Monkey Heaven: Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV, a.k.a. Black Francis, a.k.a. Frank Black, a.k.a. Frank Black Francis, World Cafe Live, October 19, 2006 Flickr: More Please Related: Death To The Pixies! Related: Airport Comfort Inn, The Bermuda Triangle of Band Gear Previously: Frank Black Ripped Off In Philly, at the motherfucking COMFORT INN?
Jazz For Lunch: Sun Ra, Chicago 1981
In preparation for part two of our Francis Davis interview, wherein our man Fran will be talking non-smack about Coltrane in Philly, Sun Ra on Uranus and the pre-historic beginnings of Fresh Air. Look for it this afternoon. Read it all weekend long.
We Know It’s Only Rock N’ Roll But We Like It
Up In Toke: The War On Drugs in clear violation of the smoking ban, Johnny Brenda’s, October 12th, 2006
Peeple: Frankly, Scarlett We Actually Give A Damn For A Change
Okay, here’s your daily celebrity dirt, bitches. Admittedly, the 215 hook is a bit of a stretch but here it is: We know Tom Waits and we live in the 215. Seriously, you can come over to our place and see the pictures. Actually, you can’t because we never open the door for strangers but there ARE pictures. Anyway, peep this: Scarlett [Johansson], I am told, has signed a deal to make her first record. “Scarlett Sings Tom Waits” is being recorded now and through the winter, with a possible release next spring from Rhino Records’ recently reactivated Atco label. […]
We Know It’s Only Rock N’ Roll But We Like It
I Stood Up And I Said ‘Yeah’: Flaming Lips, Allentown Fair, August 31st
Deep Thoughts: About New Beck, Old Wars, John Prine And How To Give A Dirty Santorum
As a boy I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes when I grew up, but now I’m thinking I wanna be Nigel Godrich. Seriously, the “it” boy producer’s life is most people’s idea of a rock ’n’ roll fantasy camp. Just take a look at his day planner for the last couple of years. Monday: Give Paul McCartney edge. Tuesday: Dial back Thom Yorke’s edge. Wednesday: Make Beck a man. Ironically, it’s the latter who suffers the greatest cred deficit these days. Some say Beck jumped the shark back at Midnite Vultures. Others lost faith when they found out he was a […]
Gitmo Jukebox
Just Like War, Torture Is Over If You Want It Like STDs or race relations, torture is the great unspeakable. Nobody will talk about it. Not your friends or your family, not your congressman or Fox News and certainly not our president. He won’t even use the T-word—he calls it “alternative interrogation” like it’s something you’d see on the midway at Lollapalooza. Well, you can call rape “a forced backrub with benefits,” but it’s still rape. Perhaps the least heinous of all reported U.S. torture techniques was the blasting of Eminem and Dr. Dre at teeth-rattling volume into the virgin […]
Mystery Tramps
New Morning For Dylan Or I Hate Paris In The Fall Hi, kids. Welcome back! You can leave your summer book reports on The Stranger and the cruel meaninglessness of existence so-why-even-bother? — in 800 words or less — on my desk after class. And be forewarned, anyone still pronouncing the author’s name like “anus” is simply not going to pass this class. On a happier note, I have a fun assignment for you today: Compare and contrast the new Bob Dylan album Modern Times with the new Paris Hilton album, which is called … wait for it … Paris. Why all those frowns? What’s […]
Dead Flowers: Syd, Arthur & The Acid-Minded Professor
Chalk it up to karmic coincidence that the deaths of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and Love’s Arthur Lee—two of ’60s psychedelia’s most beloved and drug-damaged souls—should bookend the recent publication of Robert Greenfield’s Timothy Leary: A Biography. Though Leary has been dead 10 years, Greenfield wakes his trippy ghost and, à la A Christmas Carol, forces it to confront the damning facts of his past: his reckless acid-for-all advocacy (Leary never really bothered to point out that, um, maybe children and the mentally unstable should not take LSD); his snake-oil charm and countercultural carpetbagging (from stoner Harvard prof to gun-toting […]
Karma Police, Arrest This Blonde
A Bush Twin Claps Thom Yorke’s Eraser. The cosmic bargain, shook on long ago, clearly states you can’t pick your parents or your fans. This partly explains why Thom Yorke, so famously tormented by Radiohead’s dizzying ascendancy, has been trying to thin the herd with increasingly inscrutable sounds and arrangements, constantly second-guessing the band’s instinct for anthems with arty and invariably electronic detours. The intent, aside from making some strikingly original music, was to scare off the sheep like a boozy fratboy trying to intimidate a blind date with high speed and fast turns. Except when Yorke finally pulls up to […]
Wake Me Up When The ’80s Are Over (Again)
Gettin’ Your Hot Chip All Up In My Brightblack Morning Light Back in the early mid-’80s that today’s hep cats so lovingly fetishize and cloyingly recycle, there were two kinds of bands. Those that looked forward and those that looked back. The forward-lookers were going for the shock of the new, of course, while the backward-lookers opted for the comfort of the past. The forward-lookers were usually British, had pouffy hair and billowy pastel clothes that snapped and zippered in weird places and all of them seemed to get their names from either A Clockwork Orange or Barbarella— Duran Duran, Heaven 17, […]
POSTED BY JONATHAN VALANIA, CONCERNED AMERICAN AT 1:13 AM POSTED BY JONATHAN VALANIA, CONCERNED AMERICAN AT 12:52 AM
Death To The Pixies!
All Good Monkeys Go To Heaven A word of warning: This is gonna be one of those columns where I go on and on about my little monkey shines with famous alt-rock personalities. Millions of people love it when I do that, but others seem to get very, very angry about it, stomp their feet and write mean letters that hurt my feelings. If that sounds like you, stop reading right now. I’m serious. I don’t want to even see you in the second paragraph. Set the Wayback Machine to 1988. I’m a college DJ stranded in the middle of […]