San Diego music scene news
These days when you can download all sorts of music into an iPod and burn your own CDs, it's odd to think of taking one prerecorded CD to a desert island. But the spirit of …
It's not that I listen to it very often -- I don't think I've listened to it once in the past 15 years. Even if I owned a copy I wouldn't be able to play …
The summer of 1976, PBS broadcast The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard by Leonard Bernstein. Each week Bernstein explained the structure and the meaning of music as well as the crisis of harmony composers …
I met Joseph when I was 25 and he was 52, eight years younger than I am now. I shared my one-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side in New York City with night-crawling cockroaches …
"Dancing in September" wept from the doorway of a music shop. I pulled my scarf and jacket collar open, exposing my neck and ear. I stayed on that street for the day. I wanted to …
In the age of the iPod, I can't imagine not bringing a music mix with me to the proverbial desert island. In fact, it goes further back than the iPod. I grew up in the …
This is a weighty matter, or would be if there was the slightest possibility that it might actually happen. In my case it's complicated by the fact that I'm older than dirt, and have more …
“At a Fourth of July party, the band was playing in the back yard. The police showed up and said we were too loud. The cops busted into the house. I said, ‘Do you have a warrant?’“
I hear it all the time. “Wow, I wish I had your job — you get paid to have fun and hang out with famous people!” What folks don’t seem to understand is that first, …
Love of music creates communities — usually short-lived communities, called “scenes” — that can change lives and, if the circumstances are right, change the world and the course of history. When I moved to Encinitas …
Born in San Diego in 1950, Michael Page was playing bass in local bands when a friend from New York City told him about Greenwich Village and the Bowery. The New York Dolls played at …
When I went to the bathroom for a second, in the time that I was gone, my girlfriend gave Iggy Pop her phone number. She told him to come and visit her.
We had a place in Pacific Beach at Olney and Garnet that was an old Victorian house. And we were a real happening band in San Diego. The King Biscuit Blues Band. We were playing the love-ins.
The roots of the San Diego music scene run deep. Musicians who began gigging around town in the mid- to late 1980s later became the bedrock of the diverse early ’90s scene, which included bands …
Believe it or not, with this piece, the University of California, San Diego, accepted me into its Ph.D. program in composition. So family and I came west in 1982. You’d think I would have been ecstatic.