Knock and Knowall

Concert Review by Eric Sandberg Like the Dodgers at Chavez Ravine, The Fab Four are playing a four game home stand which began Thursday evening at the Canyon Club in Santa Clarita, followed by the Rose in Pasadena last night, with the final two gam...er...shows at The Saban Theater tonight and the Canyon in Agoura Hills Sunday. If last night's show at the Rose is any indication, you must buy, steal or Lyft yourself into one of these remaining shows if you live in the greater Los Angeles area. The Fab Four have never sounded, or looked, better.  After two support acts [the first played while I was eating a Holy Aoli burger at the Dog Haus on Hill Street, and the second as I sat on the Rose's patio checking on the aforementioned Dodgers] and a hilarious introduction by Ed Sullivan impersonator/stand up comedian George Trullinger, The Fab Four promptly took the stage at 9:00 PM, dressed in their accurate Shea Stadium finery, and played a sparkling set of favorites from...

Album review by Eric Sandberg In 2019, the era of fourteen writers and producers on one song, there is no better sound to hear on a record than the buzzing of a single coil guitar pickup fed through an analog spring reverb — a sound that signals what you are about to hear could just be perfect in its imperfection.  In order to achieve such perfect imperfection it seems one must travel to the northern Sahara and Niger to seek out Mdou Moctar  a Taureg (not the Volkswagen) musician who is the first to play traditional Berber music with an electric guitar — a lefty Fender Stratocaster, no less. Moctar was raised in a strict religious family where music was not permitted. He made his first guitar out of a plank with wire and nails. After years of practicing in secret Moctar earned his living playing at weddings. He was discovered by the western world via cell phone recordings of his performances collected by tourists. Eventually some genius went out of his way to deliver ...

 Interview: Thirty Odd Minutes With Stewart O'Nan Interview by Eric Sandberg At fifty-eight years young, Stewart O'Nan has seen seventeen of his works of fiction published along with two non-fiction books, one of which is Faithful [with Stephen King] a best-selling bleachers-eye-view of the first championship season for the Boston Red Sox since Babe Ruth was traded. All of this since he, with the full support of his saintly wife, Trudy, abandoned his career as an Aerospace engineer to earn his MFA, ultimately publishing his first collection of short stories In The Walled City [Drew Heinz Literary Prize for Literature] in 1993. His first novel Snow Angels was adapted as a film and at least two other novels are in pre-production with names like Tom Hanks and Emily Watson being bandied about. Early in his career, Granta named him one of America's best young novelists. Stewart O'Nan and I both grew up in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill. We went ...