Who knew? While the Beatles (raised on American Rock 'n' Roll) were perfecting their sound in the waterfront clubs of Hamburg, Germany,...

My two sons were surprised. None of their high schools friends had ever heard of the Byrds. They’d heard of the Beatles—of course—and...

When I was 12-years old, my brother brought home from the public library “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. Judging by the title (and by his reason for reading the book) I thought it was about how to manipulate people to get what you wanted, and therefore somehow sinister. Flash forward 30 years, and now working for a large midwest company with customer problems galore, and a host of front-line employees without a clue in how to deal with them, I f

While making the motion picture "Grand Prix" in 1966, filmmaker John Frankenheimer went to Reims, site of that year's French Grand Prix,...

In an age of political cynicism, name calling, and deep political division (where political opponents are routinely demonized), it's...

Book Review: The Infidel and the Professor, by Dennis C. Rasmussen The “infidel” is David Hume and “the professor” is Adam Smith, two...

Henry Manney, wit, sage, and European Editor for ROAD & TRACK magazine in the 1960s, would stand behind a stone barn outside Burnenville...

Of all the great composers, none had a bigger ego than Richard Wagner (pronounced Ree-card Vawg-ner). Wagner (1813-1883) was famously...

Frank Sinatra was famous for “My Way”— the song and what it said about him. Music was personal for Sinatra. It was the one thing in his...

At the age of eight he was playing piano and composing music that your high-school music teacher could only dream of doing. It was only a...

“Roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news,” sang Chuck Berry in one of Rock’s classics. It seems Pyotr (that's Peter to you)...

Beatles' producer George Martin called him "The Three-Minute Mozart". He was referring to Paul McCartney, of course, and to his gift for...

Robert Schumann achieved fame in the mid-nineteenth century--after Beethoven, and before Brahms and Wagner were recognized as musical...

Not all composers possess gigantic egos. Franz Schubert is a case in point. Shy, quiet, bespectacled, known but to a small cadre of...

Orchestral music had moved from the parlors of the nobility and into the public forums by the time Johannes Brahms made his mark in the...

If you were in Vienna in, say, 1780, and looking for the world-famous composer Wolfgang Mozart, chances are you’d find him at the local...

It took a year-and-a-half of waiting in anterooms, of personal humiliations, of lobbying the government for official recognition, and of...

How does he do it? Joan Baez wanted to know. How does Bob Dylan write such folk classics as “Masters Of War” and “Only A Pawn In Their...

The California of the 1850s that greeted the first wave of American settlers was primarily comprised of large, fenceless cattle ranches...

It seems ironic, even cruel, that the quintessential British racing driver, Graham Hill, should never have won the British Grand Prix. ...