Thanksgiving is rapidly becoming my favorite holiday. It used to be Christmas, but things change. Last Thanksgiving I spent alone, eating the only thing left in a barren cupboard for my “abundant feast to be thankful for”: a bag potato chips. There are certain core concepts in my life experience that I won’t compromise, and…
(“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”) My Moms, Linda Rockino, and my Pops, Nick Rossi. were married in 1955. Here’s a little video of Nick explaining how he met Linda. The future was bright for both of them. Linda was barely 21, and Nick was settling in to his responsibilities of…
As I was driving up from NYC on Memorial Day Weekend, I received an unexpected phone call from my old friend Jon Notarthomas. Although I never played music with Jon (I did play quite a bit with his brother Jaime, however… more on that in subsequent blogs), he and I have been intersecting for decades,…
The George-O-Lettes meet Bullwinkle To catch fish, you have to use good bait. The large scale version of The Shuffling Hungarians was a fantasy in my head in the late spring of 1993, but I had by that time identified the people that were going to bring that dream to life, even if that didn’t…
About a month ago, I got a lovely email from a gentleman “Les”, from London. He plays bass in a pub band and very respectfully asked me for permission to cover “Gutbucket”, a song I wrote in November of 1993, and was the opening track to The Shuffling Hungarians first recording, released in November of…
I alluded in a previous post (DOSE #21 /”PATINA”) about the effects of being driven to the point that “stopping to smell the roses” was ignored; Not doing so can result not only in a missed opportunity, it actually can cause a lot of damage. Waxing slightly poetic, in the closing of the piece I…
In the spring of 1994, my friend and production partner Bob Acquaviva started to assemble painstakingly the aural physical reality of a blueprint that was in the design process for three years, and mostly contained in my twisted brain. We had completed basic tracks in February over a seven day period, including minor fixes to…
Since initiating this “365 blogs in 365 consecutive days” craziness on Memorial Day weekend. (Note to self: Next time you declare that you’re gonna write one a day for a whole year, STOCKPILE about 100 of them before you shoot your big mouth off.), “THE DOSE” and “THE BLOG-A-THON” have received over 6,000 page views…
I found myself at a party in a house on Crawford Avenue I used to live in, and I didn’t know where I was. Friends I hadn’t seen in a few years were gathered together to commemorate the life and death of a friend and brother, and I happened to be in Syracuse. So I…