Special Feature

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…

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.”

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.