Bostworld

Why would anyone want to take a vacation right in the middle of the holiday season? A confluence of factors — coinciding free time availability, expiring vacation days, overwork and its attendant unstoppable urge to flee — caused my wife and I to travel cross country to visit the Florida Keys three weeks before Christmas [...]

We’re big fans of the Les Humphries Singers here at the Bostworld. Listening to the LHS is like mounting a helium-filled inner tube and sailing back in time, right over the the last 35 years of musical disappointment to a time when young singers would don funky futuristic costumes to sing in unison at their [...]

I tend to steer clear of downtown Phoenix these days. It seems every time I venture down there, I discover another of my old favorites consigned to the scrap heap or worse, a target for “renovation.” The cheerfully run-down squalorous downtown Phoenix of my childhood is all but gone, a victim of the kind of [...]

Tempe was still a pretty sleepy town when I moved there in 1985. It hadn’t changed much in the ten years since I first started visiting its head shops and record stores in my mid-teens. A block east of my house, downtown Mill Avenue was still “home to little more than biker bars, tattoo parlors, [...]

It’s finally starting to cool off around these parts. Soon enough, I’ll able to once again take actual road trips to parts of the state I haven’t seen yet. But the internet still continues to offer an adequate substitute for real experience. I’ve recently found a few great sites that are new to me at [...]

In this exclusive interview, Phoenix broadcasting legend and real estate celebrity “Wonderful” Russ Shaw reminisces about “Love Workshop,” the comedy show he co-created in 1976 with Tod Carroll for the progressive rock station KDKB-FM. He also shares stories about the early days of free-form radio in Phoenix and the various local luminaries he met along [...]

My “Love Workshop” collection finally reached critical mass last moth, thanks to fellow Phoenician and Verne & Craig enthusiast Wayne Butane. Wayne sent me a full five disks of shows, all lovingly digitized from his crumbling original cassettes. I managed to clean most of the hiss out of them, but they are far from master [...]