For most of my adult life, these anniversaries around here have involved beer, crab cakes, sports arguments, old radio tapes, fun Baltimore characters, callers and some version of me looking backward and wondering where the hell all of the years went.
This one is going to sound and taste a little different – and I’m certainly going to gain less weight this year!
Baltimore Positive and WNST are celebrating 28 years, and instead of giving you another list of football players, baseball games, favorite sports somethings or places where I’ve eaten a crab cake or something tasty – and I’ve got plenty of all of those – I’m going back to where a lot of this really started for me:
The music. My Almost Famous youth as a teenage music critic…
I got my first newspaper byline at The News American as a 15-year old when I interviewed Tom Hamilton of Aerosmith, Geddy Lee of Rush and Walt Parazaider of Chicago in the first weeks of my rock critic daze back in September 1984. The same month my son was born.
And now, 42 years later, the magic is not much different than that first time I saw the shadow of Shaun Cassidy along the Baltimore Civic Center curtains on Feb. 25, 1977. (I was at the matinee show.)
The lights go down. The room roars. A guitar chord arrives like an old friend kicking open the front door. And then something inside of me comes roaring to life to make me feel alive.
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That is why I love music. It is also why, at this stage of my life, I would usually rather go to a great concert than any ballgame.
Sports have been my vocation and livelihood, my public identity, civic obsession and, many times, my greatest joy (see the two Super Bowl parade books I wrote for Baltimore Ravens fans). But most certainly as I age and the musicians who made my favorite music age out – and sadly, time out – my nights spent chasing music have always brought something even deeper and much brighter to my soul.
Sports are what I have spent a lifetime explaining. Music is what has spent a lifetime explaining me.
And all of this century, I have routinely used it as an easy escape for destination travel: I still treat live music as worth making time, spending money, and building my memories around. My South American expedition chasing AC/DC and Bryan Adams was just this past year’s suitcase excuse to scale Machu Picchu. The next year of my journey here will share my lifetime love and passport and passion for music of all kinds for your eyes and ears.
And beware: my taste is broader than my reputation. Sure, there’s plenty of classic rock, British Invasion and “Heartland” rock at the very center, but black and blues roots, crooners, small doses of hip-hop, large gobs of pop, jazz, show tunes along with some arrangement nerdism, Southern nights, and songwriting craft all make the cut.
I love the words, the melodies, the anthems, the ballads (more than you think) and the rockers and bangers.
Now, I’ll be unearthing the lost tapes, microcassettes, old reviews, embarrassment over youthful takes, and the act of reopening them now to rediscover some of those nights where the music came to life and I was in the center of it, or perhaps side stage waiting for a word with the drummer on the tour bus after the gig.
8Twice a week over the coming months, I’m going to unveil the 28 “primary” artists who shaped my life. And the “live” music that still makes me feel alive after all of these years.
Not the 28 “greatest” bands. Not the 28 best albums (although I did that fun exercise back during the COVID downtime in the summer of 2020). And this is most certainly not a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot, although I’d love to deliver my Pacifica belt buckle collection there in Cleveland one day for all of you to see and adore.
I’m calling these my “primary” 28 artists and acts because they are fundamental, foundational and central to my life. My companion songbook. And like Casey Kasem did: We’ll count ‘em down…
And that “primary” distinction is the entire point. It’s just a starting point for what my eyes have witnessed since I begged my birth mom to take me on the No. 10 bus to see Styx on the Cornerstone tour at the Civic Center on Feb. 8, 1980. (I actually have a bootleg of that show. Just like Rerun and the Doobie Brothers on ‘What’s Happening!’)
I’ve spent the last few months opening boxes and trying to assemble these memories as some kind of weird, rare art collection because no one would ever believe most of this stuff if it wasn’t completely accompanied by the artifacts to go with the tallest of true rock star tall tales.
Ticket stubs. Backstage passes. Old newspaper clips. Guitar picks and drum sticks. Photographs I haven’t seen in decades. Autographed posters and newspaper clips. Cassette tapes and interviews recorded when I was younger than some of the musicians’ children are now. Calendars with scribbled concert dates. Pictures from Hammerjacks and the Baltimore Civic Center, the Capital Centre and Merriweather, the 8X10, arenas from Sydney to Paris, Rio to Vancouver. My favorites are the ones when nobody knew that the band onstage was about to become famous.
And every artifact seems to unlock another room in my memory.
8I found the teenage kid who met Geddy Lee under the Capital Centre playing catch before he had any idea that he would spend the next 45 years loving and chasing Rush.
I found the young, dumb reporter who could criticize David Bowie in print and then have David Bowie call his house – collect from England! – to talk about it a year later.
I found the kid interviewing members of R.E.O. Speedwagon and Triumph and Survivor (with a towel over the phone feigning a deeper voice) while still trying to figure out what a journalist was let alone how to become one.
I was 17 years old drinking Heinekens underneath the Spectrum in Philadelphia with Alex and Eddie Van Halen and, decades later, drinking the very expensive wine of Sammy Hagar in a Napa Valley cellar discussing the deeper meaning of 5150 over a deep red blend.
Robert Plant took a 20-year old version of me to lunch in Philadelphia and held my 5-year old son’s hand and bought him an ice cream cone at the Four Seasons. Jimmy Page once called me collect, too, as he and Paul Rodgers took The Firm on the road in 1985. And the Bad Company frontman with the greatest voice in the history of rock music who once greeted me in a Manhattan record company office created the greatest fan boy moment of my career at the Phoenix Super Bowl in 2008 when I jumped over people on Radio Row to tackle him and bring him to my set.
