RECENTLY REDISCOVERED: These are the pages in my journal I thinking aloud before I have my first-ever interview for my first-ever writing job. I must have impressed because I was hired for Record Week soon afterwards.

Back in the day, long before there was a computer on every desk, I kept a journal. 

I now have more than a dozen of them weighing down one of my shelves. They are all a multi-media hodgepodge of words, collages, to do lists, calendars, phone numbers, and naked, uninhibited thoughts. Just the usual, yannow?

I’ve recently posted a few of the pages of my journal on my facebookery and people seem to like them. My friend (and former workmate at Island Records) Kathy Hahn reminded me how much she loved reading through my journals and how they anticipated internet postings, but in an analog format. It was a truly Smack My Head moment. I had never considered that before, but she’s absolutely right. Page after page of my journals mimic what I would later try to recreate on the innertubes.

READ: The Day I Met Bob Marley

In college I wrote a regular column called “Octoroon Expressway” for the alternative newspaper. The journals have lots of collages made from 4 for a Quarter booth pics.

Maybe it’s a side-effect of aging, but I’ve been rifling through my past a lot lately. With my journals it’s been fun to see what I had written years ago. Some of it I remember writing. A lot of it I had forgotten about totally. Some of it I wouldn’t dare publish today, despite it being obvious humour that more obviously failed. I clearly had no standards back then. Now I have some.

Several years ago an unnamed friend at an unnamed publishing company
was convinced a compilation of my journal pages would make an interesting book. It was something I had never considered before, but she convinced me to go through all of my journals and highlight interesting pages with
Post It Notes. She thought some pages could be published
“as is” while some would need some text for context. However, she thought a compilation would provide a time capsule of the era.

I did as she asked and then packed all my journals and sent
them to her. She had them for so long that became worried that I’d never
get them back. Whenever I’d request them, she’d tell me that she thinks
she had her editor convinced, just give her a little more time. Eventually, the publisher passed on the project and I finally got my journals back. She had them for almost 2 years.

My staff photographer was longtime friend Steve Feldman

Now, as I launch a new totally original feature (because no one has ever used the expression Throwback Thursday before), I thought it would be nice to show a few pages from my journals every once in a while.

My new totally original feature Throwback Thursday will be, like my many journals, a hodgepodge of ideas and thoughts. However, the connective tissue will be that they will all be about history, whether it’s my history, or that of the world at large.

If you follow my Twitter of Facebook feeds, you will know I often exclaim that history is complicated. Hopefully, Throwback Thursday will simplify some of that complexity.

Throwback Thursday will provide a bit of fun for me as well. I’m looking at it as an archaeological project, whether I’m mining my own life, or digging up little-known facts and events from history.

So, dear readers, tune into the Not Now Silly Newsroom every Thursday at this time for a look back on people, places, and events that will delight, infuriate, or simply confound you.

Two journal pages that describe a Paul McCartney concert in Toronto, followed by a Bob Marley concert in Detroit the next day, and being hassled by the cops in Southfield, Michigan. The gal in the photographs only went out with me for my Paul McCartney All Access passes. We never dated again.