1969: The year that was, still is, and always will be. Resistance is futile.

Everything you need to know about this one can be found in the title...


CURSE YOU, DAVE BINDER AND YOUR VERY BRIEF DEADLINE-SURFING ANSWERS TO MY E-MAILED INTERVIEW QUESTIONS!

A heavily researched panic attack by David O’Connell

(published September 18, 2003 in The York Dispatch under a shorter, less self-referential title)
What do you get when you type the name “Dave Binder” into an Internet search engine?

Among other things, you wind up with links to the many Dave Binders of the world. A few of them are athletic minded individuals: Dave Binder of Decatur, Ga. recently took home a first place trophy in a local “golf gala," while another Dave Binder tends to the walking wounded as the University of New Mexico’s head athletics trainer.

Some of them should probably get out a bit more often; for instance, Dave Binder of the Illinois Dave Binders Local 151 recently “dungeonmastered” a Star Wars role-playing game that, in the words of a fellow player, was “unique” and “really neat.”

To ignore other Dave Binders might cost you your life: Dave Binder’s work as a member of the Emergency Film Group of Edgartown, Mass. has taught us important lessons on how to handle anhydrous ammonia, a dangerous gas that can severely burn the eyes, lungs and throat.

Perhaps the strangest Dave Binder of them all is Dave Binder of Coupeville, Wash., who for $20 will teach interested persons the obscure art of “napkin folding," in which ordinary napkins can be transformed into candlesticks, bagpipes, or elf’s shoes.

Though all of these Dave Binders play important roles in American society, one Dave Binder stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of popularity (or number of Internet mentions, anyway) and that is folk singer Dave Binder.

Oddly enough, this Dave Binder is somewhat at odds with the Internet. Yes, he does have his own website, http://www.davebinder.com, and uses it to promote upcoming concerts such as the “1969: The Year That Rocked The World” extravaganza taking place Thursday night on the Penn State York campus.

And yet the whole purpose of a show like “1969” is to take us back to a simpler time when the Internet didn’t exist, a time when putting together a list of America’s many Dave Binders was not the easy task that it is today. An age when the CD format on which Binder’s six albums are available was merely a gleam in a Dutch physicist’s eye. Why, back in 1969, Binder was ten years away from playing his first show, and more than two decades away from receiving the first of ten consecutive Campus Entertainer of the Year Award nominations. Life’s been very good to him since 1969, in fact, so why the look back?

“It started in 1989 when I realized that no one was doing a twenty-year Woodstock tribute,” explains Binder, a 47-year old Massachusetts native. “It grew from there as I realized all the other events of that year.”

Binder’s show takes the big hits of the “Summer of ‘69” and places them into context alongside the landmark events of the day. For instance, a discussion of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon segues into a solo acoustic rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” From the Beatles to Richard Nixon, no important musical or historical figures are left out of this unique tribute, just one of several theme shows Binder puts on for college audiences across the country.

Catch Binder one night and you might see him in full James Taylor drag, leading a sing-along of “You’ve Got A Friend” as he strums his way through “Fire and Rain: An Evening of James Taylor.” See him on a college campus, and you might get to witness Dave whipping a group of incoming freshman into shape through his “Orientation” program of songs and sketches. (Perhaps something like that is in the cards for his Saturday morning show at York College of Pennsylvania.) On other occasions, you might get to watch him squirm as he takes “Any Reasonable Request," an improvisational show where the audience dictates the set list and dares Dave to “play it or fake it.” Regardless of which Dave Binder show you take in, you can rest assured that at no time will you be asked to fold a napkin into the shape of a duck. Dave “Folk Singer” Binder himself guarantees it.

-Dave O'Connell

We are family...or were, anyway

The following story was written in Duck, North Carolina, in the Outer Banks. Not that it had to be: the subject matter required absolutely no travel whatsoever. I could have done the writing and the phone interviews from York and all would have been fine and dandy.

Exactly why didn't I do that, anyway?

Like all good musical pseudo-families---The Thompson Twins, Bros., MFSB---Ashley and her relatives would soon become “estranged” from one another. In this particular case, it proves that a blood bond is stronger than one born out of newspaper ads and stalking.

