Jagged Time Lapse

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers! First — a bit of book news. Though many of you guitar gear aficionados are already hip to the jive, it bears repeating that Made On Earth For Rising Stars: The Electro-Harmonix Story is now out via Jack White’s Third Man Books and will soon be available from all major booksellers.

So much attention has been focused over the years on Ozzy Osbourne’s antics and Tony Iommi’s down-tuned guitar riffs, it’s easy to forget just how important Terence Michael Joseph Butler — a.k.a. Geezer — was to Black Sabbath’s groundbreaking and earthquaking sound and vision.

Welcome to the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast — the podcast in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Limey) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond. In this 29th episode we discuss not one of the first four classic albums by Liverpool legends Echo & The Bunnymen, but the troubled, eponymous fifth album.

THE COCKS: Jason “Halo” Halogen, Mike McCormick, Tchad Drats and Zsa. I’ve been a fan of gay punk purveyors THE COCKS ever since 2021, when they burst out of Los Angeles (and their trousers) with Loads of Fun, their loud n’ lusty debut album.

When it comes to baseball’s late, great Dock Ellis, I like to think I’m fairly well-versed in his life, career and antics, both on and off the field. After all, the irrepressible right-hander is a recurring character in all three of the books I’ve written about baseball in the 1970s — Big Hair and Plastic Grass, Stars and Strikes and The Captain & Me — and I even appeared as an interview subject in 2014’s Dock doc No No: A Dockumentary.

Tony Iommi, 2009. (Photo by Adam Bielawki, shared via Wikimedia Commons.) Interviewing Tony Iommi in the sunlit lobby of a medium-posh Beverly Hills hotel is a little like reading a collection of M.R. James’ antiquarian ghost stories by the pool — not exactly the ideal setting for it, but you can still think of much worse ways to be spending your time. In any case, that’s exactly where I find myself — and exactly what I find myself doing — on this early spring afternoon in 2001.

Flashing back on Paul Humphrey's underrated 1971 instro-funk album Back in the early 1990s, when the CD boom was motivating record labels of all sizes to unleash all manner of reissues and compilations, I got my very first taste of “Cool Aid,” courtesy of Rhino Records’ Soul Hits of the ’70s: Didn’t It Blow Your Mind! Vol. 5.

A brief ode to the pop goddess in the wake of her 80th birthday It’s April 1979, and my sister and I are spending our spring break in New York City visiting our father, who has recently returned to his (and my) hometown after living for over a decade in the comparative cultural desert of Ann Arbor, Michigan. We’re having such a fantastic time visiting local museums, landmarks, delicatessens and record stores that I don’t even really mind when our planned visit to Shea Stadium gets rained out.

Flashing back on how my rock n' roll fantasy took a knee Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers! I’m pretty wiped out from this past week, and thus am simply too fried to finish the piece I was hoping to upload today. So I thought I’d resurrect this particularly amusing blast from the past, which was originally published in March 2023, back before most of my current loyal subscribers had climbed aboard the good ship JTL.

“No, Your Honor — we’ve never touched a reefer in our lives, honest!” Marijuana has been on my mind a lot lately, even though I haven’t actually smoked the stuff in years. A couple of weekends back, as my girlfriend and I were celebrating my birthday in Manhattan by merrily traipsing East Side/West Side/All around the town, I was repeatedly reminded of how absolutely rife my home borough’s streets have been with the pungent smell of weed over the last few years.