j.j. vicars

Bruce Sheehan grew up in Youngstown, OH aka "Murder city". By the mid-80's he had moved to Austin, TX and started up Jungle Records. "Youngstown and the northeast in general, it was the late 70's and it was very depressed…

Mike Buck is a cornerstone of Texas roots music. He played with damn near every Blues and Rockabilly legend during his early years and at the beginning of the 21st Century has backed many of the younger musicians. He's the…

Lynyrd Skynyrd toured Japan in 1977 playing 5 nights, Jan 14th -18th & 21st at Nakano Sun Plaza in Tokyo and Osaka Koseinenkinkaikan Hall. It was the only time the original band played there. Opening for them was Japan's top…

Ronnie James is living the dream that all musicians who grew up listening to the Roots Rock revival of Austin during the 80's dream of. While living in California he began his road career with Little Charlie & the Nightcats…

JoJo Billingsley was my favorite Honkette. Watching video clips of the original Lynyrd Skynyrd she immediately stands out among the backing vocalists. She has that look in her eye of being a real character, someone who eats life. Reading about…

One of the biggest cultural gaps I find being an American in Japan is old people. As much as they get on my nerves I do admire the old cockroaches. Constantly bumbling around, yakking at the top of their lungs…

Coffee shops over here are not like back home. They serve real coffee. The ones back home serve sugary coffee-flavored drinks with high fructose corn syrup and extra whip cream. Suburbanites in sloppy clothes indulging in a 'brand experience'.

The…

On Friday March 5th, 2010 I headed to Narita airport to board a plane for the U.S. Six years previous, while living in Las Vegas, I had left the States in a rush and hurriedly threw my stuff in storage…

The Southwest Spring Tour has been canceled. What started out with high hopes was seriously damaged by unnecessary aggravation, but that would turn out to be the least of it. There was more to it than I could know at…

British magazine Blues Matters informed me that they've passed on my Jill Jones article but intend to run the Lynyrd Skynyrd article I wrote for them. This greatly disappoints me for many reasons It seems that anybody who is not…

Over the holiday season Derek Sivers sent out an e-mail soliciting volunteers for his latest project. Various musicians would read one of his two favorite authors, Hugh MacLeod and Seth Godin, and write about how their ideas applied to being…

2009 was a rough year for a lot of folks, and I'm no exception, but as I sit here writing this on December 31st the good stands out and bad becomes "necessary self-correcting measures" The album I was working on,…