Binky Philips

I won't take up too much of your time here. Just had a few thoughts on Adam "MCA" Yauch... and Richie Teeter. We lost Richie Teeter about 3 weeks before we lost Adam. F**king cancer!

Eventually, just the way I discovered Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, through the Rolling Stones, I did the same with anyone The Who were covering. That led me to Eddie in late 1967. Hunting down his albums in New York back then was almost impossible.

To this day, after literally 1000+ listens, the bedlam that breaks out in that original version of the coda of "My Generation" remains breathtaking to me.

As I have relayed in this blog o' mine, I spent over a decade in record store retail on St. Mark's Place in the East Village through the eruption of P...

Hello, Dear Binky-@-Huffington Reader, I have been remiss. It's been almost two months since my last blog. God, I hate that word. Sounds like somethi...

It was the Fall of 1978 and I was standing in the audience, waiting for the marvelous British Punk band, The Buzzcocks, to play their first ever New Y...

Back in the 1990s, I did a lot of traveling for my gig as an independent record promoter. My destination was always the same, a radio station. I'd f...


The Who performed just once in Central Park on August 7th, 1968, as part of what was called The Schaefer Festival.

As he lay in his Cardiac ICU room, with his doctor hovering over him, my father opened his eyes, looked up at his gerontologist and declared in a Jame...

While my wife loves the typical type of music that NPR stations play, I had kept myself sorta willfully ignorant about a lot of the more cerebral and free-range acts that live on those play-lists.

Even at 12 years old, middle-class white Beatles boys like us knew full well that James Brown was a god. Soul Brother Number One. His T.A.M.I. show appearance cemented his Already-Mammoth-In-New-York stature on an exponential level.

So, I have this friend... He was a two-or-three-times-a-week customer at the record store I ran in the East Village back the 1980s (http://www.huffin...

You will notice that in each of the three somewhat disparate encounters relayed below, I am sitting down when most of the action occurs. Back in the...


When the line-up for the Woodstock Music & Art Fair was announced... I'm guessing in late April/early May of 1969, there they were... my heroes, Th...

WARNING: As the title suggests, this week's column careens like a pinball. One dear old friend is the connective tissue, a true candidate for Reader'...

I met Desmond in 1968. He grew up in George Carlin's White Harlem aka Morningside Heights, a sliver of a neighborhood on the upper west side of Manhat...

We never saw The Who as anything but gods. They were in full flight within 10 seconds of the beginning of their opening song and we hadn't even gotten a glimpse of them.

What can I tell ya ... I was just never into Metal. 
Some of my all-time favorite bands pioneered Metal (Who, Zep, Hendrix, some Sab), but, Metal M...

Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 1987, I went down to Deland, Florida with my then-girlfriend-now-wife, Susan, to meet my future father-...

It's early evening on Valentine's Day 1973, and I'm in my kitchen, regaling my dear pal, David, about the Bowie show I'd seen the night before at Radio City Music Hall.

Towards the end of the summer of 1974, an old pal called me that I hadn't heard from for awhile. His apartment in Queens had been broken into and his ...

So, how/why is this story about a store closing Christmas-y? Well, the greatest Christmas present of my childhood came from Manny's Music Store. Dur...

The New York Dolls were the pebble thrown in the pond. They sank to the bottom having caused hundreds of ripples.

Within minutes of Cosell's announcement you could already feel everyone on the street was in a daze. It seemed like the news had traveled by osmosis.