
(1992)

(1992)

(2020)

(2018)

(1997)

(2019)

(1997)

It gets weird at the Jersey shore after Labor Day. No one’s driving slowly anymore because the cops don’t care, or the cops were part-timers anyway and are back on the mainland. The whole barrier island becomes a construction site. Some businesses are still open, others already said fuck it. More than any other place here, the boardwalk — home to three piers of amusement rides and you don’t want to know what else — really loses it by mid-September. Behind the lens at this moment there’s a guy giving a shopkeeper the business about Jesus Christ, and the shopkeeper is having none of it. Two old dames are driving too fast in their motorized chairs and laughing hysterically. There are no rides running and no one young enough left to want them. And then there are these two guys. (2020)

(2014)

(1993)

I was driving home on the morning of Sept. 12, 1987, in my first car, a 1966 Pontiac Catalina, after ending the previous night’s party on my host’s couch. The car had 421 cubic inches under the hood, an aquamarine Lucite steering wheel, and the profile of an Indian head in the dash that lit when the high beams were on. The radio, however, was AM only, so I kept a seriously giant boombox in the back seat. That grey morning, the box told me Peter Tosh had been shot to death in Jamaica the night before in a botched home-invasion robbery. At the time, I was mixing sound for a Philadelphia-area, white-boy ska-reggae band, and the news hit us hard. A year later, Tosh’s son, Andrew, taking up the mantle, brought some of the Wailers on tour. A very short-lived magazine assigned me to cover the son with his father’s band. (Carlton “Santa” Davis was drumming with a bullet still inside him somewhere, my memory says.) Here’s the boy Tosh, age 19 or 20, with, I think (pretty sure), Earl “Chinna” Smith outside the former Chestnut Cabaret, 38th and Chestnut Sts. (1988)