Tag Archives: Biography

Walter Yetnikoff was a classic music industry player, until it all went wrong...

Clevelander Joe Eszterhas, Hollywood screenwriter more famous for being a dickhead than anything else, has a new memoir out about his complete change of life brought about by cancer of the larnyx, among other things. I’m glad he stopped smoking and drinking – good for him – but when the …

I hate Pete Rose – always have, probably always will. I hate the whole “Charlie Hustle,” “anything at any cost to win” crap. I hate the fact that he plowed into Ray Fosse and basically ruined his career in a freaking All Star game. I hate his selfishness and his …

Jessica Lynch has been lionized as a hero by the military, vilified as a fake by the rabid anti-war crowd – she has been bandied back and forth like a tennis ball. She is not a symbol, she is a person, she did not fight like Rambo when she was …

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. and so many other great orators and civil rights leader spoke of the desire for true equality. I have been listening to NPR’s Tavis Smiley show the past few days as …

Caroll Spinney, Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch for 34 years, has written a book: The 156-page book (Villard, $16.95) is for adults, not children, but Spinney figures most of his readers will have grown up with Sesame Street, or have children who watch it. At 69, he says he …

Understanding Napster is essential to a grasp of how we got where we are now with P2P, the hysterical flapping of the music industry, and the various possible entertainment-delivery futures. We ran an excerpt from Joseph Menn’s All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster from the …

The truth be known I am emotional and pretty damned squeamish, so when it comes to aspects of life that touch heavily on both – like war – I try pretty hard to concentrate on the macro view and not get too caught up in the micro, where it ALL …

Nice overview of Napster history – did it really happen? – in LA Times excerpt from new book All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster by Joseph Menn: It all began with a poor Boston-area kid who came west to Silicon Valley and started a revolution. …

Jandek is a mysterious Houston “recording artist” who has been self-releasing albums since 1978. Some call him a genius, many more call him a psychically dyslexic agoraphobic with no discernable musical talent beyond an uncanny ability to irritate. Demonstrating that not all radio is geared toward the masses, Harvard’s WHRB …