You're browing the archives for the month of October 2014

Last Night at the Viper Room: Now in Paperback!

I am delighted to announce that my book Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind is out in paperback today. So if you’ve been waiting for a bathtub-friendly copy, your time has come. I haven’t posted much about it lately, so may I remind you of a few […]

posted 21 October 2014 in Buy My Stuff. no comments yet

R42 Mailbag: Meiert Avis

Now and then, this website attracts correspondence or comments from the people that I write about: the cowriter of Bryan Adams’ “Summer of 69,” the bassist from Information Society, the actor who starred in Poison’s video for “Nothin’ But a Good Time.” I was delighted the other day to get email from Meiert Avis, who […]

posted 15 October 2014 in 1988. 1 comment

Friday Foto: Ceci n’est pas une pipe

Photographed in September in Runyon Canyon.

posted 10 October 2014 in Photos. no comments yet

Top Five Third Songwriters

Some bands have one primary songwriter. Others hash out most of their songs collaboratively (or pretend to), so you can’t really tell who’s contributing what. But a relatively unusual situation is when a group has three distinct songwriters: often two of them will be working in partnership, either artistic (e.g. the Beatles) or romantic (e.g. […]

posted 8 October 2014 in Tasty Bits. 5 comments

Friday Foto: Computer Blue

This picture requires some explanation. That’s my left hand holding a diskette that I was sent by Prince’s PR reps circa 1993 (when I was a music editor at Details). That generation of disk is an artifact by itself, but what makes this one particularly interesting is that it had the software patches necessary to […]

posted 3 October 2014 in Photos. no comments yet