iPhone app iPad app Android phone app Android tablet app

Binky Philips
GET UPDATES FROM Binky Philips
Binky Philips, a life long New York babyboomer, was born a few years before Elvis changed everything. Permanently ruined by The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Binky has devoted his life to the noise made by larynxes and electric guitars. He spent the 70s and 80s performing, writing, and recording his own songs in the semi-legendary CBGB/Max's Kansas City band, The Planets. For the last three decades, Binky has run East Village records stores, done radio promotion for every major record label's Rock and Alternative acts, and now has his own indie label, Dotpointperiod, and manages the Dallas Texas band, dEAf PEdESTRIANS. Binky Philips is currently working on a memoir of his misspent youth and adulthood in the music business. He can be reached at binkinc@earthlink.net.

Blog Entries by Binky Philips

Stars in a Record Store

(12) Comments | Posted May 17, 2013 | 6:24 PM

Running a record store on St Mark's Place in the East Village during the 1980s put me in the dead-center middle of an exploding mecca of pop culture. Wow, that is one cheesy sentence, but, true dat.

Think about what happened in popular music between 1978 and 1988...

Punk...

Read Post

Excerpt: London, 1971 - Two New York Idiots Look for Their Own Keith Moon and John Entwistle

(15) Comments | Posted May 10, 2013 | 3:26 PM

Here's another excerpt from my ebook, out on Rhino, My Life In The Ghost of Planets - The Story of a CBGB Almost-Was.. This one is kind of the 'prequel' history to our CBGB days, including a very silly stay in London, Summer of 1971... Here we go...

...
Read Post

I Meet The King in 1956 and Paul Simon Meets Two Stewardesses in 1992

(2) Comments | Posted May 3, 2013 | 4:03 PM

It's 1956, I am 3 and a half years old. My best friend is Corky. His dad is taking us, along with Corky's two utterly fascinating sisters, to the Central Park Zoo in his green Packard "woodie" station wagon. Corky and I were in the back seat. I can still...

Read Post

How a New York City Rock Kid Fell for George Jones and Tammy Wynette

(7) Comments | Posted April 27, 2013 | 8:54 AM

"If we could, we'd all sing like George Jones" - Waylon Jennings

Truth be told, it's been awhile since I just sat down and banged one of these here drivel-spews out.

But...

George Jones died Friday.

I was 15. I'd been playing guitar for a whole 4 years. I knew...

Read Post

Excerpt: Rock 'n' Roll Band Guys Interact With the Mob

(8) Comments | Posted April 19, 2013 | 3:32 PM

I have long been fascinated/repelled by authentic bad guys. From a distance, they are intriguing, maybe even glamorous. Up close, man, they are no fun. No fun at all.

In this excerpt from my ebook on Rhino, My Life in the Ghost of Planets - The Story...

Read Post

Another Excerpt: I "Discover" CBGB and Open for The Ramones, May, 1975

(7) Comments | Posted April 13, 2013 | 9:34 AM

Here's another excerpt from my eBook on Rhino, My Life in the Ghost of Planets - The Story of a CBGB Almost-Was. It's doozy, too... in which my band, The Planets, is initiated into the brave new world of CBGB in the early Spring of 1975.

Here...

Read Post

45 Years Ago: April 5th and 6th, 1968... The Who Debut at the Fillmore East the Night After MLK Jr.'s Assassination

(13) Comments | Posted April 5, 2013 | 2:46 PM

I am currently waltzing my way through the seventh (or is it seventeenth?) "final" revision on my book, The Who: Choosing My Religion. The thing about editing, rewriting, revising, is... with each pass, you have to become even more focused exactly when you're dying to skim and be done with...

Read Post

August 31st, 1965: I See The Rolling Stones In Concert... And Charlie Watts Hits Me In the Face With His Drumstick, November 1969

(10) Comments | Posted March 29, 2013 | 3:50 PM

I went to the legendary "red diaper" Camp Thoreau in Wallkill, New York for eight weeks the Summer of '65. How red diaper was it? Well, my first summer there, 1964, my bunk's counselor was Robbie, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a sweet and intense guy, who I liked...

Read Post

1971: Me and Pink Floyd in a New York Hotel Room

(14) Comments | Posted March 22, 2013 | 3:19 PM

Let's start with a run-on sentence...

Back in the balmy Fall of 1971, a friend of mine, actually pretty much my older brother/ mentor at the time, John Taylor, the lead singer of the mythical band we were 'putting together' with me on guitar, becoming The Planets a...

