May 17th is the anniversary of Donna Summer’s death, which came as a shock to her fans around the world having kept her illness a secret to even those she regarded as close friends. Though her…
Category: Music
Blog posts
Music For Dusting, the 1970s: A Gay Man’s Guide
In the early-1970s, my parents split up and my mom quickly reinvented herself as an Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore-style feminist. No longer satisfied with the limitations of 1950s-era definitions of women’s sex roles, my mother…
Stevie Nicks on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
“Had Tom Petty called me up on e day and said, ‘If you want to leave Fleetwood Mac to be in the Heartbreakers, there’s a place for you,’ I might very well have done…
“I Don’t Like Reggae—I Hate It!” A Comprehensive Guide to Reggae Music for the Unpersuaded
Though it may strike you as something less than shocking coming from an analog, Fosse-loving guy like me, but I’ve never cared much for reggae music. Doesn’t everyone like reggae? I like the idea…
Dionne, Whitney, Luther & Stevie Performing “That’s What Friends Are For” (1987)
In the 1980s it seemed like everything was big: big shoulder pads, big hair, and big music sales. But even by that decade’s exaggerated proportions, composer Burt Bacharach and lyricist Carole Bayer Sager’s “That’s…
Stargayzing Top 20 Posts of 2014
2014 was a very good year for Stargayzing, both in terms of growing its readership—it doubled—but also (I hope), in terms of the quality of its writing. In addition to regular pop culture commentary here, I also…
Stargayzing Songwriter’s Forum: 20 Questions With…Peter Zizzo
Peter Zizzo is an Emmy winning producer/songwriter whose songs have been recorded over the years by artists like Celine Dion, Jennifer Lopez, Howie Day, Donna Summer and many others. One of his more recent productions…
“After the Glitter Fades”: Remembering Laurel Canyon Vintage in Words and Images
The shop was located at 63 Thompson Street in New York’s Soho neighborhood where Elisa had operated a different vintage boutique called Chelsea Girl for twenty years. In 2012 she expanded that shop and moved around the corner. This allowed me to take the Laurel Canyon concept and move it from my mental queue to prime real estate directly across from the Thompson Hotel. In a fever of enthusiasm, I set about transforming a hundred-year-old storefront in what was once a part of New York’s Little Italy into a California Craftsman fantasy on Lookout Mountain Road circa 1972.
Bad Songs I Love: Sammy Davis, Jr.’s “The People Tree” (1972)
There are few things that put me in as great a mood as dependably as the peerless showmanship and soaring voice of Sammy Davis Jr., especially on performances’s like his criminally underrated 1972 recording of “The…
Bing Crosby’s 10 Favorite Performers of All Time
Bing Crosby was, perhaps, the first multi-media superstar: radio, recordings, live performances, and film. Crosby was an Oscar-winning actor and the top-selling recording artist of the first half of the 20th-century. Despite all these…
The Worst Music Video of All-Time: Lime’s “Babe, We’re Gonna Love Tonight”
I was an MTV baby. I watched the nascent network incessantly, from the day I moved in to Weinstein Dorm at N.Y.U. in the summer of 1983, until it ceased being an outlet for music sometime…
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