Last week, I met up with a group of Brazilians, visiting the U.S. for the first time. The highlight of our conversation was a rundown of the cities they were most excited to visit: Mesa, Arizona; Salt Lake City, Utah; Boise, Idaho; Little Rock, Arkansas; Birmingham, Alabama, etc. We tried to persuade them to include Cincinnati, Ohio; Omaha, Nebraska and Champaign, Illinois, but they claimed they didn’t have the time.
I commend our visitors for compiling such a mundane itinerary. To be sure, it’s the ordinary little details of a vacation that give its memories such resonance. During our recent trip to Scotland, when we weren’t busily cramming as much as we could into our schedule, we were hard at work parsing the landscape as we went along. As the navigator, it was my job to bark out instructions and sights of interest.
No matter what folks do on Sunday, they like to party on Saturday night. Back in the late seventies, if you liked to dance you did the Hustle. That’s what people did back then. Despite the enthusiastic drubbing it used to receive at the hands of rock fans back then (not to mention racists and gay bashers), disco was always at heart a populist entertainment. And though “roots” has always been a topic of fierce contention among country critics, I have to commend the artists in this anthology for casting off theirs in pursuit of contemporary popularity.
Once upon a time, a Nebraska High school class produced two lovers. It was the 1930′s and prudence was the mode of the day. Their parents were both tea totaling Methodists. He played the piano in a jazz combo. He used to say that what it took was eight hours of practice a day and if you weren’t willing to put forth that much effort, you might as well forget it. The band had a trap set, banjo, trumpet and piano, and played the works of all the greats — Miller, Ellington, the Dorseys — as well as their own compositions.
With great regret, my wife and I have returned home after a week in Scotland. If it weren’t for our cats and our jobs, we might not have bothered to return at all. Compulsively planned as always, the brief trip was crammed with long days of 
Whenevever I’m asked who my favorite drummers are, I’ll usually rattle off a list of disappointingly obscure studio musicians. Most of ‘em played on pop and disco records; not too many of them were rockers. But the daddy of them all will always be the great