Brianland

If you’re a Cat Stevens fan — and you know who you are! — stop reading this. Close the link and go somewhere else. Anywhere. Keep your music and memories intact. Beautiful gardens are too hard to find in this world. . ============================================   Okay?  Nobody here who doesn’t want their bubble burst? Just makin […]

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. Here’s some early songs in sound and light . . . My tribute to the late great Carolyn Cassady on the one year anniversary of her passing … . Or “The Pranksters Invade the Woodstock Museum” . . . . Or here’s opening the Marry Prankster Reunion weekend in 2016 . . . . […]

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The Prankster Woodstock . “I’ve got to get back to the land and set my soul free … “ Two of the coolest events of the ’60s just came together in the 21st century — and I lived it from start to finish. The Merry Pranksters’ Bus, which pulled out of Ken Kesey’s house in […]

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. Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld were the Lennon & McCartney of comedy. That’s the way I see it, anyway. Larry was a Lennon — mercurial, opinionated, sharp tongued, bull-headed, idea generating, creatively uncompromising, a supremely gifted artist born to his medium, with an enormous elaborate expansive vision. And Jerry was the McCartney — an […]

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 Not Fade Away — Birthday Adventure 2014     The start of the Adventure.   Just home from the 5-show birthday blow-out!  Sheesh!  Started with New Orleans’ Soul Rebels outdoors in a park with my New Orleans Soul Brother Ross Perlmutter.  The funky brass-n-drums combo were joined for some songs by Toronto’s own frontline horndogs […]

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“The Taming of The Shoobeedoobie” . . “Next stop, Shakespeare’s Globe,” says the driver downstairs on the red double-decker bus winding its way through the narrow South Bank streets of London. I went early so I could do the official tour of the theater, and of course the guide was extremely well-versed, among other things […]

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 The Northport Report     Whale, we had another Jackfest — dancing with Big Sur by the Sea, My Brothers! — this time in Jack’s wave-lapping hometown of Northport, the idyllic little living Rockwell harbortown where he went to dock near the darkness of the city but still remain a slip away. I’m just back […]

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The Day I Heard The Tambourine Man          I, like others, was whisked away by the Gallatin genie just as I was about to drown in the requirements of my previous school.  If NYU hadn’t had a school-without-walls, I wouldn’t have graduated, if you want a soundbite about it.  The trade-off they offered was that […]

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.   The Boys Who Grew From Northern Lands for my dad — Vern Victor Hassett From playing hockey with homegrown pucks, To riding in the back of pick-up trucks, Under cloudless, beating prairie skies, Chasing the girls with the prettiest eyes, Riding the roads from farm to boomtown, Working the land from Rose to […]

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Every Day Is A Gift   by Brian Hassett Every day you’re alive is a gawd-damned gift.  And that’s the whole shot, as Gregory Corso would say. Try adding up all the times your Indomitable Spirit was challenged but did not topple in a deathly firestorm of adversity.  There’s probably been a hundred of them, […]

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