BIOS, HISTORIES & DISCOGRAPHIES                                         Dr. Progresso Home

This section offers a somewhat different take on musicians and bands. Although I researched and wrote them, these are not my personal views or reviews. These pieces offer brief but comprehensive overviews of a wide variety of musical artists from pop, rock and jazz.

All of these pieces were originally written for the Collectingchannel.com website, which required of them that they be relatively short (which I got around by writing multi-part pieces until I was told to stop) and that they offer a collector’s perspective (including price quotes). “No reviews,” I was told. I wrote one of these pieces each day, five days a week, for about six months. I made use of some of my posted reviews from this site, removing the review portions and retaining the historical and discographical parts, when it was appropriate.   Those rewrites are the least likely (with one exception) to be seen here in this section. (The exception is my multi-part piece on King Crimson. I edited out a significant portion of one part, and put in a link to the original review, but in other parts you’ll find some minor overlaps.)

I have reposted here only some of the pieces I wrote for the Collectingchannel.com: those I consider the most appropriate for this site. For the most part they appear here as originally written, but I have occasionally added new material and all of that is enclosed in [brackets]. I have also edited out gross redundancies in multi-part pieces when each part began with a variation on the same introductory paragraph.

Originally these pieces were supposed to be about 1,000 words long, but I tended to write longer pieces (the Patsy Cline piece is the longest – it did not lend itself to being broken into parts and is almost 2,000 words, and that’s after I cut more than 1,000 words, including several good quotes and anecdotes).   As time went on I was encouraged to make the pieces shorter, and in the last two months I was not allowed to exceed 700 words (it was assumed our audience wouldn’t read anything longer).   This causes several pieces to end rather abruptly.