On December 8, 1943, James Douglas "Jim" Morrison was born at Brevard Hospital at this location.

Since then, the building has changed ownership many times, but has kept its general construction, most notably the curved-linear facade.

The son of a future Navy rear admiral (George Stephen Morrison), the Morrisons moved a great deal while Jim was growing up. The elder Morrison was unsupportive of Jim's musical ambitions, and by the time Jim Morrison had graduated from UCLA he had cut ties with his family.

When a neighbor brought over The Doors debut album to George Morrison, he wrote Jim a letter asking him, "to give up any idea of singing or any connection with a music group because of what I consider to be a complete lack of talent in this direction.'

The relationship was nonexistent after that point.

view full location details...

Based on the slogan from "Keep Austin Weird," this is just one of Portland's unofficial slogans.

view full location details...

This building still exists (with the large Rosevear's sign above it), but the music shop has moved just down the street to 110 East Wishkah Street.

view full location details...

In the early months of 1940, Woody Guthrie arrived in New York City. Dubbed "the Oklahoma cowboy" by his contemporaries, he was embraced by the leftist folk scene at the time.

On constant radio rotation at the time was Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." Guthrie found the song distasteful- unrealistic and complacent. On February 23, 1940, in a small boarding house at the corner of 43rd st and 6th Ave in NYC, he went about writing an answer to Berlin. Guthrie's response was the song "This Land is Your Land."

Adapting the melody from "When The World's On Fire" by the Carter family, "This Land is Your Land" has become a powerful national song, still open for interpretation today.

One of the original versions of the song had a final verse that goes like this:

"As I went walking, I saw a sign there,
And on the sign there, It said 'Private Property'
But on the other side, it didn't say nothing!
That side was made for you and me."

view full location details...

Gene and Dean Ween recorded The Pod and Pure Guava at "the Pod," a fly-ridden shack they shared on a horse farm on Van Sant Road in Solebury Township.

They recorded both albums on a Tascam 4-track, and according to Deaner, they didn't even bother buying new tapes for Pure Guava but simply recorded over demo tapes that other bands had given them on the road.

This is arguably the band's "brown"-est period- a term they devised to describe anything "f*cked up in a good way."

As their producer and sometimes bass player Andrew Weiss put it:

"...you know, stuff's always so well-orchestrated, or tries to be, when people make records, but the best sound you're gonna get out of stomp box is when the battery's right at the point of dying and it sounds like it's being strangled or something. So it's kind of like those glorious mistakes are what you're lookin' for."

(Chocolate and Cheese, Hank Shteamer, 33 1/3 books)

view full location details...