Hammond and Waits Get Behind the Mule

Wicked Grin review, 2001

I took a hiatus from writing about music in 1994 when I joined the food staff at Newsday/New York Newsday. My first assignment, and it was my elevator pitch to the food editor, was interviewing the Great Chefs of New York (and a separate set of interviews of Long Island chefs for a divided editions) about what they'd cook at home for a Super Bowl party. It was venison chili instead of nachos, for sure.

I kept writing about food for the New York Daily News ("Thoughts on Food") column, and the Newark Star-Ledger ("In Season").

I was drawn back into music around 1999 when I saw a magazine on my local newsstand edited in Boulder with my old Colorado buddy Leland Rucker on the masthead: Blues Access. Leland gave me the oldies reissues column, with a title like "New Again/Blue Again" or something. What a great gig: reissues of decades of blues and R&B on CD for the first time, many in box sets. I was hooked again writing about music.

While I was doing food columns in NJ and NYC newspapers, I s…