to attempt to justify why I’m doing it, except perhaps to observe, well, why not?