When The Shit Hits The Fans

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE WHEN THE BAND YOU LOVE HATES YOU

We all have bands we hate, really hate-you know, with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. You hate REM, I still hate Journey. There's a lot of that going around. But how many people can say a band hates them? Tin-eared soundmen, people who jack the gear out of their van while they sleep, and the played jokesters who still yell "Freebird!"-and that's about it.
And when you narrow it down to people who are hated by their favorite bands, well, it's a very elite club, my friend. Membership is pretty much down to me and Mark David Chapman, homicidal Beatles superfan. Misery usually loves company but I have no sympathy for my cohort-he killed John Lennon. Motherfuck him.

My crime? Well, I wrote this pretty candid piece about Wilco for Magnet back around the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Everything I wrote about-the band members forced to walk the plank, the messy divorce from Reprise and the handshake drugs that were bought downtown, as well as the fact that Wilco had became the Great American Band-eventually became a matter of public record, in the documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart and the frank interviews Jeff Tweedy gave in the wake of his rehab stint last year. I contend, your honor, that my only crime was writing an honest story about the band before they were accustomed to people doing so.

Be that as it may, Wilco hates me. I know-boo-hoo, right? Sure, journalism isn't Friendster. It's not my job to be buddies with the people I write about, but it kinda sucks when you happen to admire them.

Last year I wrote a story about the Terror Dentist, aka Anand Rao, a 33-year-old Rittenhouse Square dentist and Wilco super-fan who was visited by the FBI after somebody, possibly a patient, made an anonymous tip. A few weeks before then-Attorney General John Ashcroft held one of his curiously timed be-very-afraid-terrorists-walk-among-us press conferences. One of the cold-blooded killers possibly hiding under your bed or mine was named Adnan. And Rao's first name was Anand. If that wasn't suspicious enough, Anand is of Indian descent and, to a nearsighted or paranoid elderly patient, could pass for an Arab.

The whole thing ended happily, with the FBI agent asking Anand for a dental appointment. In the accompanying photo, Anand posed in his beloved Wilco shirt, purchased off eBay for a princely sum and rumored to have belonged to the drummer.

Somehow Wilco sees the story and links it on their website, for like the whole summer. At one point, their Web master got a hold of me, saying the band wanted to invite Anand to see them perform at Radio City Music Hall. Free tickets, backstage passes, the whole nine yards. We'd become friends by this point, and Anand thought it was only fair that he take me-or maybe I said that, I'm a little fuzzy. I definitely told him he couldn't tell them who he was bringing because it might queer the deal.

So the big night rolls around, we stroll up to the box office at Radio City and ... no tickets. Come back later, they say. The band hasn't turned in the guest list yet. That's odd, I think. It's less than a half-hour to show time. We go out front and a couple people in line recognize Anand. "Aren't you that Terror Dentist guy?"

Anand tells me he feels like a rockstar. With the clock dwindling, we agree to drop a $100 pair of scalper tickets just to be safe. We're not going to come all this way and miss the show. As we head back inside, we check at the ticket booth one last time. No dice. We explain the whole Terror Dentist saga to this sweet old lady usher, she goes backstage, finds Wilco's road manager, explains the deal, comes back with two tickets. Don't worry about the passes, she says. Just go to the backstage door after the show.

Cool, we think. We go inside, watch the show. In a word: transplendent. But you already know that, and if you don't you can check out Kicking Television, the just-out live album recorded over four nights at the Vic Theater in Chicago. How is it? It's fucking great. They're my favorite band. What do you think I'm gonna say?

So after the show we knock on the backstage door. A smiling security guard opens the door and asks us if we're here for the party. Yes, very much so, we say. He looks for our names on the list and when he can't find them he stops smiling and slams the door in our faceS. Just then this guy walks up. British accent. Looks like he's in the Strokes.

"Blimey," he says. "You're that Terror Dentist bloke, ain't ya, mate?"

Again, rockstar moment for Anand. Turns out he's Wilco's road manager and he's gonna get everything sorted. We follow him inside and up the elevator. He tells us he's got to make preparations for the party downstairs, so he's gonna escort us up to the band's dressing room. "Wait till they see you!"

The elevator door opens up, and we're deposited in the tiny hallway outside their dressing room, crowded with the band's inner circle: manager, publicist, a few Nonesuch bigwigs. I turn around and I'm standing face to face with Jeff Tweedy. Last time I talked to him, he asked me to never call him again. Tweedy gives me the hairy eyeball and retreats into the dressing room and slams the door shut. Up walks Wilco's manager, Tony Margherita, who kinda looks like his name sounds.

