By Christopher Arnott
Hartford Courant
July 7, 2026
Larry Rifkin of Prospect has spent a lifetime around microphones. His father managed radio stations in the Waterbury area, and Rifkin’s own broadcasting career was largely in television as the head of local programming at Connecticut Public Television.
It was also Rifkin who found an obscure video titled “A Day at the Beach” at a store in Prospect to amuse his child, saw the potential in turning it into a series and helped make an international superstar of Barney the purple dinosaur. He also became known as an on-air personality for CPTV fundraisers and televised UConn women’s basketball games. After he left CPTV, Rifkin hosted a talk show on Waterbury’s WATR from 2010-17. Then he started his podcast “American Trends,” which aired its 1000th episode this month.
Now the 74-year-old is behind the mic as a singer and songwriter. He has recorded and released three albums of original songs in the last three years under the band name Rockaway. The latest Rockaway release, “Wrong Side of Love,” has a familiar mainstream soft-rock style and ranges from tender ballads (“All I Want Is That Love, Too”) to social observations (“The Last American Housewife”) to churning folk-rock (“Ring Shout”).
Rifkin has a key collaborator for his Rockaway recordings: Alasdair MacKenzie, a Harvard graduate who has a home studio in Somerville, Massachusetts and whose own band is called Hush Club.
Rifkin’s daughter Leora — the same person who, as a 4-year-old, inspired him to pick up that Barney video — is the one who connected Rifkin with MacKenzie, who plays most of the instruments on the albums and sings lead on most of the songs.
“I’d send him a demo and tell him what I was thinking about for how it might sound,” Rifkin said. “On the first album there’s a song ‘It’s Not My Circus,’ about politics, and I told Alasdair ‘I hear ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ Bob Dylan, in there.’
“You need somebody to bring your vision to life,” Rifkin said of the collaboration. “I sing the songs I’m best for vocally, and Alasdair sings the rest. Like me, he is primarily a drummer who learned to do other things musically. It’s a wonderful collaboration between an old guy and a young guy.”
The two members of Rockaway don’t need to meet up in person much but have done some open mic events together in Massachusetts.
Though MacKenzie is responsible for production and engineering, Rifkin also works on the recordings with producer/engineer Matt Terribile at Ace Tone Productions, a recording studio in Bethany. Terribile has been credited on all the Rockaway releases. For “Wrong Side of Love,” he is listed as “album production manager.”
“If it wasn’t for Matt and Alasdair, I wouldn’t have pursued this,” Rifkin said. “I love the music! It’s so much fun, but it’s also one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, to land a song lyrically and melodically.”
Rifkin has drummed for years in local bands. When he thought of becoming a songwriter he learned how to play keyboards, which is what he uses to write his songs and make his demos. He keeps the keyboards and drum kit near each other so “I can just swing around” from one to the other. His keyboards can be heard on a couple of the “Wrong Side of Love” songs.
Rockaway recordings have gotten some airplay, thousands of Spotify hits and have charted on the NACC (North American College & Community) radio airplay charts.
Inspirations for the songs can come from anywhere. He wrote “For the Others (An Ode to the Miners of Chernobyl)” after watching the HBO series about the 1986 nuclear power plant explosion in the Soviet Union. “Speak to the Queen” is based on the real-life encounter between Queen Elizabeth II and the man who broke into her bedroom in Buckingham Palace in 1982, an incident Rifkin saw dramatized on “The Crown” TV series. The song, which features Rifkin on keyboards and vocals, begins with the spoken intro “The following is based on a true story.”
“Are You Still With Me, Carmelita?” is about his marriage of 48 years and counting. On this soft-rocking confessional Rifkin sings “Sometimes I’m grateful for all that I’ve got/Sometimes I should be but I know that I’m not/Sometimes I wish I could talk to my dad/He was taken from me back when I was a lad/ It’s just how life’s ball keeps on bouncing.”
Some songs are complete fiction. “About Last Night,” which Rifkin describes as the likeliest first single from the album — and which has been given an AI-generated romance-themed video on the Rockaway website — “has no bearing on my real life,” Rifkin said. “I don’t drink. I don’t go to bars. I don’t have one-night stands.”
Rifkin estimated that he’s written over 120 songs at this point. “Wrong Side of Love” has a whopping 17 songs on it, including an alternate version of “About Last Night” with vocals by Rifkin rather than MacKenzie. Rifkin stuffed the album in case it might be his last one he records, but he’s already written several more songs so there may well be another one.
“I decided back when I left radio around 2017 that I should take keyboard lessons. I learned enough so I can write songs. It was always on my list of things to do.”
“Wrong Side of Love” and Rockaway’s previous albums “Southern Border” and “It’s Not My Circus” are available on all major music streaming platforms. More information on Rockaway is at rockawayband.com.