Dylan's "Key West (Philosopher Pirate):" The Last Stop Before Kokomo

Perhaps the best summary I’ve seen for “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is that it’s Dylan’s own “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” That sums it up perfectly for me - when he sings about “Key West… the the enchanted land… the land of light,”  he’s not singing about the literal Key West, exactly, but a magical place where troubles melt like lemondrops, time works differently, you can be friends with memories that are traumatic anywhere else. A land that he heard of once in a pirate radio broadcast. My first thought on hearing it was of Ferlinghetti’s poem about finding the lost locality where he could catch a sunday subway for a “Far Rockaway of the Heart.”

The first night it was streaming, my friends and I tried to outdo each other describing what sort of song it was. Among my frist thoughts was the Papa John Phillips demo of “Kokomo” that Mike Love revised into the Beach Boys hit. One friend initially thought of Warren Zevon, then landed on Mark Knopfler. I agreed until I pictured Lana Del Rey singing it and couldn’t shake the image. Though I doubt highly that Dylan said, or probably thought, anything about Lana Del Rey during the recording, it’s the best comparison I’ve thought of. It’s like one of her more dream-like numbers, evoking a version of Americana unique to the singer.  

I wouldn’t have imagined that a new Bob Dylan album would ever remind me of the latest Lana Del Rey album, but here we are. It’s been a big year for unexpected twists, I suppose. But Dylan’s latest record is a moody, atmospheric album, presenting a unique view of Americann full of pop cultural references that seem both timely and timeless. I’d describe Del Rey’s “Norman Fucking Rockwell” with exactly that same sentence. She presents her version of Americana just as Bob presents his; they aren’t exactly the same, and you have to factor in the debatable extent to which Lana Del Rey is a character Lizzie Grant plays, but still. I’ve made the comparison and I’m sticking to it. 

Though most of the ways “Rough and Rowdy Ways” reminds me of “NFR” are vague and stylistic, one very specific shared trait between the two albums is a name-check of a Beach Boy other than Brian Wilson or Mike Love: in Dylan’s case there’s the Carl Wilson shout-out on “Murder Most Foul,” and in Del Rey’s a mention of Dennis Wilson on one of the album’s strongest tracks, “The Greatest’ (which, like Murder Most Foul, was written before the pandemic but seems even eerier and more timely here in the throes of it).

Her song opens with:

I miss Long Beach, and I miss you baby

I miss dancing with you the most of all.

I miss the bar where the Beach Boys would go

Dennis’s last stop before Kokomo

When the song came out, many of the Beach Boys heads (the real cool heads making real good bread?) objected that this young whippersnapper must not have known that Dennis had died well before “Kokomo” was recorded, but I’d say that A: anyone referring to Dennis by name can be assumed to have passed Beach Boys 101, and B: in this context, Kokomo is more of a reference to a place like Valhalla, not a reference to a song.  It’s a place somewhere over the rainbow.

Of course, maybe “Kokomo” always -was- the Beach Boys’ own “Over the Rainbow.”

Let’s pull up our over-analyzing pants. The bars are closed and there’s no baseball, after all, so we don’t have a lot of better things to do. 

“Kokomo,” the Beach Boys song critics love to hate the most, began life as an early 80s demo by Papa John Phillips, a breezy easy listening tune about a tropical paradise where he used to go to get away from it all. The song wasn’t released at the time (you can find it streaming without any trouble now), but he sent the demo over to the Beach Boys. Mike love revised the lyrics, tweaked the melody, and completely rewrote the chorus.

Phillips’ chorus was:

 “Wasn’t it good / the things we tasted / nothing we did was ever wasted / every moment lingering / like lovers fingers / across the strings of our lives / at least we gave it a try.”  

It’s pretty dreary.

Besides adding in the more radio-friendly “Aruba, Jamaica” chorus, Love’s revisions were mostly swapping out one line about an island paradise for a different line about an island paradise. Most crucially for my purposes here, though, he changed the tense of the song. Phillips’ demo is all in past tense, Love’s is in the future. He’s turned “where we used to go” to “where you want to go.”  His tropical island “off the Florida Keys,” as every radio DJ explained, was a fictional island. A fantasy. It was “off the Florida keys” in the lyrics but existed somewhere over the rainbow.