"I'm gonna take you guys to the party," he says. We get on the elevator and head down, the door opens and we get out, you know, to go to the party. And then we realize we're back at the backstage door and spin around to see the Tony Margherita still in the elevator as the doors close in our face. We've just been kicked to the curb. Anand was pissed. But me, I remember thinking I would die if I could come back new.

Is That All There Is To A Fire?

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

How Many Strokes Does It Take To Get To The Center Of Julian?

It all started-for me, anyway-at Spaceboy. Dandy Dan Buzzkirk was behind the counter looking, as per usual, like the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary.
"Check this out," he said, before slapping on The Modern Age, the three-song debut by some band called the Strokes. It was everything I liked about Television/Velvet Underground/the Cars/Tom Petty's Heartbreakers. And the singer sounded like he was reciting the ISOs out of the back of The Village Voice through an electric razor. Every song made me want to break a window or smoke a cigarette. I paid cash.

Fast-forward past a gig opening for Guided By Voices, a drunken four-week residency at the Khyber and a star-making turn at Making Time to the after-show party at the Five Spot following a triumphant headlining gig at the TLA. All the local hipsterati were in attendance, hovering at the velvet rope that separated us from the Strokes' VIP booth.

"Fa-bree-zio!" chirped a Fresh Air producer, hoping to catch the drummer's attention. There was a tingle in the air. For a few moments we were inside the bubble, looking out instead of in. Even the haters seemed jazzed.

You can sell 3 million albums with the right pose and the right hook, they said, but there comes a time-usually after your first album sells 2 million and the second sells only half that-when sporting the right shades is no longer enough. A time when you actually have to mean it, man-if you want to matter. And that's the singer's job.

Imagine, if you can, you are the lead singer of the Strokes. Your name is Julian Casablancas, scion of the Elite Model Management founder and son of Miss Denmark 1965. Your surly slur serves as the perfect foil for the pogo-ing garage rock of your prep school pals. Your rise is dizzying. Within a span of months you go from fliering St. Marks Place to being a savior of rock, according to the hyperventilating British music press.

Now it's 2006-two albums later-and the band's grown beyond the catchy primitivism of the early days. They've built their own studio and have been, um, stroking for months. There's a whole album in the can, First Impressions of Earth, and it's very cool. All that's missing are the vocals.

The songs are like streets: Some go uptown, others point to the Bowery, some go sideways and others go nowhere in particular. Your mission, Mr. Casablancas, should you accept it, is to name these streets, give these songs a mailing address or a zip code, tell the cabbie where to pull over, which buzzer to push.

That's what New York rock 'n' roll is about: where the action is. Your job is to take us there-and in so doing prove there's more inside of you than just tinny petulance and pedigree. But when you open your mouth to sing ... nothing comes out. Nothing worth repeating, anyway.

Except maybe: "I've got nothing to say." Crooning like you're trapped inside a helium balloon or a Human League song, you repeat that over and over again. Each time it becomes a little less ironic and a little more sincere, maddening in its repetition, tragic in its waste, damning in its self-evidence.

And though the vocals will be mixed front-and-center and the distortion will be replaced with moony drollery and Cobain-ish tantrums, no matter how loud you scream, you just can't fill these songs. The price, perhaps, of being born very cool-but not very deep.

Can You Dig It?

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

20 Essential Rock Snob Artifacts Unearthed In 2005

1) Patti Smith Horses: 30th Anniversary Legacy Edition (Arista)
As the high priestess of punk, Smith revived the shamanistic notion that words could be strung like Christmas lights, and-when whipped around like whirling dervishes atop three-chord garage rock-could open the portal of the ecstatic.

2) Bruce Springsteen Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Three-Disc Set (Sony)
After two commercial duds, the suits demanded a hit or else. Written as a time-lapse snapshot of one long summer night in the teenage jungleland of Jersey -- with all the urgency of a last chance power try.

3) Donovan Try for the Sun (Sony)
Deathless acid-folk from the land of peace, pot and microdot.

4) No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Paramount)
Best thing on public television since Sesame Street.

5) Talking Heads Brick (Rhino/Wea)
All eight studio albums remixed to sound like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Just kidding.

6) Flaming Lips Fearless Freaks (Shout! Factory)
Unflinching home movie about a bunch of Okie space cadets who clicked their heels three times and wound up somewhere over the rainbow.

7) DJ Shadow Endtroducing ... : Deluxe Edition (Island)
Alchemical turntablist clones groovy Frankensteins out of the recombinant DNA of semiprecious vinyl. Nine years later beat scientists are still trying to figure out how he made this monster mash.

