Orel Family

The smiles that changed America: George Harrison and Ringo Starr in the moment, February 9, 1964. This past Sunday evening marked the 50th Anniversary of the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Esullivan Show .  The Fabs, virtually unknown in the United States just 6 weeks prior, but that evening 73 million people turned to CBS to watch them perform live. By early April, the Beatles owned each of the top 5 positions in the Billboard Hot 100  singles chart . To commemorate the anniversary, CBS aired The Night That Changed America: The Beatles - A Grammy Salute , and it was everything the Beatles weren't:  Tame. Boring. Inert. Dreary. (an encore will air tomorrow evening). And most of my Beatles-fans friends loved it. The anniversary program was really three shows: A historical presentation focusing entirely on the events leafing up to and including February 9th, 1964. A musical tribute focusing almost entirely on pieces written after  February 9th, 1964....

Bruce Springsteen has made national headlines many times over the past 30 years. But he's never really been an internet sensation. His website is modest with few interactive features beyond links to order products. His  official videos on youtube , especially of more recent vintage, typically generate fewer than a million views. His first twitter post was just a few months ago. That changed Wednesday morning. On Tuesday, Bruce's latest studio album, High Hopes, was officially released. That didn't make a dent. But that evening, he appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon . And by Wednesday morning, seemingly the whole world knew about it. My facebook wall exploded with links. Not just from my Bruce friends, either: From my old high school friends from New Jersey. From college friends in the diaspora. From conservatives. Bruce's appearance on Late Night came as no surprise; after all in 2010 he went in the show and spoofed his own '70's look  for a c...

Jay-Z, Barrack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. Columbus, November 5, 2012.  A few days ago, I read an article posted on the  Rolling Stone  website. Springsteen producer Ron Aniello was talking about Bruce's latest album,  High Hopes . Talking about how the project began, Aniello said, "I remember that Bruce called me on my birthday, so it was December 9th, 2012. He said to me, 'I have some songs. I want to get together.'" Aniello went on to talk about how Bruce tends to work, and how the process unfolded. I keyed in on the date. On November 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term as President of the United States. The next evening, Bruce introduced  Badlands  by saying, "I don't know what you guys think about what happened last night but I think it's pretty frightening. You guys are young, there's gonna be a lot of people depending on you coming up so this is for you." The song performance, without the spoken introduction...

Earlier today, Bruce Springsteen's latest album, High Hopes leaked far and wide across the interwebs. The official release isn't due until January 14th of the new year. The album is a hodgepodge of "our best unreleased material from the past decade," as Springsteen explains in the liner notes (already published at brucespringsteen.net ), where he adds, "I felt they all deserved a home and a hearing." Bruce previously wrote liner notes for Devils & Dust , which perhaps not coincidentally was also an album mainly of older unreleased material. As with the notes to that album, there are some poignant notes here: The Wall, a song that Bruce premiered in concert in 2003, was inspired by Walter Cichon, a member of a '60s Jersey Shore band called "Motifs." This is the best part of the liner notes, and arguably the best of the previously unreleased songs on the album. Much of the album has been heard before. Springsteen recorded  High Hopes,  w...

The first thing I noticed, when launching in to the introduction for Debra Rothenberg's book Bruce Springsteen in Focus 1980-2012 was the instant potential for a good old game of Jewish geography. Ms. Rothenberg and I were born less than 10 weeks apart and grew up a few miles from each other in suburban Northern New Jersey. Her school friends were my camp friends. Her college acquaintances were my relatives. We each saw out first major concerts at the Garden States Arts Center in the mid-70s, were turned on to Bruce Springsteen's music by mentors who preached the Springsteen gospel and knew not to let up, and saw Southside Johnny at the same shows near our homes before finally seeing Bruce perform for the first time during The River tour. Rothenberg's first published photo: September 1981 issue of New Jersey Monthly magazine Rothenberg combined her love for Bruce Springsteen with her dream to become a great photographer, and over the course of 3 decades has chro...

Hanukkiah on the Thanksgiving table! Right next to the... mashed potatoes! Did we? No. I wanted to. What better than to replace yams -- I don't like yams, anyway -- with good old fashioned latkes? But this was an over-the-river-and-through-the-snow year, and grandma was already making the yams and mashed potatoes. Who could argue? The mashed potatoes were really good. Much has been written about the coincidence of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah this year. It has been given the lame name Thanksgivukkah  (what did they call it when Hanukkah coincided with Black Friday, just 11 years ago? Shopukah?). Some sites have proclaimed that it has never happened before won't happen again until the year 79811, due to how the two calendars work. That's not quite true, as an excellent recap by the calendar-heads at Chabad shows. Mostly, it was cool to have a menorah on the Thanksgiving table, and to give out gelt after the pies. As for the latkes, we stopped off at friends in...

How many of the first tier rock bands from the '60's are still rocking around? With all members alive, and able to perform? And of those, how many actually are  performing? And of those, how many are bringing  it, in major halls with first rate production? I'm pretty sure there's only one: The Rascals . Felix Cavaliere Gene Cornish and Eddie Brigati That's not the only reason to see their show, Once Upon a Dream ,  but it's a good place to start. The Rascals weren't simply any  band, though; they were a substantial portion of my childhood soundtrack. Their hits played on the AM radio on my way to day camp, and can still be heard regularly on various radio outlets including XM/Sirius Radio's Underground Garage .  Their biggest hit, Good Lovin',  remains one of the most instantly identifiable -- and urgently danceable -- songs of the rock era. And, of course, they were from New Jersey. Not down the shore, where I never went, but in Garfi...