Robert Rosen

The earliest video of Stephen Stills I could find is from his show at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ, March 23, 1979, five years after the concert I saw at Carnegie Hall.

I continue to excavate the detritus of the 1970s as I assemble a book about an underground newspaper at City College in the days of open admissions and free tuition. The other day I came across a music review I wrote, published in the February 13, 1974, issue of Observation Post. In the span of a month I'd seen Bob Dylan and The Band at Madison Square Garden, Joni Mitchell at Radio City, and Stephen Stills at Carnegie Hall.

Stills is the one I discussed in-depth. A blizzard paralyzed New York the night of the show, February 8. Only a sparse crowd showed up. I thought it would make for an intimate evening. But, I wrote, it was the kind of concert "that can make you never want to go to a concert again." Stills alienated himself from the audience. I said he acted like "a prick."

He opened strong with a rousing "Love the One You're With" but after three songs walked offstage and took his band with him. Twenty minutes later he returned alone to apologize. "If you're wondering why I'm acting so uptight," he said, "it's because the organ went out in the middle of the set. I've seen a lot of bands fall apart over a lot less. If you think I'm making excuses, I'm not."

I thought he was making excuses.

He launched into a solo acoustic set but got tripped up on the lyrics for "4 + 20" and "Blackbird." When he played a new song that wasn't greeted with enthusiastic applause, he said, "I like that song. I'm sorry if I bored you."

The band, recovered from their organ issues, came back and rocked out on songs like "Bluebird," the Buffalo Springfield classic. Stills and company were on the verge of redeeming themselves. But just when it seemed the crowd had forgotten what happened at the beginning, he waved goodbye and everybody walked offstage. The mandatory encore, "a half-hearted '49 Bye-Byes,'" was met with a standing ovation in an attempt to coax a few more songs out of him. But the "cheers turned to boos" when the audience realized Stills wasn't coming back. The show was over.

I spent 14 bucks on two orchestra seats (a lot of money at that time) and had fun tearing his performance apart. But on the basis of Déjà Vu alone, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young remain one of my favorite bands of all time.

_______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

Dak Mills, an easygoing New Yorker, wanted to talk about all aspects of my life and career on his podcast Comfortable Being Uncomfortable. And I was completely comfortable chatting with him about the three books I've published—Nowhere Man, Beaver Street, and A Brooklyn Memoir—as well as the untitled book I'm writing about an underground student newspaper at City College in the 1970s, as the antiwar movement was giving way to the despair of punk. So Dak and I jump around from the days of free tuition and open admissions, to John Lennon's dairies, to industrialized pornography, to post-traumatic stress disorder in Flatbush in the aftermath of WWII. I even throw in some hard-earned writing advice.

Please do give it a listen, either on YouTube (above) or on Spotify, Apple, or iHeart.

_______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

Colombia is one of the many Spanish-speaking countries where readers embraced Nowhere Man: Los últimos días de John Lennon. The book appeared on best-seller lists, and El Heraldo, in Barranquilla—the newspaper where Gabriel García Márquez once worked as a reporter and columnist—ran an excerpt as the cover story in their Sunday magazine supplement.

This was back in the mid-2000s, but Colombia's fascination with Nowhere Man continues. The other week, the book came to the attention of a columnist at the first newspaper to publish Márquez, El Espectador, in Bogotá. (I keep mentioning Márquez because the Venezuelan newspaper Últimas Noticias listed Nowhere Man as one of "Five Indispensable Books" along with Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.) Novelist and poet Luis Fernando Charry's May 4 column is titled "Los últimos días de Lennon
." (You can also access it on MSN.)

He starts out talking about the multitude of Lennon biographies and memoirs, including books by Albert Goldman, Philip Norman, Cynthia Lennon, May Pang, and John Green. This is a setup for his impressions of Nowhere Man. I wouldn't agree with all of Charry's interpretations. I don't know why, for example, he finds Lennon's yoga sessions "disturbing" or why he implies that Yoko Ono was a student of yoga (she wasn't). But he does a good job of making the book sound interesting, describing such things as Lennon's paradoxical diet that wavered between health food and sweets; his obsession with his weight; the "miracle" of his son Sean's birth; and how fatherhood had an adverse effect on his career. This being Latin America, he also mentions that the New York Daily News mistakenly reported that Ono worked for the CIA. And he ends, of course, on how Mark David Chapman put an end to the legend.

I'll count it as a positive review.

Which brings us to the perennial question: Why has Nowhere Man endured for 24 years? The short answer: Because people keep reading it and writing about it. I hope they continue.

_______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

My semi-annual journey to West Palm Beach to visit my mother, Eleanor Rosen, in her assisted-living facility coincided with Passover this year. The facility, Morse Life, observes the holiday. As we were sitting under an umbrella in the lush garden, an aide brought my mother her lunch, matzo pizzas consisting of tomato sauce and melted kosher-for-Passover mozzarella cheese on matzo. I reminded her of all the good food she used to prepare for Passover when I was living at home.

My mother is one of the main characters in A Brooklyn Memoir, a book she hasn't been able to read due to failing eyesight. In the book, set in the 1950s and 60s, I describe her as a magician in the kitchen who often cooked gourmet meals like crêpes suzette. When I visit, she likes me to read to her from the book. In honor of her 97th Passover, I read from her favorite chapter, 15, "The Flatbush Diet":

Sometimes on weekends, she'd whip up a batch of blueberry pancakes or a cheese omelet or cinnamon toast or French toast (often made with challah), occasionally with a serving of ambrosia-like bacon on the side. Though we routinely consumed other pig meats as well—notably pork chops and ham—we also observed Passover. And to make more bearable those eight days of giving up virtually every food I liked to eat, my mother made a mouthwatering matzoh brei, latkes as light as feathers, and a sponge cake that she then transformed into a strawberry shortcake so delectable it seemed to defeat the very purpose of the holiday—to remember the suffering and deprivations of the Jews who'd wandered in the desert for 40 years.

And the only reason I can think of that she didn't add matzo pizzas—a variation on English-muffin pizzas—to her repertoire is because kosher-for-Passover mozzarella cheese hadn't been invented yet.

_______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.

On May Day, as the majority of Americans wallow in the misery of Donald Trump, I've returned to the 1970s to explore some of that old-time misery. In the book I'm working on, Nixon is president; Agnew is vice president; teenagers are being drafted out of high school and sent to Vietnam to die for the greater glory of Nixon-Agnew; and people in Berkeley, like the Red Star Singers, are writing and recording songs like "Pig Nixon."

I came upon a reference to "Pig Nixon" in the January 24, 1974, issue of Observation Post (OP), the radical/pornographic student newspaper at the City College of New York that's the main setting for my work in progress. The title intrigued me and sure enough, more than 50 years later, there it was on YouTube. So I gave it a listen, and can only wonder why a song this catchy got no radio play that I'm aware of. Fortunately, OP's music critic knew about it.

Now we need a song about that other ex-president who continues to set new standards for piggishness. Everybody should sing it.

_______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on X or my eternally embryonic Instagram or my recently launched Threads.