Don Everett Pearce: News/Blog

 

“They” say that the famous, legendary, iconic (and oddly triangular) diner seen in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting was a real-life restaurant that existed on the corner of Greenwich Avenue & 7^th Avenue in New York City in the 1940s. It turns out that “they” are most likely mistaken and that this widely-held belief may be little more than an urban legend.

 

 

Last night I took out an old favorite; Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. It’s a glorious, unrefined, masterful, poetic mess of an album. I’ve been in love with this record since about 5 years after I first bought it as a double LP. At age 19, I just wasn’t ready for it and it took me a few years to warm up to it. At first it struck me as too ramshackle and shrill. It sounded like out-of-tune circus rock with a drunken brass section. His singing on this record has an absurdly comic swagger, with those long, lazy vowel sounds in the phrasing that still stand as the classic Dylan caricature.

All of these reasons why I didn’t like it then are all the same reasons why I love it now.

 

It’s been 2-and-a-half years since I’ve written a song. I don’t mind admitting to that because the truth is that I haven’t actually tried to write a song in all that time. First I was busy finishing up The Last Dive in Town (recording, mixing, cover art) and then I was busy learning to be a dad (an ongoing project).

 
A 52-year-old drive-in burger joint, a landmark of mid-20th Century Southern California teen cruising culture, in all its space age glass and neon Googie-style glory, gets a new lease on life after suffering years of neglect and the blows of a wrecking ball at the hands of its leaseholder.

Opened in 1958 on Firestone Boulevard near Old River School Road on the west edge of the city of Downey (a quintessential Los Angeles suburb and then-new frontier of middle class optimism in the Beaver Cleaver era), Harvey’s Broiler was born the same year that the first great teen angst anthem “Summertime Blues” was released. Rockabilly star Eddie Cochran lived just about a mile away as the crow flies – or as the T-Bird flies – from Harvey’s and he may or may not have hung out there somewhere between the time his song shot up the charts and the time his life came to an end just two years later. It’s said that all the kids went to Harvey’s so you [...]

 
It’s already been a few days, but I can’t let the passing of J.D. Salinger go by without some kind of comment from my little corner of the internet about his signature work.

Catcher in the Rye was just about the only novel among those I had to read in high school that didn’t bore me to death. Unlike the others (Pride & Prejudice, Cry the Beloved Country, Candide, Passage to India or whatever-by-Shakespeare to name a few), Catcher in the Rye spoke to me through the voice of its misfit anti-hero/protagonist, Holden Caulfield, in a language that I could relate to. There was nothing wrong with those other books, I just couldn’t relate to them when I was a teen. Catcher struck me as so fresh and relevant that it was hard to believe I was reading it forty years after its first publication.
I won’t get into any long-winded analysis or personal takes here, even though it’s tempting to do because of the fun I’ve had reading this book over the [...]