Perhaps I’m crediting Mike Love with too much mysticism and submeaning here, but, what the hell. He DID hang out with the Maharishi and wrote “All This is That.”  Maybe he imagine Kokomo as his valhalla. 

Which brings us to “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” which would geographically be right near Kokomo.  Here, in a tune just as breezy as a 60s rock star singing yacht rock in the 80s,  Dylan sings about Key West as the place to be if you’re looking for immortality, the very thing that legend says Ponce De Leon is looking for there. But, while the Beach Boys themselves just described Kokomo is a tropical paradise with cocktails and moonlit nights, Dylan presents “Key West” as a whole lot more. It’s his verison of a tropical paradise - a whole lot weirder than most peoples would probably be. 

When I first heard the song, Dylan appeared in my mind as the sort of old man you meet in seafaring stories now and then: the kind who tell you about a magical land where time works differently, riches are there for the taking, and the all women are cute, available, and totally into you. THough he assures you it’s a real place (“Truman had his white house there!”) this place is not on a map, and if the sailors in the book go looking for the place, they’ll never find it, and they’ll doubt the old man was ever really there. Or maybe he wasn’t even real - he was the voice calling your name when you’re half asleep, the sweet sound that calls the young sailors to come find the Rainbow Connection.  

There are some clues in the lyrics that this is, in fact, Dylan’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” There are a few lines in the song to drive it home - a specific reference to “the land of oz” and vaguer lines like “fly my pretty” and “follow the road.” And, like a land that’s “over the rainwbow,” Key west is described as “on the horizon line,” a place that’ll get further away the closer you get to it.  You reach it by staying to the left and leaning to the right (put your hands on your hips and bend your knees in tight?)  Key West is a land that he heard of once in a lullaby that a pirate radio station was playing. 

I remember moments like that; tuning the dial and finding some strange station that I can could never find again. I still don’t know what the hell station I’d found the first time I heard The Pogues. 

The radio signal he got from Key West was no ordinary radio signal - it was broadcasting the death of President McKinley (an event that happened about twenty years before anyone was getting their news on wireless radio). And not just a news item about McKinley, but the actual sound of McKinley hollering and squalling, the sound of his doctor talking to him. THe radio picks up different things here, and all the women are beautiful. Everyone wears flowers in their hair. And rather than being traumatized by strange events of your past, you can still be friends with them, as in perhaps the most striking verse:

When I was 12 years old, they put me in a suit

forced me to marry a prostitute

she had gold fringes in her wedding dress

That’s my story, but not where it ends

She’s still cute, and we’re still friends

down on the bottom, down in Key West.

What would be traumatic in the real world becomes tolerable here. It’s where you can find the mind you’ve lost.  

But you can follow the pirate radio signal as it gets clearer and clearer, and you won’t get to this version of Key West. It’s always on the horizon line.  Ponce De Leon didn’t really go looking for the Fountain of Youth in when he explored Florida and the Keys; it’s one of those historical myths. I bet he looked for it in THIS version of Key West. 

Now stop me before I start connecting all the things Lana Del Rey says she'll "miss the most of all" to Dorothy and the Scarecrow. 

2020 Music Talk: "Knockin On Heaven's Door, Just Like So Many Times Before"

I first heard of Bob Dylan in a children’s book called Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes by Louis Sachar. In the book, a girl enters a talent show dressed in a brand new leopard skin pillbox hat and tells everyone that Bob Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived. I thought I recognized the name, and figured maybe I should look that guy up.  I met Sachar a couple of weeks ago and thanked him for sending me down that rabbit hole. A few years after I read the book, I saw my first Dylan concert. A few months ago, I saw my 50th. 

Now, the early 90s were not the best time to be getting into Dylan. His concerts at the time were, at best, an acquired taste, and the same could be said of his output for the previous fifteen years. I think he wrote a lot of great songs in the 80s and early 90s, but he spent most of those days struggling to find a place in the modern music scene. None of his songs would have broken through to a kid listening to top 40 songs on Q102 Des Moines, and I don’t think they ever played him KLYF, the oldies station. 

