Darrell Vickers – It’s Only Words: How Hollywood Made Me Thicke to My Thtomache

I became a professional scribe at the tender, pre-Tinder, age of 18. Since the halcyon days of my humble, date-free youth, words have fed my family and made it possible for me to accumulate a record collection that would sink most medium-size boats. While I have enjoyed an unreasonable amount of success through the decades, armed with only pen in hand and the dictionary in my head, in show business there is forever a micro-thin line between gainful employment and having to mug a giant-arrow-spinning condo clown for his Subway coupons. This is the harrowing, tongue-swallowing tale of how a couple of simple words almost cost me my entire Hollywood career, just as it was breaching the birth canal.

JAIMIE VERNON – BULLSOGRAPHY: Sneak Peek #1

With my ‘True Tales From a Cemetery Cop’  being released October 3 I’ve finally returned to finish writing the book I promised a year ago – the history of Bullseye Records of Canada.

JAIMIE VERNON – THE GRAND SONG CARAVAN

Excerpted from the upcoming Bullseye Records 30th Anniversary book “Bullsography”

Darrell Vickers: Thicke of the Night Part Two – Location, Location, Location.

Part One can be found here.

When poised, teetering precariously on the very edge of a vast and black eternity, most of us will gaze back reflectively upon those pivotal moments in our brief time on this green Earth. The roads taken and the byways left untraveled. The friends made and the bastards who stole your girl. The victories briefly celebrated and the losses bitterly mourned and gone over and over and over again in your head until foul and ugly thoughts begin to rage like a demonic Jovian storm within you. Your cranial synapses start to explode like overcooked popcorn and all sense and reason is frantically cast aside as you are sucked down, flailing and screaming into a soul-shredding vortex of irreversible madness…but I digress.

Roxanne Tellier – A Canadian Summer

There is something so uniquely .. well, Canadian … about how we as a country approach the season of summer.

This year, the majority of us, bruised and battered by the wickedly fierce winter weather, are cautiously optimistic that the sun will again rise over the commonwealth. In fact, the big headline in the Toronto Sun on June 3^rd was “Weather Network chief meteorologist Chris Scott said everyone can expect a “fairly pleasant summer.”  Can’t get more cautious or Canadian than that, eh?

Darrel Vickers:The Long and the Short of It

Andrew and I have had the honor of working for three legendary geniuses during our higgledy-piggledy writing career.  One was Johnny Carson.  The second was George Carlin.  This is the story of the third.

The Beginning….

Once upon a time, two young and impoverished Canadian writers were sitting in a cramped, cockroach infested apartment in Van Nuys (The Oshawa of L.A.) with no prospects and virtually no hope.  They had bravely ventured down to this mystical land of tinsel and broken dreams a scant six months earlier and were now facing the ominous fate of having to go back to Oshawa (the Oshawa of Oshawa)…and it was all their own fault!

Darrell Vickers: South of the Border, Down Status Quo Way

If you could walk inside your own ear and travel back to the very first sound you ever heard, what would be some of the stops you’d make along the way?  For me, one of those stations would have to be the beneficent and glorious wire racks of used albums at Star Records, in the ever-so-humble town of Oshawa. (Miraculously, the store is still there, so hie on down!)  Oh, the many hours I would spend inside that noble sound emporium, sifting through the aural dross in search of precious slices of black gold, containing cheap, non-scratched-to-shit, auditory feasts of ultimate transcendence.