Celebrating Community
54-46 was Toots Hibbert’s prison number. He sang it out loud on the electrifying track 54-46 That’s My Number (1969), one of a crop of tunes that made Toots and the Maytals a household name on the island of Jamaica and soon thereafter in a lot of other places too. Toots Hibbert, the reggae singer, passed away on September 11 […]
Ben Bierman lives around the corner from me, which explains how I first met him and his partner Val at the local gin palace. It was the usual Sunday afternoon gathering, and I was on the prowl for a game of cribbage, but there were no takers, no suckers, no ringers. I felt like a cross between an also-ran Paul […]
I know this has happened to most of us who are big city dwellers – in saloons, clubs and airport bars, on train platforms, on the high street, in greasy spoons, a few times in likely places, but more often than not in the most outlandish and unexpected of circumstances. I’m talking about what the paparazzi refer to as celebrity […]
The piano player and singer Aaron Louis Hurwitz goes by the nickname of Professor Louie. He was christened as such by Rick Danko of The Band. Professor Louie now has his own group, the Crowmatix. All of its members boast long associations with The Band family tree, having performed with the likes of Levon Helm and the other departed ones. […]
I arrive out of the concrete cold into the warm foyer of the tabernacle. My pals Tom and Joe are deep in conversation. I catch the end of the back and forth and hear “the Blood of Christ.” I query what this is all about. I am let into the secret and told that they are thinking of an appropriate […]
Well I ain’t broke but I’m badly bent, everybody loves them dead presidents – Willie Dixon* As the Presidential electoral season shifts into full-throttle Aristotle mode, we need to gird ourselves for the incoming bombardment, and I can guarantee it will be vein-bursting. Candidates will glom onto anything that might give them an edge in the popularity stakes. Don’t expect […]
In an earlier edition this year of the Red Hook Star-Revue, Mike Cobb wrote about the welcome revival of record shops in Red Hook (see “The Return of the Record Store,” February 2019). In his treatise, Mike told of the special relationship that music lovers have with vinyl records. To paraphrase his sentiments, he said something like “You can’t put […]
I have an important announcement to make. Clermont Ferrand, the founder and lead singer of Brooklyn’s catchy French pop and rock band Les Sans Culottes, is not who he says he is. His real name is Bill Carney, c/o 47 Railway Junction, Apartment 2E, Brooklyn, NY. It’s not easy pulling off the dual personality number, unless you have the experience. […]