“Wang Dang Doodle,” a short story I wrote, is set in the 1980s Chicago blues scene and appeared originally in Challenger 36, edited by Guy and Rosy Lillian. WANG DANG DOODLE Kent McDaniel Joe glanced at Robert and Lori feeding crickets to the tarantula in the dry aquarium. Lori, who was nineteen, […]
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Recording He Flies
April 16, 2013 
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I’m posting an audio recording here of my song “He Flies,” but I wanted to talk about recording it, which was really enjoyable, and most of which I did at home. First, back in our den, I recorded the rhythm tracks on my venerable Tascam, an eight track digital recorder, pretty much an anachronism these […]
Read moreVolunteer Sunflower
January 18, 2013 0 Comments
This sunflower began growing in our backyard a couple summers ago, a volunteer. We’d planted sunflowers before, but this one just appeared. Generally a sunflower grows to, I don’t know, maybe six feet and has one or maybe two flowers, but this thing just kept growing and growing and sprouting more and more flowers. Eventually […]
Read more“He Flies”
January 9, 2013 2 Comments
Summer before last, I was playing guitar and looking out the window at the backyard. The thought drifted up in my mind: it’d been a couple years since I wrote a song, and could I even still do that? There was a little bird sitting on the cable line coming into the house. I started […]
Read more“A Sunny Day”
July 29, 2012 2 Comments
We’ve been having a lot of them, and I’m glad. I like them. But the title up there refers to a song of mine. (Available for download at Amazon and iTunes and everywhere else. The CD it’s on, About Time, is at http://www.cdbaby.com). I’m posting a video here of my wife Dorothy, our pal Alpha Stewart, […]
Read moreReading from Jimmy Stu Lives!
July 15, 2012 2 Comments
I did a book reading last Wednseday on Chicago’s north side at Silvies, a comfy little club with two equal sides, the further of which is the music room, where I gave the reading. I’m gonna say right now that I don’t recall a better evening. People came from The Writers, my critique group, […]
Read morePlaying At Custer Street
March 21, 2012 0 Comments
For a long time, Custer Street Fair in Evanston has marked a sort of unofficial start of summer for my wife Dorothy and me. We used to go to it every year, and then we got the idea to try and play at it, so we sent them a demo tape. To our delight they […]
Read moreRemembering Gage Park (a review)
February 5, 2012 0 Comments
Remembering Gage Park by William P. Shunas; self-published through Xlibris; copyright 2010. Available at Barnes & Noble (www.bn.com), Amazon.com, and at http://www.Xlibris.com/Bookstore. Paperback $15.00-20.00. Kindle edition $7.69 A fictional memoir, Remembering Gage Park begins: “I was eight years old when I met Connor. That was they day he nearly put out my eye. You […]
Read moreWaitin’ For The Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago
January 27, 2012 2 Comments
By the 1980′s Z Z Top’s new songs were almost novelty numbers. They still put down some pretty nice grooves and some hot licks, but most of their tunes were cutesy little ditties designed to work well with the goofy vidoes they were grinding out for MTV. If anybody looked down their nose at that, the band cried […]
Read more“I Saw Her Standing There”
January 1, 2012 1 Comment
Remember the first Beatles song you ever heard? I do. I was riding around on a Friday night in the early Sixties, and the record hop that came live from the Jaycee Civic Center in Paducah, Kentucky, across the river, was on the car radio. A couple reports had been in the news about this group called The […]
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