Hensley farms

I meant to post this yesterday as an observation of Dyngus Day, but I'm a day late. So sue me. Actually, I haven't posted anything here lately, but there's a reason for that, and it's not a sad one, I'm…

Four decades ago, we were working hard, puttling together a piece of moviemaking titled "The Jazz Singer." There are a lot of stories about the making of the film, and many of them are true. But here's my favorite clip…

Sadness today, at news of the passing of veteran troublemaker Simon Stokes. Google him if you're not familiar with the name. I'm including a video I completed recently of a track we recorded together some years ago. Working with Simon…

It was nice to be confronted with this memory from 1986. Alan Lindgren and I were co-musical directors for the CBS special, which was done at Television City, at Beverly and Fairfax. I arrived early one afternoon for rehearsal, just…

During our final tour, in April of 2017, we played Fort Lauderdale, Florida, never one of my favorites, but it's not my tour. And we weren't staying in Ft. La-di-da, we were up the road in Hollywood. Yes, there's a…

The picture shows an imagined visit of Kurt Vonnegut and Andy Warhol to the Hollywood Bowl, for no reason. This story is about an altogether different night, one when our band was hanging around backstage before a show at  the…

For people interested in such things, here's a video that turned up recently on the web, a song only done in our show a few times--it's titled "Wake Up The Band," here, and it's based on a song from my…

Sad to read today of the passing of Regis Philbin, a real TV icon. I liked Regis in general, but specifically I liked him because one night in 1986, he and his then-broadcast partner, Kathie Lee Gifford, came to see…

On the night we all convened to begin our 2017 tour, the final one, most of the band sat up late at night in the lobby bar of our hotel in Fresno, and talked about the early days, and especially…

In the year 2008 A.D., the Diamondville touring year consisted of 82 shows, exactly the same as the number of games played by an NBA team during a regular, i.e. non-pandemic, season. And our appearances during the 2009 Grammy week…

When I was a mere teen-ager, one of my earliest gigs was a 4th of July party at the Bloomington, Indiana country club. It was an awful evening of loud drunks behaving badly, including an especially abrasive lady whose idea…

Cigarmania hit Diamondville big-time back at the end of the last century. Our vocalist either acquired or  revived a powerful craving for smoking stogies, and some others soon got the bug too. Even I, who had never even indulged in…