But there was one song my friends and I all knew in middle school: “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Of course, we had no idea it was by Bob Dylan - as far as we knew, it was a Guns n Roses song. We were incredulous when a substitute music teacher told us it was by Bob Dylan. (That same year, my friend was shocked when we rented the Bond film Live and Let Die and found out that the GNR track was a Paul McCartney song). 

I’ve seen people say that GNR’s version introduced Dylan to the wrong crowd at the wrong time, which is probably fair, but it’s not GNR’s fault. Their version is really very solid hard rock version (except that, in a show of typical early 90s GNR excess, there’s a phone message skit in the middle, and then a gospel choir shows up very briefly for no particular reason). It’s easy to go overboard on the song, though: it's a song so simple it can be sung a million ways. In fact, Dylan has sung it about million ways himself - sometimes totally rewriting it, and sometimes completely changing the meaning with a single added line. 

The song was originally written for the soundtrack of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), in the same sessions that yielded the half-written demo that eventually became “Wagon Wheel.” On the soundtrack album it’s a two minute country song - two simple verses and a simple chorus sung over a few simple chords, an uncomplicated tune in the classic country tradition of songs about dying cowboys. Within a few years of Dylan’s release came Arthour Louis and Eric Clapton’s reggae versions, and pretty soon it became a standard, both on records and at open mic nights in any bar (it's super easy to play, even for beginners)

Dylan himself started playing it on the 1974 tour with The Band, with some rewritten lyrics and extra verses. The next year he appeared at a benefit with Neil Young and played a version completely written as “Knockin on the Dragon’s Door,” then used it as a group showpiece on the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour, in which all the various singers in the band would trade verses, seemingly making them up as they went along. 

It was around 1981 that he made the most significant addition, the one that make the song unexpectedly powerful for me when I saw him play it live in 2001: he added a line to the chorus.

While it normally goes:

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

It now went:

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Knock knock knock on heaven's door

Just like so many times before

 I’m not sure if someone else added that line before Dylan did. For him to adapt other peoples’ covers of his songs into his own performances isn’t uncommon. (Most famously, he’s pretty much played “All Along the Watchtower” as a Hendrix cover since he started performing it, his late 70s arrangement of “I Want You” bore more than a passing resemblance to Springsteen’s version, and the 1994 version, recorded but unused for “Unplugged," sounded a lot like the Sophie B. Hawkins version). But it became common in Dylan's version for twenty years. 

Anyway, “Knockin On Heaven’s Door” is a song about being at death’s door (come to think of it, given the subject matter it’s an odd song to turn into a big group singalong). It’s all about lying there, blood in your eyes, and resigned to your fate.  But by adding in “Just like so many times before” at the end of the chorus, the tone of the song changes completely, and it becomes powerful and uplifting. The singer is still at death’s door, but it’s not the first time he’s been here.  He’s knocked on heaven’s door before. So many times. 

And if he’s here and singing now, it stands to reason that he cheated death in the end every other time. And now he can probably do it again. Hell - he’s got this. It may be a song about death, but now death is something you can still talk your way out of.   

2020 Music Talk: Springsteen's "No Surrender"

(Hi, everybody. I haven't used this website in years; go to adamchicago.com for current stuff. But this week my usual spring travel gigs are postponed or canceled. I'm hoping to launch some virtual tours and other ventures very soon, but for I need an outlet and something to work on, so I'm going to do some more music writing.)

"And Hear Your Sister's Voice Calling Us Home" - Springsteen's "No Surrender" 


When I think about the time when I first got into music, I usually think of the summer of 93, when a slightly older guy made me a tape of Metallica, Megadeth, and Nine Inch Nails songs. That was the year when the only acceptable answer to “what kind of music do you like?” was “Metal, alternative.” You could be into rap, too, and not lose any social status, but “pop” was a totally unacceptable answer. You could still like Billy Joel, though. 

