I quit buying 45s when I was 13 years old. After that, I considered myself an album consumer, but that sometimes created an economic conundrum: when a cool new song…
J.A. Bartlett
113 Articles
Writer, raconteur, radio geek, beer snob. There's more of this pondwater at http://jabartlett.wordpress.com.
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We probably shouldn’t even go here. We should probably listen to the small voice inside that keeps us from playing with matches, drinking and driving, and buying short shorts. But…
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Many of us have favorite stories we return to again and again. Even though we know the characters, the incidents, and how the whole thing turns out, there’s something about…
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A commenter on a recent post about Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey” suggested that in the pantheon of the World’s Worst Songs, “the fruit doesn’t hang any lower.” I beg to differ,…
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If you like music and you like to write, challenge yourself with this task: Say something fresh about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. When the album’s 40th anniversary was celebrated…
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There’s a volume of Time-Life’s AM Gold series called Teen Idols of the 70s, which features many of the usual suspects: the Partridge Family, Bobby Sherman, the Osmonds, the Jackson…
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As the spring of ’67 turned into the Summer of Love, two of the top acts of 1966 returned to the top of the album chart as the world waited…
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The farther back we go in time, the harder it is to fairly judge what sucks, because tastes and styles change. Complicating matters is the post-modern ironic distance through which…
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The original Pre-Fab Four set chart marks the original Fabs never matched.
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In an episode of King of the Hill called “Reborn to Be Wild,” Hank Hill says to a Christian rock singer, “Can’t you see you’re not making Christianity better? You’re…
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Billboard magazine began publishing an album chart in 1945, and it wasn’t long before a soundtrack album hit #1: Song of Norway, from a musical adaptation of the works of…
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Make it stop. In the name of all that’s holy, make it stop.
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The list of great Motown albums doesn’t start to fill in until 1971 or so, when Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder used their new creative freedom to make fully realized…
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There’s something bad happening in Booger Woods, and it’s this song.
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One of the many fascinating subtexts in the current season of Mad Men involves the seismic shift in youth culture that began in 1966, the year in which the season…
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After Carrie Underwood won American Idol in 2005, she wanted to be marketed as a country singer, and she has been fabulously successful: 11 #1 country singles and three more…
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The Chairman of the Board is not finished, by a long shot.
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Somebody hose down the singer, and her producer too while you’re at it.
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The album that contains some of the most magnificent music to come out of the 1960s, including “California Dreamin'” and “Monday Monday.”
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When I’m playing Abbey Road, I almost always pass them by.
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Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler had been wounded in Vietnam while serving with the Green Berets, an elite special-forces unit. While recovering, he was filmed by a TV crew singing a…
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Does country music suck, or doesn’t it? Depends on who you are and what you want from it.
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While the kids were buying Beatles records, their parents were buying Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
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Clever or pretentious? With Sting, it’s always a valid question.
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Forty years ago today, The Partridge Family hit the television airwaves. Join J.A. Bartlett for a look back at some of its best songs.
J.A. Bartlett
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January 20, 1988, is a Wednesday. In Arizona, a committee of the State House of Representatives continues hearings into whether Governor Evan Mecham should be impeached. Mecham is under indictment…
J.A. Bartlett
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December 16, 1973, is a Sunday. The front-page story on many newspapers across the country regards the decision yesterday by the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list…