19th Level

Andrew Wood. Kurt Cobain. Layne Staley. Scott Weiland. And now Chris Cornell. Grunge music really took off late 1991, the start of my junior year at the University of Connecticut. I graduated in May of 1994 (taking five years due to time spent on co-op). For the second half of my time at UConn, the likes of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, and Soundgarden provided the soundtrack. I loved classic rock like the Beatles and Queen and I'd yet to fully discover the greatness of David Bowie. But the grunge music of the early to mid-1990's inevitably brings me back to my early twenties. I don't think I could ever explain what a seismic change those opening chords of Smells Like Teen Spirit marked for many in my generation. And now so many of them are gone. It's not a unique phenomenon -  earlier generations experienced the losses of the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, and Janis Joplin. Like many of his musical generatio...

We move under cover and we move as one Through the night, we have one shot to live another day We cannot let a stray gunshot give us away We will fight up close, seize the moment and stay in it It’s either that or meet the business end of a bayonet The code word is ‘Rochambeau,’ dig me? Rochambeau! You have your orders now, go, man, go! And so the American experiment begins With my friends all scattered to the winds "Yorktown (The World Turned Upside)" What first got my attention about the music from Hamilton was how bad-ass Lin-Manuel Miranda and his cast made The Battle of Yorktown sound. I love history in general but the founding of my nation has a sepcial place in my heart. The music of Hamilton captures this era so well - how a bunch of rebels against incredible odds managed to found a nation. How that nation needed a federal government and how fortunate it was in its first president was a man who understood the importance of refusing power - of teaching a nat...

I'm a techie. For my grad school classes at Brandeis I tend to take notes on my Microsoft Surface Book. I use a Nexus 6P phone for that "pure Android experience". I very rarely buy DVDs or Blu-Ray discs anymore, streaming most of my video watching. My comic book reading is electronic, as is my reading. Which is probably why the surprise expressed by family and friends was understandable when I picked up a TEAC Vinyl Turntable and purchased the first vinyl records since picking up the 45 single for Debbie Gibson's "Lost in Your Eyes" back in late 1988/early 1989 - my musical tastes have hardened rather considerably since then and I seem to have misplaced that single and everything else from my rather small vinyl collection of high school. As I recall, most of my music in high school was on cassette tape, with the occasional 45 or 33 record for singles/remixes. And then in 1988 I got my first CD player for Christmas. No one I knew in college had a record pl...

Toll the bell Pay the private eye All's well 20th century dies  David Bowie, "I Have Not Been to Oxford Town", from the album 1. Outside One of my all time favorite concert experiences was seeing Nine Inch Nails and David Bowie performing together on September 14, 1995. It wasn't the most appreciative audience. Nine Inch Nails was at the height of its popularity and the bulk of Bowie's performance was from the soon to be released album 1. Outside . My brother and I were able to get some great seats after many of the Nine Inch Nails fans left. To this day it boggles my mind that they missed out on seeing David Bowie live. It was a great show, with a transition between Nine Inch Nails' opening and David Bowie's performance. Trent Reznor and David Bowie were awesome together. My brother and I were talking about it today over twenty years later, how you had Nine Inch Nails all dark and out comes Bowie in light colors as they performed "Su...

Here we are, Born to be kings, We're the princes of the universe, Here we belong, Fighting to survive, In a world with the darkest powers, "Princes of the Universe" from the Queen album A Kind of Magic Initially I was going to write about the 1986 film Highlander , for which A Kind of Magic is essentially the soundtrack. But my thoughts kept focusing on the music and thus, here we are. One of my musical regrets is I never got to see Queen live in concert. I have some memories of seeing them perform on television from the 1985 Live Aid concert with my uncle. But my young musical tastes at the time shifted to more trendy/pop music, something that shifted when I started college in 1989. The early 1990s had me discovering Queen for myself, sadly months prior to Freddie Mercury's death. Anyways.... A Kind of Magic is an album that just screams fantasy. Epic, ass-kicking fantasy with tracks like "Princes of the Universe" and "Gimme the Prize...