But really I first got into music in 1987, when I got my first clock radio and listened religiously to the Top Ten at 9 on Q102. That was the year of Tiffany, George Michael, Belinda Carlisle. And Def Leppard and the last gasp of what we’d later call “hair metal.” I remember “Tunnel of Love” coming on the radio when it first came out, but I’d arrived a bit too late for Bruce Springsteen. My only exposure to him was the Kids, Inc rendition of “Thunder Road,” sung by Martika (in character as “Gloria”) and leaving out most of the best lyrics.  I liked it, though. I played “Kids Inc Sing the Chart Hits” to death and I liked every song. 

My first concert, in 1990, was Billy Joel. I knew every song he played.  

I suppose I knew the chorus to “Born in the USA” like everyone else who attended a parade, fireworks display, or grocery store in those days, but Bruce had sort of peaked in mainstream popularity a few years before, and by the time I got more serious about music in the early 90s, he was sort of floating around the ether - still selling out stadiums to the faithful, but not huge with teenagers anymore. The E Street Band was on hiatus, and his two early 90s albums didn’t make a dent. I knew and sort of liked “Streets of Philadelphia,” but Bruce was started to be lumped in with acts like Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart. It seemed absurd that less than a decade before there’d been pinups of him in magazines aimed at your average teen. The classic rock station in Des Moines never really played him. Even as I began to get really into Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and the other classic rock greats, I didn’t know “Born to Run” or “Dancin’ In the Dark,”  and certainly not “Rosalita” or “Fourth of July, Asbury Park.”  There was a terrific young adult novel called “Dear Bruce Springsteen” that was written in the form of a teenage boy’s letters to Bruce (by Kevin Major, check it out) that got me more interested, but the only way I could really hear the music, without shelling out 15 bucks for a CD, was watching some of the mid-90s “E Street Reunion” specials on VH1 from around the time Bruce’s “Greatest Hits” came out. I liked “Two Hearts” and “Murder Inc” and especially “This Hard Land.” But I didn’t buy the CD.

When I bought my first car and started being able to haunt thrift stores at will, I took a chance on a cassette of “Born in the USA” at Goodwill. The cassette was sort of warped and half the songs were distorted, so I didn’t play it much, but one song, “No Surrender,” broke through. It’s the kind of rock anthem Bruce can seemingly write in his sleep. 

I finally got into Bruce a few years later, when a friend played me the “Live in New York City” album in 2001, and the next year, while delivering pizza in a prison town, I got deeply into his first couple of albums before working through the rest. I finally got to see the opening night of the 2003 tour, right after “The Rising” had lost for “Best Album.” He come onstage and said “I would like to thank…absolutely…fucking….no one!” before launching into “No Surrender.” 

Bruce’s career took off when Jon Landau reviewed a 1974 club gig and included the line “I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” The record company latched right onto that one, and used it to make Bruce a star. It’s such a punchy line that it’s easy not to notice that it was taken way out of context: Bruce’s early music was a lot of things, but it wasn’t exactly innovative, musically. And Landau didn’t mean he felt like he was seeing the next superstar.  Landau was 27 that night - old for a rock fan in 1974. Sure, the Beatles and the Beach Boys had grown beyond songs about cars and girls, and even further back Buddy Holly had touched on adult themes with “Peggy Sue Got Married,” but people still thought of rock as music for teenagers, really.  Bruce’s set that night made him feel like rock could still feel fresh, and still grow up with him. 

“No Surrender” is, on the surface, a basic rock and roll anthem. When it was released in 1984, the chorus “No retreat, baby, no surrender” and the most famous line of the song, “We learned more from a three minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school,”  could have easily been the basis for a Twisted Sister number. Maybe even an upper-tier KISS tune. 

The twist is that it’s a song about being old and remembering the feeling of taking on the world, and trying to get that feeling back. It functions just fine as a call to arms, but dig into the lyrics and there are lines like “There’s a war outside still raging, you say it aint ours anymore to win,” and “now young faces grow sad and old, hearts of fire grow cold.” It's trying to get that feeling back and trying to persuade others to want it back, as well. 

