McKeesport
Jeff Ingersoll of the Boneyard told me yesterday that at one time, before the steel mills closed, McKeesport was the third largest city in Pennsylvania. Could that possibly be true? The place is kind of a ghost town now. Jeff, D.J., and I went over to have hot dogs at Sam's on Saturday at about 2:00, but it was closed. It wouldn't have been closed at 2:00 on Saturday in 1965.
We're trying to reenergize McKeesport around a new product--soul, blues, and R&B. I should have paid attention to what they were doing out at the Boneyard a long time ago. The more I hear, the more impressed I am. I listened this morning to a CD that they made in 2000 for Guitar Shorty called Git Shorty and was knocked out, as I have been by almost all the stuff that comes out of the studio.
Mike Sweeney's stuff, the two Hoodoo Drugstore CDs, is like a Pittsburgh version of The Band. It's the tree falling in the forest that no one hears, and it's a damn shame. Sweeney is an amazing songwriter. Here are the lyrics that begin "The Hard Hours," one of the songs on East End Avenue:
Pittsburgh haiku.
It would be great if East End Avenue could help draw some more attention to Bobby Wayne, Tommy Brown, Piney Brown, and Sweeney.
To add a comment, click the "Comments" link below.
We're trying to reenergize McKeesport around a new product--soul, blues, and R&B. I should have paid attention to what they were doing out at the Boneyard a long time ago. The more I hear, the more impressed I am. I listened this morning to a CD that they made in 2000 for Guitar Shorty called Git Shorty and was knocked out, as I have been by almost all the stuff that comes out of the studio.
Mike Sweeney's stuff, the two Hoodoo Drugstore CDs, is like a Pittsburgh version of The Band. It's the tree falling in the forest that no one hears, and it's a damn shame. Sweeney is an amazing songwriter. Here are the lyrics that begin "The Hard Hours," one of the songs on East End Avenue:
Close my eyes, hold my ears
But the last words won't disappear
"I'm leaving," was all she said.
Pittsburgh haiku.
It would be great if East End Avenue could help draw some more attention to Bobby Wayne, Tommy Brown, Piney Brown, and Sweeney.
To add a comment, click the "Comments" link below.
2 Comments:
When I was a kid before the construction of I-79 and the mall explosion, my father bought just about everything except groceries on both sides of the Mon from Homestead on out past Clairton, and we traveled from Canonsburg.
He's 80 now and isn't prone to reminisce about anything except the quality and availibility of the sturdy, reliable merchandise from that section of the Mon Valley.
He preferred Homestead (automobiles), McKeesport (a good tailor and shoemaker plus hardware), and Clairton (children's clothes and radio repair...getting your radio fixed, how cool is that?), and Duquesne ( a good place to eat), to downtown.
He has said that he doesn't really trust any purchase involving himself and a bored young adult or teenager in a red shirt...why by God, back in the day, the guy at Finleyville Furniture treated him like the Duke of Pennsylvania!
So it's good to learn that a renaissance of a sort is taking place in McKeesport.
Best wishes on the new CD. I am looking forward to some more music from you.
Great post, Steve.
I grew up in suburban Northern Jersey and, for reasons that I don't quite remember today, went to college at Penn State. (You weren't accepted at Rutgers, that's why - ed). Something I first encountered at Penn State and later experienced first hand drew me westward to Pittsburgh--Bob Prince, the Pirates, Myron Cope, Porky Chedwick, Vincent's Pizza, Primanti's, the Dirty O, the hilly cobblestone streets, Mancini's Lounge and Mancini's bread, the Fox Cafe...and maybe McKeesport too.
When I got to Penn State, there were two guys on my dorm floor from McKeesport known as Big Joe and Little Joe. Big Joe was a generous, gregarious, smiling Labrador who was diagnosed with MS a couple of years later and died in a hiking accident in one of those beautiful forests near State College.
Little Joe was an intense, soft-spoken guy with a sharp sense of humor who played guitar in the legendary (as I was later to learn) Swamp Rats from McKeesport. Jeff of the Boneyard tells me that their 45s are worth hundreds of dollars in the U.K. today. I think I may still have one that Joe had given me, but I never paid much attention to it--I was listening to O.V. Wright records on BackBeat and Bobby Bland records on Duke back then and had no time for Rolling Stones derivations. Little Joe was one of the unfortunate ones in our group who got a low number in the draft lottery, and he eventually moved to Canada. I have no idea what ever happened to him.
There was another guy from McKeesport that we knew named Tim. He was more ambitious and focused than the Joes. He was a journalism major, and he eventually got a job writing for the McKeesport Daily News--I pass their building on Lysle Boulevard on my way to the studio--where his investigations of local politics and corruption got him into some sort of trouble. McKeesport, McKees Rocks...poor Mr. McKee's legacy is tainted by the politics in the towns that were named after him.
But as you suggest, McKeesport was and is about a lot more than crooked politicians and economic decline. Our challenge is to make a CD that is infused with the spirit of the Mon Valley and has that same sturdy commitment to quality that brought your father to Finleyville Furniture.
Billy Price
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