LIVE FROM CODORUS PARK: ASHLEY MARIE & FAMILY WHO ARE NOT ACTUALLY FAMILY

WITH SPECIAL GUESTS MORE NOT FAMILY AND EVEN MORE NOT FAMILY

By David O’Connell

(published in The York Dispatch on June 26, 2003, sans stupid headline)
At first glance, the band name Ashley Marie & Family gives off all the wrong vibes. One expects an aggressively wholesome family combo, with a cloying child vocalist strutting about the stage, smothering the audience with truckloads of sass. Lots of hand clapping, corny skits, that kind of thing.

So it’s a surprise to find that Ashley Marie is a full-grown, 20-year-old singer, and her “family” consists of rock ‘n’ roll musicians who bear no familial relation to her at all.

In fact, the “family” in the band’s name comes from a comment guitarist Chris Bell made one night in a state of post-gig euphoria. “We had signed a lot of autographs and a million people had told us we were the greatest,” says Marie. “We were sitting there patting each other on the back and our guitar player said 'I never thought when I joined this band that I would have this much fun. You guys are like family to me.'”

Being a caring, sensitive bunch, the other band members laughed at his syrupy comment and ridiculed him for weeks. Marie even played up his gushy remark at gigs, pointing to her bassist and calling him “Dad,” and confusing more than a few audience members in the process.

The joke wound up sticking, which is why a group with the name Ashley Marie & Family will be taking the stage at Saturday’s 'Codorus Summer Blast', lifting off June 28 from Codorus Park. In addition to Ashley’s close-knit clan, the event will also feature veteran oldies band Pentagon, as well as The Colgan Brothers Band.

Though Ashley wasn’t the precocious show-off in a family country band as a kid, the truth is not much different. “I got ridiculed in school for my deep, manly voice, so I had to put a good use to it,” she says. “My local 4-H had a performing arts club, and they provided the entertainment for the Carroll County Fair in Maryland. One year, I got the opportunity to sing a few songs to taped backgrounds, and afterward everyone kept requesting that I sing more.”

From that karaoke launching pad, Marie’s star shot into the stratosphere. A writer from The Baltimore Sun penned an article on the preternaturally talented youngster, and a local TV station put together a piece on the little starlet. At the age of fourteen, she entered a Baltimore-area talent search and walked away with the top prize, allowing her the opportunity to open for Martina McBride and record a solo CD.

All the hype proved beneficial in 1997, when Marie decided to form her own band. “The best thing is that we had gigs lined up before we were a band, due to the publicity behind my name,” she says. “I was singing in a local club as part of the house band, and people were coming in and offering to book me at other places. So I formed my own band.”

In the grand tradition of countless other musical ventures, Marie’s band was assembled through the timeless magic of newspaper ads. Within a few weeks, they even had their very own stalker, whom they soon put to good use.

“A month after the ad had run, this gentlemen named Dave Staccone called up and said 'I’m going to be your bass player', like it was a fait accompli or something," recalls Marie. “I told him that we already had a bass player, but we’ll keep you in mind if anything happens---expecting him never to call again. The very next night, he phoned again and said, 'Hey, has that bass player quit yet, because I know I’m going to be your bass player.'

“So I asked him who he had played with, and he came back with all these really big names, like the Everly Brothers. I thought, either this guy is full of it or he’s got a great resume.”

A stalker’s greatest tool is persistence, and it eventually paid dividends for Staccone, making him one of our country’s more accomplished stalkers. “Our bassist had family obligations, and couldn’t keep to our touring schedule, so Dave ended up stepping in,” she says. “He was great. Later on, he said, 'See, I told you I was going to be your bass player.'”

With the missing piece of the puzzle in place, the quintet set about playing club gigs. They signed with Mirasound, a European subsidiary of EMI, and released a CD of non-original material in 2001. They are currently working on a new CD, with Marie and her 'relatives' determined to exercise more creative control over this project.

“We have so much material that it would be silly to do other people’s songs,” asserts Marie.

That job will fall to Pentagon, the Rich Clare-led outfit known for their oldies medleys and between-song comedy sketches. Formed in 1971, Pentagon has played everywhere from Harrah’s in Atlantic City (for 31 straight weeks) to the QEII (for a Steve Allen-hosted variety special) to this year’s Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire 'Blast From The Past' festival (where the elements won out and drenched them in a torrential downpour.)