Bruce excels at this, hiding meaning in plain sight behind catchy tunes. Most famously, “Born in the USA” is not a patriotic anthem at all, it’s a song about the plight of Vietnam veterans. “Thunder Road” is a great car song, but it’s really a religious song (I mean, it’s a car song that includes the words “Mary,” “vision,” “magic,” “crosses,” “savior,” “redemption,” “heaven,” “promised land,” “wings,” “ghosts,” and “gown.”) On the same album, "Glory Days" does the same sort of thing, but with a more jovial, smirking tone. 

I’m writing this on 3/13/2020. A few days ago I watched the livestream of an 80s themed Purimspiel where they sang "No Retreat, Haman, No Surrender." It feels like ages ago.  Yesterday was 3/12, which felt like 9/11. Broadway went dark, large gatherings were canceled, and we all bunked down for “social distancing” to try to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. All of my travel clients for the next month cancelled and I don’t know how many more might. On the way home from picking up supplies for a more isolated couple of weeks, “No Surrender” came on in my car. These days I usually feel like it’s the sort of song Bruce can write in his sleep; he recorded literally dozens of good pop rock songs for “Born in the USA” that didn’t make the cut - many just as good or better, and many touching on the same basic theme of growing old and trying to hold on to the feeling of being young. 

But as the world around started to crumble, along with all of my usual sources of income, a seemingly random line hit me so hard I had to pull over and sob a bit: “I’m ready to grow young again / and hear your sister’s voice calling us home across the open yards.”   It was the “hear your sister’s voice calling us home” that did it.  

I’ve always thought it was a good line - something about the image it conjurs up. It would have been easy for him to use one of his go-to names in this line - “Hear Maria’s voice calling us home” - but somehow “your sister” makes it all seem so much more real to me. Personally I can’t recall hearing my sister, or anyone’s sister, calling me home across the open yards, but that line, more than any other, makes me feel like I know these guys he’s talking to. Or I don’t KNOW them, but I can picture their whole lives, their childhoods, and those little things that draw you back in time.  

I'm more than a decade older than Landau was when he wrote that review, and at least five years older than Bruce was when he wrote this song about aging. On a day when it seemed like things might never go back to normal, it’s a longing for just one simple thing, one simple feeling, that reminds us of what it felt like to be young and ready to take on the world. We have to feel like that. We made a promise and swore we’d always remember. No retreat, baby, no surrender.

I’m still at my usual uncrowded morning coffee shop, but wishing this guy standing near me would take a few steps further away. Maybe in a few days even this level of interaction will be too risky, too. But what the hell am I going to do? How long will this be the new normal? We’re going to fight this as best we can, standing together (though six feet apart) and hopefully finding something new on the other side - and maybe, in Bruce’s words, in the darkness there’ll be hidden worlds that shine. But right now all I want do is grow young again and hear your sister’s voice calling us home. 

adamselzer.com

The adamselzer.com URL now points people over to adamchicago.com , which is the URL I've been giving out for the last couple of years. It's more of a "digital business card," linking to all my various projects. I'll keep this page up and maybe even post now and then, but I think author "blogs" like this are sort of old-fashioned.

November Tours, Book News, and More!

Did you  miss out on the sold out Mysterious Chicago: Grave Robbing 101 tours or the cemetery walks in October? Good news! I'll be teaming up with Atlas Obscura to run a few in November, as well. See mysteriouschicago.com for all the info.

In other news:

- Just Kill Me , the book about a ghost tour guide who makes places more haunted by killing people at them, is out in paperback! And Play Me Backwards, my novel for young adults who worship the devil, is an Illinois Reads pick for 2017.

- The Illinois Association of Teachers of English named me Author of the Year, for some reason.

- My band, 82nd Street, will have a new album out soon entitled Dinner and a Crime Spree. It's a concept album co-written with author Libby Cudmore. The first single hits Spotify, etc, around Nov 3. We also cover "Cum on Feel the Noize" on the new Cover Me! 10th Anniversary compilation.

