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...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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......

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...