In the 80s, Clare and company played casinos during the day and clubs at night, penning more than 200 originals in a bid for a major-label record deal. A number of labels, including Geffen, showed interest, but nothing ever materialized. Disillusioned, two members jumped ship, and Clare retired from performing to manage the group full-time. Five years later, Clare embraced what we would now call his “inner Michael Jordan” and came out of retirement, leading Pentagon through the 90s with the band’s only other remaining original member, Jim Colestock.

In 2001, the band released their 30th anniversary CD, bearing the logical title of Pentagon 30, and celebrated the milestone with a show at Hersheypark.

Clare describes the live show with the sort of confidence that naturally springs from three decades of touring: “I have pretty good business savvy. I know what it takes to entertain folks without compromising what we do. The band has always rocked, and on top of that, we do music that people know and we do it well.”

Another band offering their take on other people’s music at the Codorus Blast is The Colgan Brothers Band. Built around the nucleus of siblings Brian and Pat Colgan, this quartet runs the gamut from harmony-drenched acoustic music to straight ahead rock ‘n’ roll.

Brian credits his family as his inspiration for performing: “The Colgan family has always been pretty musical. We had aunts and uncles who played piano and were in jazz bands. We took piano lessons and were exposed to a lot of music while we were growing up.”

After a fifteen-year run and one CD release, the Colgan Brothers are about to call it quits. However, Brian plans to form a new band and concentrate on writing and recording his own original material.

In addition to a seemingly neverending supply of music, the Codorus Summer Blast will feature fireworks, hot air balloons, and a series of educational displays. For those of you who want to be photographed inside a giant strawberry, your strangeness will help benefit the Make-A-Wish foundation. There will also be a craft show and various exhibits on display.

-Dave O'Connell

Read this article, win free bling!

As this blog's title indicates, this is stuff I wrote because various editors told me to. First up is the very first article I ever submitted for publication in a newspaper, which also contains the very first interview the subject of the piece had ever done for a newspaper. So without further adieu, our mutual deflowering...

THE NOMADIC PROFESSOR AND HER FRIENDS THE HONDURAN CURLY TARANTULA, THE HAMMER-SHAPED CHECK CANCELLER, AND THE PIECE OF TILE FROM EVA BRAUN’S BATHROOM
By David O’Connell
(originally appeared under a more mundane title in The York Dispatch on May 22, 2003)
Have you ever wanted to view a collection of Iranian ram heads? Brush up on 6,000 years of grain-related history? Delve into the fine art of Moravian pottery and tile craft?

If so, then you are a mighty strange beast and just the sort of kindred spirit Therese Boyd is looking for. Her excellent new book, The Best You've Never Seen: Pennsylvania's Small Museums--A Traveler's Guide (Penn State University Press, 224 pp. $18.95), rounds up 42 of the more bizarre and obscure tourist traps to be found in the Keystone State, including the Toy Robot Museum in Adamstown and Mr. Ed's Elephant Museum in Ortanna.

Some are located along major thoroughfares, others accessible only by gravel roads. One thing they all have in common, however, is a mission to preserve the arcane elements of our culture overlooked by the larger, better endowed historical landmarks.

Over a two-year period, Boyd visited hundreds of museums, including a few uncovered purely by chance. In the process, she petted a Honduran curly tarantula, submitted to a theological interrogation at the hands of a Bible-thumping curator, and played with an old-fashioned hammer-shaped check canceller, all while jotting down notes for what would become her first published book.

A notable (if reluctant) co-star in this travelogue is Annie, Boyd’s 11-year-old niece. Poor Annie’s life is turned upside down by her wicked aunt, who tries to indoctrinate her into the anachronistic world of doo-wop music by subjecting her to brutal four-part harmony torture at the National Vocal Groups Hall of Fame & Museum.

Bravely, she resists this onslaught of good-time oldies, but Boyd exacts revenge on the plucky Platters-proof preadolescent with her backup plan: a trip to the dreaded Insectarium, forcing the arachnophobic Annie to confront her eight-legged archenemies.