- Did you see me four episodes of American Ripper? Or the recent Murder Castle series on Discovery? Now that the show's over I think I can post my video about evidence as to where HH Holmes was in Fall, 1888 , and my thing about matching his dental records to the skull they exhumed.  My recent enormous Holmes biography, HH Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil, is doing pretty well, from what I've heard. Check out the companion ebook compilation of his letters and writings, Very Truly Yours, HH Holmes.

- Also still available: The Mysterious Chicago book! Unsolved murders, phantom kangaroo sightings, UFOs over O'Hare, unexplained grave stones, missing mansions and more, all with new data unearthed from the archives, personal interviews, and more. Thinking of doing a New York one next; I'm in New York about every other month these days; I got my license to work as a tour guide there in June. Last month I saw Michael Moore's excellent Broadway show there, as well as The Play That Goes Wrong, during which I didn't stop laughing for more than a second. I've caught Marissa Mulder singing at La Rivista three times this year!

- On Nov 17, I'll be talking about Chicago's various antique serial killers at Days of the Dead. And on Nov 9, it looks like I'll be the "in conversation with" guy at Jason Segal's appearance in Naperville. Neat!

- No new books are currently scheduled to be published, but I'm working on several, ranging from middle grade fiction to more Chicago-based true crime.

- I'm also gathering a collection of speeches, meeting transcripts, letters, etc from 1858-1861 regarding why the southern states seceded from the Union in their own words, unearthing a lot of data that hasn't been reprinted in over a century. Not sure what I'll do with that yet; I might do it as an ebook just to get it out in the world faster than I would with a publisher. The world seems to need it. (Short version: the only cause of the war besides slavery was stupidity.)

So, that's where I've been in the months since I updated this page. Follow me on instagram or come see me on a Mysterious Chicago tour!

Starred Review for HH HOLMES: THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE WHITE CITY DEVIL

Hey, everybody! I don't post much here these days (author websites are sort of old fashioned, aren't they?) But I really should take a minute to plug my new biography of antique serial killer HH Holmes, due out April 4!

Pre-order now!

Some advance blurbs:

“Exhaustively researched, highly readable…you’re drawn into the narrative as though reading a Caleb Carr novel.” – M. William Phelps, author of Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

"Using thousands of primary sources...what emerges is a picture of a terrible but intriguing man.. whose story leaps off the page in Selzer's uniquely suited hands. A must-read." - Booklist (starred review)

“Adam Selzer’s masterful sleuthing proves to us, ‘the devil IS in the details.’ Impeccably researched, the author has wiped away the 19th century cobwebs. Highly recommended.” – Steve Hodel, author of Black Dahlia Avenger

“Selzer takes apart the dove-tailed pieces of fact and legend to show the myth-making behind one of America’s most infamous bogey-men. Not to be missed by any crime enthusiast.” – Donald Rumbelow, author of The Complete History of Jack the Ripper

I've also spent the year working with the History channel on a new series about Holmes, American Ripper, which I believe premiers a week after the book comes out. You can follow along with my own research on the Holmes posts at mysteriouschicago.com

There'll be a number of book store and library events around Chicagoland for the book - more info coming soon, or ask your local store or library to book one! 

Pre-order the book now!

JUST KILL ME: New Book Out Now!

Hi, everybody!  In the midst of rolling out new podcasts, setting up the October tour schedule, conducting interviews, and finishing off the Mysterious Chicago book, I almost forgot I had a new novel! On Aug 30, Simon and Schuster released Just Kill Me, a novel about a ghost tour guide who makes places more haunted by killing people at them. Since there are lots of real historical mysteries in the book, they had me throw together a series of videos about the research that went into each aspect of the story. Here's one about Tomb Snooping, including a tour clip from my Grave Robbing 101 tour:




 There are videos about four more topics (plus one joke one about my research into the "killing people" angle) up at Riveted, one of Simon and Schuster's pages.

  Just Kill Me is in stores now, and available at your favorite book store (links to several are here).

 And if those aren't enough videos for ya, dig my impression of Tom Waits live at the Mos Eisley Cantina. 

