January 1, 2012
In exactly six months (June 30th, 2012) I will turn 60 years old. I do not mind telling you, dear reader, that this thought terrifies me. I don’t mind telling you, I am not going to have an easy time with 60. I will not have an easy time turning 60 years old because when my first rock & roll best friend Dave Blackburn and I planned out our future rock star lives at the end of the 1960’s when we were 17 or 18 years old Dave projected us dying in an airplane crash the day before our 30th birthdays. (Though Dave never explained to my satisfaction HOW that was going to be possible since we were going down on the same flight but had wildly different birthdays.) Anyway, I never had any plan beyond 30 and have basically been making it up as I go along for the past 29½ years.
In exactly six months (June 30th, 2012) I will turn 60 years old. I do not mind telling you, dear reader, that this thought terrifies me. I don’t mind telling you, I am not going to have an easy time with 60. I will not have an easy time turning 60 years old because when my first rock & roll best friend Dave Blackburn and I planned out our future rock star lives at the end of the 1960’s when we were 17 or 18 years old Dave projected us dying in an airplane crash the day before our 30th birthdays. (Though Dave never explained to my satisfaction HOW that was going to be possible since we were going down on the same flight but had wildly different birthdays.) Anyway, I never had any plan beyond 30 and have basically been making it up as I go along for the past 29½ years.
So, this chronicle will attempt to communicate EVERYTHING I currently know about rock & roll music in that six month span. It will be part autobiography (real, mis-remembered, and imagined), part journalism, part best-of lists, part video-shares of bands I love, part geographical on-the-road stories, some song lyrics and/or song uploads, and whatever else I think of along the way and damn well feel like sharing. This memoir will go out as a series of e-mails to a carefully selected list of my contacts, but feel free to forward it to anyone you like. It will not appear on a Facebook page because I don’t believe in social media. (All of my second & third grade report cards pointedly noted, “Richard does not play well with other children.” That has never changed or gotten any better.) At some point we may upgrade to a blog format once my I.T. Department (i.e. my lovely wife Debbie) figures out how we, meaning she, would accomplish that.
And trust me, you won’t be getting deluged with e-mails. They definitely won’t be coming every day, perhaps not even every week; though I hope not more than 10 days will pass between posts. If I go over 14 days, somebody please write and badger me for additional material, someone please keep me honest & productive.
This introduction was written with pen & paper in the Baltimore Airport just after Christmas, 2011. I appreciate the ease and facility of writing on computers, but man do I love buying notebooks and pens.
I love paper and pen too!
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