One of the awkward little secrets of early rock ’n’ roll is that many of the musicians who made it great had little or no use for it. That doesn’t mean the singers or the writers, whose passion gave the music its furious energy — the energy that enabled it…

It’s not exactly clear what parts of what songs Lamont Dozier wrote in the Holland-Dozier-Holland team at Motown Records in the mid-1960s. We don’t need to know. We do know that his death Monday, at the age of 81, is a terrible loss to American songwriting. Lamont Dozier and brothers…

Vin Scully was born with a great announcing voice. It was what he did with this voice that made him maybe the best baseball announcer ever. Scully died Tuesday at the age of 94. His death was announced during a close game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San…

When they hold the ultimate all-time draft with every player who ever played in the NBA or the ABA, if I get the first pick, I’m taking Bill Russell. This will make the second and third pickers happy, I guess, because they will get to fight over Michael Jordan and…

Beaver Cleaver’s older brother died this week and naturally that got me to thinking about whether human beings by nature are good or evil. Wally Cleaver, I can say for sure, was not evil. He was kind of heart and he followed the Golden Rule, like every other character on…

Meineke Car Care Centers has been all over television lately with a series of commercials in which a dark-haired actor with a short mustache speaking English in a cartoon German accent goes through a bunch of short comic skits that seem designed to link Meineke with high-quality German engineering. I…

I hail from the generation where, if you were a serious popular music fan, you were also a serious radio fan. You probably complained constantly about what your favorite stations played, or didn’t play, but they were family, so it was okay, because that’s how families work. My first faves…

Joel Whitburn never to my knowledge recorded a note of popular music, but he did something that was in its own way equally valuable: He helped make popular music a respectable subject for serious historical and artistic discussion. If that sounds dry and esoteric, then you may not realize how…

I’d been trying to capsulize why I will miss the baseball writings of the late Roger Angell when my friend Joe Connor nailed it: “Because you didn’t need an advanced degree in mathematics to read him.” Angell, who died May 20 at the admirable age of 101, had the day…