At a stop at the Horseshoe Curve in Altoona, Annie sidles up to a Norfolk Southern freight train, no doubt preparing to signal the engineers and workmen for assistance in fleeing her bookwormish captor, but Boyd’s watchful eye ensures that no rail-riding escape is made. The book leaves Annie’s ultimate fate up in the air, but one thing’s for sure: those barbershop quartet scars will never heal.

Part diary, part history lesson, part coolest travel brochure you’ll ever come across, this book does what a good travel guide is supposed to do: make you forget that you’re reading a travel guide. Therese Boyd has succeeded in assembling a volume that could very well make more than a few readers want to cast aside their domestic chores and embark on that road trip they’ve been planning in their minds for years. I, for one, am looking forward to being raked over the ecumenical coals, frontier-style, at the Tom Mix Museum, a shrine to the great Hollywood cowboy of the ‘50s.

And yet the question remains: how did a mild-mannered book reviewer (and one-time Dispatch contributor) wind up leading a double life as an Americana-seeking part-time nomad? A reawakened sense of wanderlust, perhaps? Maybe a profound disillusionment with traditional museum culture?

The truth is far more mundane. “The idea came from a friend of mine,” explains Boyd, 45. “She works for Penn State Press and thinks up ideas for good regional-themed books. One day she came to me and said, ‘Hey, you know what would be good for you to write about?’ and suggested a guidebook of small museums. She was right. It was a good idea. It was little me, a little my publisher, a little discussion with my friends and family---totally a cooperative effort of many people.”

And so began this odyssey that would take her through 28 different counties and introduce to her such unlikely historical figures as Christian Sanderson, a packrat of world-class proportions.

“He’s just got the most unbelievable collection of stuff that is supposed to be connected to history, whether it's his or somebody else’s,” she says of the deceased schoolteacher whose namesake museum showcases, among other obscurities, a piece of tile from Eva Braun’s bathroom and the shoestrings Sanderson wore to Harry Truman’s inauguration.

A love of the obscure is indeed helpful, though not a prerequisite for those interested in these peripheral landmarks. Boyd separated the book-worthy museums from the also-rans not according the hipster notion of ‘the more esoteric, the better’, but by a far simpler barometer.

“I had to like it,” she explains. “There had to be something that grabbed me personally. I was totally selfish. If there was something there that I thought was interesting, or something I thought people weren’t going to know about without reading my book, then I put it in.”

One museum in particular that grabbed Boyd’s attention was the Music Box Museum in Ephrata. “That one really surprised me. I expected a bunch of little music boxes, and what I got instead were these enormous, gorgeous pieces of art that just happened to be music boxes,” she marvels.

Along the way, Boyd also learned a few things about the proprietors of these unorthodox tourist stops. “People feel very strongly about the places they’ve built,” she explains. “Every single one of these museums is a labor of love, whether it’s just one person who started it or a whole group of people.”

Although Boyd currently has a full plate of activities on her itinerary, ranging from various book and magazine editing duties to a regular gig teaching elderly Penn State students how to write their memoirs, she still hasn’t quite shed those off-the-beaten path road trip inclinations.

“Since I wrote the book, I’ve been ‘collecting’ other little museums,” she admits. “I’ll find out about them and think, ‘Oh, you know, I have to go in that one and that one’ or say to someone, ‘What do you think is in there?’ In fact, I have a similarly themed book under consideration for Maryland.”

The ultimate goal, both with this book and any future spin-offs, is to encourage people to cast off their doubts and explore the unknown. “When I was looking for one of the museums, I stopped somewhere, and asked this stranger for directions,” recalls Boyd. "He said ‘Oh, I drive past that place every day’, so I asked him if he had ever been inside. He replied, ‘No, you don’t want to go in there.’ He had never set foot inside, but kept insisting it was nothing.

“So here was this guy judging this place and he had never been inside, didn’t know what it was, and yet he was telling me it wasn’t any good. I’m hoping my book makes fewer people say that.”

Boyd’s book, due out in May, will be available in local bookstores, including Border’s Books & Music, where she will be signing books on June 13. It can also be ordered online at Amazon.com or through the publisher at http://www.psupress.org/.

-Dave O'Connell