In 2003, Chuck Berry was listed #6 among “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” by Rolling Stone magazine; Time magazine put him at #7 on their list of the “10 greatest electric-guitar players”. Six of Berry’s songs made the 2004 list of Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”; “Johnny B. Goode” was ranked #7, and it topped Rolling Stone’s 2008 list of “100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time”.
(June 2013/1)
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In her 1977 cover story for Time magazine, Linda Ronstadt was quoted as saying: “If you find a band that can play rock ’n’ roll, they can’t play a country shuffle to save their lives. I swear to God, if I could find a drummer who could play all that s--t, I would marry him.”
(October 2013)
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Writing for Time magazine in July 2001 for their salute to the best in America in the new millennium, rock critic Greil Marcus named Sleater-Kinney the nation’s best rock band.
(January 2014)
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John Lennon made the Beatles an easy target by his remark, but the fact is that church attendance was declining in England and elsewhere in Europe, a pattern that continued in the US some years later. Although Pope Paul VI denounced Lennon’s statement (and actually Pope Benedict XVI apologized for this church stance in 2010), there were few church leaders joining the denunciation of the Beatles, since the Church was going through an intense period of re-examination in this time period. For example, the Jesuit newspaper America wrote about the controversy: “[John] Lennon was simply stating what many a Christian educator would readily admit.”
Earlier that year, on April 8, 1966, the cover of Time magazine famously asked: “Is God Dead?” Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962, an earthshaking event in the Roman Catholic Church that attempted to re-frame Catholic teachings in a modern context, leading (among many other major changes) to services being conducted in the language of the people attending rather than Latin. The ramifications remain strongly controversial to this day.
(September 2014)
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A bit of serendipity occurred when Bob Dylan and Joan Baez appeared together at the 1963 Monterey Folk Festival singing a duet of a newly written song, “With God on Our Side” (which would appear on Dylan’s next album, The Times They Are A-Changin’). The Festival was in the same month as the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Wikipedia states: “Baez was at the pinnacle of her fame, having appeared on the cover of Time magazine the previous November. The performance not only gave Dylan and his songs a new prominence, it also marked the beginning of a romantic relationship between Baez and Dylan, the start of what Dylan biographer [Howard] Sounes termed ‘one of the most celebrated love affairs of the decade’.”
(March 2015)
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The article in Wikipedia on the Beatles’ most famous album starts off like this: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. Released on 1 June 1967, it was an immediate commercial and critical success, spending 27 weeks at the top of the albums chart in the United Kingdom and 15 weeks at number one in the United States. Time magazine declared it ‘a historic departure in the progress of music’, and the New Statesman praised its elevation of pop to the level of fine art. It won four Grammy Awards in 1968, including Album of the Year, the first rock LP to receive this honor.”
(June 2015)
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(June 2017)
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A few months ago, I was at
The Book Bag, the great used-book store down here, and the owner asked me if I liked
National Geographic, and I said sure. She then offered me to sell me numerous bound volumes for $20 – but only if we took all of them! She also had
Time and
Newsweek and
Life and some
U. S. News and World Report and even a couple of volumes from an old set of
Encyclopædia Britannica. As I have mentioned before, I am not driving these days; and
Shawanna’s husband
Earl was steady carrying boxes out to his car on a dolly while I was shopping for books. A couple of times when he took a break, the owner ran back there and said, no, these also; and those over there. (At a later date, she had found another half dozen volumes and gave me those also!)
The magazines are professionally bound, mostly in green, and look like they had come from a public library or university library somewhere. Although there are no library cards or anything like that, some of the individual issues are marked “
Gulfport East High School”. The
National Geographic volumes date back to the
1940’s and extend to the very end of the
1990’s, including those from the month of my birth (
May 1951). I don’t think I have all of the volumes, but I haven’t put them into order yet, so I cannot say for sure.
The magazine volumes cover most of two full bookcases, and I really didn’t know where I could fit them. Then it occurred to me to create a library in the front room off the over-sized living room; we had never really found a use for that room, other than to sit the china cabinets in there, but I had them moved to the side of the dining room off the kitchen (the only large window in the house is in that room). So far, I have three bookshelves in there, including all of the magazines; and I am planning to move the rest of the bookshelves into the library over the next month or so, probably including the paperbacks that are housed in open media cabinets in our bedroom these days.
I have half a mahogany dining room table in the library already that I inherited from Charlie, along with eight chairs; they went through Katrina but came out in pretty decent shape after we had them refinished by a local company. The other half of the table was broken accidentally post-Katrina, so at our big yard sale, we sold that half plus the drop leaf to someone who was restoring an old boat. That half a table I have only ever used as a bar during parties; but I figured that it would work well as an old-fashioned library table like those you see in movies, with four or maybe even six chairs beside it.
Post-Katrina, the bottom shelves of all of my bookshelves have always been used for a row of record albums; otherwise, I would have run out of room for them long ago. The upper shelves are no good for that, but the bottom shelves work out fine. There is one bookshelf left in my office that is also going to the library; pretty much everything else in that room is for the albums and CD’s. Hopefully, one more record rack from Hobby Lobby will cover the rest of the collection, including the 300 or so albums that went through Katrina that I have still not cleaned up.
(Year 10 Review)
