Cam Carpenter: Rock’n’Roll Rewind – High School Confidential

This week we rewind to high school in more ways than one. Buried deep in a box of rock memorabilia I stumbled upon a collection of my high school newspapers. Calling them a newspaper is a bit of a stretch as most of them are four or five sheets of mimeographed white or green paper and almost faded into obscurity.

Frank Gutch Jr: Death Becomes Relevant (A Look at Musicians Who Passed Over in 2014)…..

People die.  I know they do.  But the closer I come to the end myself, I become more reluctant to admit it.  When I was young, death was funerals.  You knew someone had passed by the crowd of well-dressed people lining the streets in front if a funeral home or the long line of cars passing by with lights on.  Or the number of people at a church on a weekday afternoon.  Or the serpentine of gatherers at a viewing, which at moments seemed to be a national event (the two which directly come to mind involving President Kennedy and Rudolph Valentino).  At that young age, death was a ritual.  I came to hate rituals.

Cameron Carpenter: The ABC’s Of Rock’n’Roll – Lists

I love lists, especially when they pertain to music.  I had a great chat with Now Weekly Editor/Publisher Michael Hollett last month as he was putting together the “50 Best Toronto Albums Ever” (which was Now’s cover story last week).  More on that later. My love of lists began in 1977 with the publication of “The Book Of Lists” written by David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace. As a teenager it quickly replaced the “Guinness Book Of World Records” as the time wasting no-brainer book that you could pick up anytime, turn to any page, and by mesmerized by the amount of fascinating trivia.