JUST KILL ME: new book out soon

More on the Book, Including Pre-Order Info, 

Advance Praise:

"Ominious, unsettling, and dripping with snark, Just Kill Me is a delicious dark comedy that will leave murdermongering readers jumping at shadows and waiting for a knife in the back. The ending still haunts me." - Delilah S. Dawson, author of Strike

"Just Kill Me is a hilarious punch to the brain. Quirky and full of Chicago ghost history, I raced through the pages to see who would go from from murder-monger to good old fashioned murderer. I loved every page!" - Demetria Lunetta, author of the In the After series.


"A message to all weird and wonderful morbid kids - you've found your heroine." - Caitlyn Doughty, "Ask a Mortician" and author of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.

Teasers

- Kinda last notice but 82nd Street will be at Burlington Bar on Fullerton tonight (Dec 6). We'll be playing stuff from the new album, plus some older material. It's the time of year when I break out "Heavy Metal Vomit Christmas Party," after all. Some songs on the cue sheet I haven't played since about the 90s. Including one about Charlton Heston whose shelf life seems like it SHOULD be expired since he's dead and all, but still feels pretty relevant.

- I have seen the cover to Just Kill Me, my new YA novel about a ghost tour guide who makes places more haunted by killing people there. I can't show it to you for a couple months yet though, so nyah nyah nyah. Several archaic synonyms for swear words will be appearing in print for the first time since the 1600s.

- There's gonna be a new cover for Play Me Backwards, too. It'll have a similar feel to the one for Just Kill Me. Which is super cool and reminds me of Pushing Daisies. I can't wait to show it off!

- Oh! I have a whole new company! I parted ways with the ghost tour company I was with off and on for the last ten years. And now I've moved the old Mysterious Chicago blog, started a new podcast, and launched new tours at Mysterious Chicago.com ! Get on the mailing list, subscribe to the podcast, and follow Mysterious Chicago on twitter and facebook!

- There are two tours and one cool event coming up NEXT WEEKEND. I'm teaming up with the Obscura Society to launch....

 - DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY: MYTH AND MYSTERY.
   A 2.5 hour bus tour about H.H. Holmes, our most popular antique murderer, Sat Dec 12, 1pm. (I'll be at work on a Holmes book all winter - more details coming soon).

   UNSOLVED CHICAGO MYSTERIES
   A 90 min specially-priced bus tour of some super-cool Chicago stories I've researched over the years. Sat Dec 12 4pm

   DRINK LIKE THE DICKENS!
   A night of drinks from the works of Charles Dickens (Port negus, rum flip, Rocky Mountain Sneezer, etc) and Victorian-inspired food (whitebait fritters, gruel shooters, mutton meat pie, etc) at Knife & Tine. Sun Dec 13 at 5pm.

  Regular walking tours will start in the Spring. Private tours available all the time.

New album, new tours, new books, new radio appearances!

Been a busy fall!  I've done a lot of radio shows lately, including 10 minutes on the Big John Howell show on WLS 10/27 and the second half of the Patti Vasquez show on WGN the night before (click for podcast links).

I've been running more private tours lately, including some really neat ones for Atlas Obscura, such as "Grave Robbing 101" and "The Darker Side of Taylor Street," and a handful of H.H. Holmes tours for small groups in cars (which allow us to hit a site or two where busses just won't fit).  There's a whole new page for that stuff - adamchicago.com

Advance copies of my new novel, Just Kill Me, should start circulating soon. It's all about a ghost tour guide whose company is making places more haunted by killing people at them. Simon and Schuster is putting it out next year. 

AND, last but not least, after nearly 10 years since the last "Adam Selzer and his Revolving Door All-Stars" album, I just released a new record. The band is called 82nd Street, and the album is called Every Man Has His Price and Mine is $300. It's a rock and roll concept album about a pizza man who picks up a hitch hiker who claims to be a time traveler. You can stream it on spotify, Tidal, iTunes and all of those places. We'll be playing an acoustic set at Windycon on Sunday morning, 11/15.   

Stream/buy links at 82ndStreetRules.com