Read Post

The Bay City Rollers Did NOT Suck... and the Awesome Influence of One Haircut

(12) Comments | Posted March 15, 2013 | 4:49 PM

Here's the true unsung story about one of the origins of the Punk/New Wave look...

It was 1973... my friends and I were wearing our Glam-shagged hair as long as possible, mine was at least 8 or 9 inches past my shoulders. We all had the satin and velvet and...

Read Post

Pete Townshend and I Bump Into Each Other at an Adam Ant Show

(5) Comments | Posted March 8, 2013 | 12:01 PM

About a year ago, as I was signing with Rhino to publish my book on my own semi-aborted-career as a 'rock star', My Life In the Ghost of Planets - The Story of a CBGB Almost-Was, David Dorn, then the head of the Rhino eBook project, commissioned me...

Read Post

Billy Joel Shoots a Video in the East Village, a Crew Member Says the Exact WRONG Thing

(11) Comments | Posted March 1, 2013 | 1:57 PM

The Summer of 1979 was a fallow one for me.

For the first time since 1968, I wasn't in a band. Beginning in February of 1978, I'd been working at Free Being, literally the first used record store in the world, as far as research shows by those obsessed...

Read Post

1977: Iggy Pop and Ray Manzarek Want to Start a Band With Me

(3) Comments | Posted February 22, 2013 | 11:08 AM

When we last left our intrepid guitar bozo, Binky Philips, he'd had a rather too close brush with His-Dream-Come-True... almost almost almost getting signed by a major record label.

Here's another somewhat interlocking story from my book, My Life In The Ghost of Planets -- The...

Read Post

1977: My Band is Signing With Warner Brothers Records! Thin Lizzy's Producer is Set to Do Our Album! In London! At The Who's Recording Studio! And... Then...

(7) Comments | Posted February 15, 2013 | 11:11 AM

Looking back, it was an undeniably fertile creative moment in New York City. Things were coalescing and I was in the thick of it.

Yes, it's more of my personal micro-to-the-macro 1970s Glam Punk Hard Rock New Wave history, folks, courtesy of another snippet from my book out on Rhino......

Read Post

Two CBGB Bands vs. an Actual Biker Gang

(1) Comments | Posted February 7, 2013 | 9:25 PM

Last year, when I was initially approached by Rhino to write the story of my days in one of the original mid-1970s CBGB bands, The Planets, the managing editor stressed that what they were interested in was an "unvarnished" version of that brief halcyon era down on The Bowery....

"Enough...

Read Post

A Compendium of Encounters -- Including Excerpts From My Book On Rhino, My Life In The Ghost of Planets - The Story of a CBGB Almost-Was

(7) Comments | Posted February 1, 2013 | 2:28 PM

Over my many years as a rock 'n' roll/pop culture freak, I've had my share of classic New York City encounters with celebrities and ummmmm, street life. A few of these wound up in my recent eBook on Rhino, My Life In The Ghost of Planets - The...

Read Post

December 19th, 1972: Me, Opening for The New York Dolls 40 (!) Years Ago

(2) Comments | Posted December 21, 2012 | 3:21 PM

Two years ago, around this time of year, I wrote up a piece about my first encounter and subsequent show with The New York Dolls. Early this year, I had Huffington Post remove it because I was writing a book for Rhino Records, My Life In the Ghost of Planets...

Read Post

More of My Damn Opinions About Guitarists and Guitars

(48) Comments | Posted December 7, 2012 | 9:46 AM

Judging from the response I got a few weeks ago to my column entitled "Binky's Revenge: My Own Damned List of Most Influential Guitarists" (over 1,000 Likes and over 200 Comments... thank you all!), I am clearly not the only one with a love/hate relationship with those foolish...

Read Post

Binky's Revenge: My Own Damned Most Influential Guitarists List!

(248) Comments | Posted October 19, 2012 | 10:44 AM

I have long had a love/hate relationship with The Top 10 (20, 50, 100) All Time Guitarist lists. As in, I love to see how much hatred and rage they can generate in my arrogant pedantic know-it-all bile-soaked soul. It is absolutely guaranteed that at some point, a guy who...

Read Post

My Pal's Mom: The First Female Boxing Judge In History

(5) Comments | Posted September 28, 2012 | 10:21 AM

I'd just turned 18 years old when Ms. magazine debuted.

I'd lost my virginity less than a year before.

I was in the larva stage of my stud-dom when the world according to het males was turned upside down. The log we'd be sitting on turned out to...

Read Post