I once asked Paul McCartney a question in the front row of a press conference before he signed a copy of Rolling Stone for me. I lived long enough to ask Bruce Springsteen a legit question on live television at a 2009 Super Bowl press conference in Tampa only to be called “a dummy” by The Boss.
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I watched and filmed Eddie Vedder literally brought to tears about 10 feet away from me in the pit in Brisbane, Australia watching Bruce perform “Spirit In The Night” at close range. They did “Highway To Hell” together an hour later!
And back in October, I was in Seattle seeing the Cameron Crowe book tour and Vedder told me that he didn’t trust me when I asked him about the state of love and trust…
I found the early Black Crowes stuff at Hammerjacks opening for a band called Junkyard long before anybody in the room knew what they were about to become.
8I saw Live at the UMBC Cafeteria in 1993.
I was among a dozen people who witnessed Smashing Pumpkins at Max’s on Broadway on a lonely Valentine’s night in 1991.
Billy Joel once called into my radio show while I was in the bathroom. My son answered the phone.
Paul Stanley invited me to his penthouse suite at the Dulles Hyatt for a 1 a.m. dinner and he told me everything the 7-year old boy who found KISS Alive in his cousin’s attic would ever want to know, all as groupies pounded on his hotel door wanting in.
These are the stories.
8Some come with pictures of bad hair, cheap sunglasses and cheaper concert tickets.
And sometimes they make me remember going to the other side of the world to see The Rolling Stones in Buenos Aires or U2 in Tokyo and Seoul – or even Dublin or Sao Paolo.
Bruce Springsteen has taken me across decades and continents and through virtually every version of myself from Madrid to Auckland.
Bryan Adams somehow went from being music I wrote about as a reckless young critic to music attached to my marriage and then, this year, to Montevideo, Santiago and Bogotá and even Las Vegas (solo acoustic) before bringing the whole journey back home to Baltimore.
AC/DC can connect a kid standing inside the Capital Centre in the early 1980s listening to “Highway To Hell” before a ZZ Top concert to a 57-year-old man standing among tens of thousands of screaming people in Santiago, Chile, realizing that apparently there is no Spanish translation required for a timeless guitar Angus Young riff.
And then there are the stories that simply sound made up.
Like winding up in Havana with Andy Summers of The Police, who handed me the job of being Sting while we sang Police songs in a tiny Cuban bar. Woody Harrelson did my harmonies that night. (We have pictures and witnesses, including the guitar player.)
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Or eventually standing onstage singing “Spirit of ’76” with Mike Peters of The Alarm at Jaxx in Springfield, Virginia – and then losing the recording for more than two decades and finding it only the day after Mike died last year.
Or realizing that The Smithereens became my real-life version of Stillwater from Almost Famous: the band that somehow crossed the invisible line between people I wrote about and people who became part of my life.
That’s what these 28 stories will reveal.
The music, certainly.
8But also the people.
The access. The accidental glories. The backstage tales.
The ridiculous good luck, and some of the bad fortune, too!
The journalism. The road trips. The unlikely friendships.
Life on the tour bus, and the losses. And, inevitably, the passage of time.
Because this 28th anniversary is really the opening act.
On December 13, another clock turns over for me.
8Thirty-five years earlier, on December 13, 1991, I sat down behind a microphone and began my life on Baltimore radio as the sports reporter who was about to become Nasty Nestor.
Thirty-five years.
That number is almost impossible for me to process.
So, I’m not going to simply celebrate it for a night – we’re going to celebrate it for an entire year, and music is going to be the thread that ties it together with 35 memories and lists of all sorts of fun raconteur duties that I enjoy and the ones that concert lovers always seem to ask me about.
All of this was inspired by a friend who recently asked me:
“What was the best concert you ever saw?”
And that led me to offer that this was an impossible “ask” because I have been to thousands of concerts.
8Yes, thousands…
I’m honestly trying to add it all up and these Primary 28 stories of bands, artists and their impact on me will lead us there – into an even deeper exploration of the depth of interviews, photographs, concerts, friendships and moments that somehow accumulated while I was busy thinking I was merely going to work, going to shows and living my life “doing” sports radio but honestly never, ever listening to it.
There will be Hootie and Henley and Hagar.
There will be Buffett and Bono and Bon Jovi.
There will be giant stadiums with Genesis and church settings with R.E.M. I’ve done synagogue shows with Bryan Adams and Don Felder. I witnessed The Rembrandts play by candle light and Bodeans unplug their instruments and deliver songs “fireside” in sweaty bars.
There will be heroes who became acquaintances, acquaintances who became friends and friends whose songs sound very different now that they’re gone.
And there will be plenty of things I have forgotten until one of you reminds me.
8That’s part of the invitation!
Follow along twice a week and tell me what you remember because you probably saw these bands, too!
Send me a photograph, a memory – or correct mine if I got the date wrong!
Remind me who was in the car, who got sick at the show, which girlfriend used the men’s room at the Capital Centre to buck the line.
Tell me we were at the same show together (because, of course we were…)
Because after 28 years of WNST and nearly 35 years of Baltimore radio, I’m learning something about my own history:
I didn’t keep every ticket, save every photograph, audio interview recording and polish every mostly-sober memory around my rock and roll experience this far into the game to not memorialize it all while the sport of baseball will most certainly shut down again.
8Remember: music didn’t even shut down during the plague.
And we all know that Bon Scott had the biggest balls of them all…
I’ll still be here after the boys of summer are gone…
I certainly don’t remember every night, every show but I’m gonna try like hell to get that master list ready by December when my radio show turns 35 years old. I know it’s more than 2,000 but less than 4,000.
But somehow, the songs and shows and random artifacts actually kept the receipts for me and I’m gonna find out.
Now, I’ll be sharing it all with you. And I hope you’ll share your love of music with me…
