John A. Rodgers IV — 1970-2020

In the age of social media, it’s now highly possible to not hear from a friend for a while, go to their Facebook (or Instagram, Twitter, etc.) profile to see how they’ve been and what they’re currently up to… only to find out they’ve passed away four years earlier. To coin an internet trope, I was this many days old when I found out our good friend of Big Shout Magazine and kind-hearted sales rep John Rodgers passed away in 2020 as a result of a bad car accident.

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Kenny Budd — (1962-2022)

From 1984 to sometime in 1987, Kenny Budd and I were best friends, bandmates and co-songwriters for a Delaware band you probably never heard of called The Exam. So it saddens me to report that Kenny passed away on Thursday, August 25, 2022 of an undisclosed cause. After decades of not hearing from one another, he and I connected on Facebook in July of last year, but sadly we never took the time to talk to each other by phone.

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Sneaking in the back door of LIVE AID 1985

It was 9 a.m. on Saturday, July 13, 1985 and I was watching my cathode ray tube television, tuned to the opening acts of Live Aid at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. At the time, I lived only half an hour south of where the concert was being held, and the broadcast provoked a range of emotions. While I wanted to be watching the event in the venue, I was glad I wasn’t in the 95° F heat. So I contented myself with watching it on the TV. But a phone call I would soon get from a friend would completely change the course of the day…

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My Strange & Brief Friendship with “Rock Legend” Kim Fowley

In March of 1991, I was in Austin, TX standing on the tradeshow floor of the South by Southwest Music Conference, next to the booth I was sponsoring for Big Shout Magazine when I suddenly noticed a stir several yards away. “Who is that?” I asked a stranger perusing our booth. “That’s Kim Fowley,” the person said barely looking up. “He put together the Runaways and wrote songs for KISS and the Byrds.”

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How to Get Bitten by a Swan

A few days per week I take my dog Dusty to a park where I live in Connecticut where our local river and the Long Island Sound intersect. In the past few days, we’ve come across a small bank of swans who have been scouring the shallows of the river looking for food. I was surprised to see them actually approach me when I went down to the water’s edge one day, but they began shrieking and hissing when Dusty joined me.

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Tom Watkins X (1952 – 2021)

“I’m not sure at what age you’re supposed to begin reading obituaries with daily dread. This past year, too many friends have ended up as neat little column-wide fillers between ads for flowers … and undertaking services.” — Tom Watkins, …

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Jones Purcell — Passing of the Musical Mad Genius

It’s February 23, 2021, and at about 2:33 pm EST today I found out that a good friend of mine passed. Jones Purcell. Maybe you knew him, too.

If you lived in the Delaware area from 1980 to about 1995 there’s a good chance you would have heard of him even if hadn’t followed any of the goings on in the music scene in that area.

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