It is with great sadness that we recognize the passing of the Quiet Riot singer, Kevin DuBrow. No details are, as yet, available about the cause of death, and a spokesman for the family is asking that, at the very least, people keep speculation to themselves. We choose to honor that request, and hope that you do likewise. Kevin Dubrow was 52.

On this most important of holidays, we would like to take just a moment to say “Thank You” to all of the fine men and women serving in our armed forces, and a special thanks to those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan today. We thank you for the sacrifices you are making, and are saddened as we sit down with our families, knowing that your fight for our freedom is keeping you from yours. Our prayers are with you.

A lot of great (and not so great) bands have gotten their start practicing in an old garage. Recently, we began looking into what it would take to make the acoustics a wee bit better in ours, and discovered that garage flooring is an important part of that. Our old stained and cracked cement floor needs to be recovered, and it looks like tile may be the way to go. I guess we will be consulting people who know a bit more about it than we do! We certainly wouldn’t want the world to miss out on a great new sound just because we have a rotten garage!

If we are going to talk about all the music from all the decades, it would be remiss if we did not include examples of the heavy metal from the eighties. I never cared much for it, but my daughter went through a period of liking it. This was one of the songs that deafened us for a time during her teen years… Quiet Riot’s MAMA WEER ALL CRAZEE NOW. (And, as the Momma in my house, this song was enough to MAKE you crazy!)

The name Bobby Dann doesn’t always spark a lot of recollection, even among music fans. Bobby Dann died in December of 1973, and so has not stayed in the spotlight. To my knowledge, he had only one big hit. What follows is his final television performance, which occurred nine months before his death. I am categorizing this in two places here, because the performance was done in the seventies but it is a sixties hit… SPLISH SPLASH.

Elton John is a living legend. There are very few people who would disagree with that, though his, um, tendencies… tend to make you question his love songs. His beautiful voice overrides that for his fans. NIKITA, one of his most beautiful songs ever, came out in the mid eighties, when my daughter was still in high school. The song, about an American man in love with a woman from the USSR, hit the charts just about five years before the breakup of the Soviet Union. Presumably the mythical couple are now sunning themselves in LA. I hope you enjoy this song as much as she and I both do.