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, […]
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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 […]
WAR OF DISTORTION Mr. Young Goes To Washington When Stephen Colbert hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner — the annual D.C. puppet show where reporters play pattycake with the Prez — he rode the Trojan Horse of Truthiness right up to the President’s table and unleashed its hidden contents: a disinfecting dose of reality-based reality, thinly-coated with irony for easier digestion, though impossible to swallow for those weaned on Fox News comfort food. Speaking truth to power at point blank-range, Colbert’s barbs essentially added up to: The emperor has no clothes, and all of you, the Fourth Estate, have become nothing more […]
Amazing Grace
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN WE SHALL OVERCOME: THE SEEGER SESSIONS It’s no accident that you don’t really know what Pete Seeger did. That he’s truly larger than life, an American original, the kind that walk out of storybooks, like Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed, but more real. That he more or less singlehandedly carried the burden of pure roll-up-your-sleeves and speak-truth-to-power lefty populism, social justice and humanitarian conscience on his back for the better part of the 20th Century, with amazing grace and without complaint. For his trouble he’s been tarred and feathered, beaten and blacklisted, and officially written out of history […]
At The Twilight’s Last Gleaming
The Lonesome Crowded Death Of Grandaddy And All Who Sailed With It The posthumous album by Grandaddy opens with the forlorn voice of a child simultaneously invoking the album’s title and asking the question innocents invariably ask in the wake of a divorce, fire, flood, hurricane, towering inferno, earthquake or Poseidon adventure: What Ever Happened To The Family Cat? Trust me kid, you don’t want to know. As you have no doubt heard by now, this will be the final Grandaddy album and, really, that should come as no surprise. Most bands have a shelf life of ten years tops — five […]
This Is Where Ilebrity Begins…With A Mix Tape
RHYMES FOR THE DEAF, DUMB AND BLIND CRACKERJACK HIP-HOP JAWN Okay, kids – here’s the deal … I take my hip hop very seriously. Like Chuck D., I, too, believe that it can serve as “CNN for Black people.” But that’s not all that’s at stake these days. Hip hop is the new jazz – a truly American-born music phenomenon/style/genre that has yet to be rivaled by contemporaries in the form of social consciousness, intelligent wordplay and overall swagger. This disc represents what I regard to be the cream of the hip-hop crop as of late (with a […]
Cosmic Americana
THE FLAMING LIPS At War With The Mystics (Warner Bros.) Having become sentient in the mid-’70s, somewhere in the middle of that that vast mountainous Pennsyltucky between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, I had a front row seat to one of the places where the ’60s went to die: the hinterlands. While more cosmopolitan zip codes were sampling disco, cocaine, Members Only jackets and punk, all I could see growing up was ex-greaser shitkickers in dirty bellbottoms, Greg Brady haircuts, faded Dark Side of The Moon T-shirts and knocked-up girlfriends in peasant dresses billowing with pre-natal pulchritude, blasting Zep, Floyd and Yes […]
Come On Feel The Rage
DISCUSSED: IRISH GIRLFRIENDS; THE IRA; RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE; MUMIA; PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN; THE END OF DEMOCRACY; AND JUST HOW AWESOME IS THIS PHOTO OF BRIAN JONES? Five years and three girlfriends ago, Rage Against the Machine was on the FOP shitlist for staging a Free Mumia concert at the Meadowlands. Mumia, as you may have heard, was convicted of killing officer Daniel Faulkner. None of that hubub was much on my radar back then. But my gal at the time, well, she was pretty hardcore Irish, Up The Ra! and all that. Her aunt was a tough-but-sweet old broad […]