The College Crowd Digs Me

"The Buddy Holly Story" - Buddy Holly and the Crickets (1959) I knew I wanted to own a copy of this iconic album.  I really like the cover.  But I was never actively looking for it.   "The Buddy Holly Story"  is not a difficult album to come by, nor is it expensive.  I've stumbled on it out in the wild many times, but whenever our paths crossed, something else would always be tugging at my pockets.  However, last year, I found the album at a local swap meet for $10.00 with the seller taking half-off of everything he had brought.  As I said,  "The Buddy Holly Story" is an album that can usually be found on the cheap. Buddy Holly was only 22 when the plane he was on went down.  It was the winter of '59.  February 3rd.  The day the music died.   Coral Records put this Buddy Holly compilation out in record time. (No pun intended.)  It was on the shelves less than a month after the tragedy.  The album holds twe...

Fairy Tale   by Stephen King (2022) Hardbook, 599 pages NO SPOILERS: Fairy Tale is an homage of sorts to the fairy tales of old.  The tales that snuck horrific, disturbing acts of nastiness behind pictures of smiling faces.  But Fairy Tale is much more than this.  Stephen King delivers the goods in a piecemeal, meticulous fashion...taking his sweet, wonderful time setting up the details before embarking the reader on a familiar adventure of fantasmic proportions. And don't mistake meticulous and familiar for boring.  King brings to these pages what fairy tales of old seemed to always lack.  Well-developed characters.  We are given persons we can recognize.  And plenty of reasons to like, love, and empathize or dislike, hate, and despise.  And for reasons more than just being good or bad.  We have Charlie, a likable, talented high-schooler, and Mr Bowditch, the grouchy old man on the hill.  And his dog. (The dog exhibit...

"Merkurius" - Baby Grandmothers (2018 ) Baby Grandmothers was a Swedish band and one of the earlier purveyors of the psych juice.  In the early days, the band was asked to support Jimi Hendrix while he was on his Scandinavian tour.  Later, the band would morph into the second formation of the Mecki Mark Men , another Swedish legend.  In 2007, Subliminal Sounds issued Baby Grandmothers' first album which was made up of unreleased 1967-68 material along with their only single.  And the album is a must-own for any collector of psych. In 2018, the original members of Baby Grandmothers recorded a reunion album,  "Merkurius" and the square sounds almost equally as good.  Like they had never left the studio.  Just top-notch stuff.  The undercurrent of stoner psych still permeates throughout the spin with space-rock vibes and drone-like rushes to feed your head.  Each song is different, but nothing drifts away from the mind-tripping journey....