8) Neutral Milk Hotel In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (Domino Reissue)
This is still the king of carrot flowers. Come back wherever you are.

9) Dig! (Palm Pictures)
The Dandy Warhols' guitarist nails it when he predicts that in 10 years his band will likely be forgotten but people will still be buying Brian Jonestown Massacre albums.

10) Moanin' at Midnight: The Life and Times of Howlin' Wolf By James Segrest and Mark Hoffman (Pantheon)
Documenting the hard-time-killing-floor life of the spookiest-voiced bluesman to crawl out of the Delta ooze and walk like a man in Chicago.

11) The Man Who Fell to Earth (Criterion)
Red-haired, lizard-eyed and cocaine-thin, David Bowie plays the titular extraterrestrial in Nicholas Roeg's navel-gazing 1976 study of the metaphysics of alienation and ambiguity.

12) Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke By Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown)
He sang like an angel and died like a pimp: naked, chasing a hooker and staring down the wrong end of a gun. He was only 33 when he went to oldies heaven.

13) Various Artists One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found (Rhino/Wea)
She's goin' to the chapel and she's gonna get married and she's gonna cut that bitch Sheila if she even looks at her man again.

14) Ramones Weird Tales of the Ramones (Rhino/Wea)
Their genius wasn't that they really only had one song. It's that you can listen to it 85 times in a row and never get tired of it.

15) Johnny Cash The Legend (Columbia)
Required listening for all good Americans.

16) Greil Marcus, Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads (Public Affairs)
Only a profound windbag like Marcus could wring 283 pages of hardcover sociocultural exegesis out of a six and a half minute song.

17) Rock Snob Dictionary, By David Kamp and Steven Daly
Kamp and Daly finally turn their much imitated (ahem) Vanity Fair piece into a book-length treatise perched halfway between self-serious insight and self-mocking smarm.

18) T. Rex Slider
Reissued along with ZINC ALLOY AND THE HIDDEN RIDERS OF TOMORROW, DANDY IN THE UNDERWORLD, and THE T. REX WAX CO. SINGLES A's AND B's 1972-77, this is the one that, all these years later, retains its hubcap diamond star halo from beginning to end.

19) Miles Davis The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia Legacy)
When Miles started dressing his jazz and Dashikis and wah-wah pedals and let it all hang out.

20) Stooges Fun House (Elektra/Wea)
Thirty-six years old and this still makes Metallica sound like pussies.

Trusted Travelers

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

10 Albums That Were Drivin' My Plane in 2005


1. Spoon Gimme Fiction (Merge)
Mystery loves company, and everyone loves Spoon. Like the hooded figure on the cover, Spoon's minimalist rockscapes intrigue endlessly because of what they don't reveal: the obvious. Masters of the art of subtraction, Spoon makes subliminal three-chord guitar chug strip naked and do the locomotion, and in the vast silence that seems to frame every instrument on this record you could almost swear you hear a singalong chorus or a fist-pumping solo.

2. Bright Eyes I'm Wide Awake It's Morning (Saddle Creek)

Released concurrently with the best-forgotten Digital Ash In A Digital Urn, this was Conor Oberst's Blonde On Blonde move -- the vast sprawl of a mind wandering too fast to be trapped in just one album. Maybe that's why every show seems like Live At The Royal Albert Hall and some are already yelling Judas -- which is, of course, the highest compliment a generation can bestow on a folksinger.

3. Fiona Apple (The Unreleased) Extraordinary Machine (Epic)

Funny how the year's best un-buyable album went from a Smile-esque cause celebre to a cake somebody left out in the rain. Money talks and Jon Brion's art-fag hurdy gurdy bullshit walks -- right over to Kanye West's Late Registration, to be exact. Now I ain't sayin' she's a goldigger, but...

4. New Pornographers Twin Cinema (Matador)

Another dose of feathery Canuck-pop to tickle your melody bone. Their sound may be a whiter shade of bread but their execution is is as immaculate as Mr. Clean.

5. Wilco Kicking Television (Nonesuch)

The double live album was rendered obsolete with the evolution of seedless weed. But this one's justified because it's on the stage where Wilco has been re-inventing itself lately. With the addition of Nels Cline, who tweaks Jeff Tweedy's avant-rock curiosities with Hammer of Gods virtuosity, and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, fluent in the scarf-rock vernacular and hair like ABBA, and laptop-rockin Mikael Jorgensen, who sends Kraut-rock sine-wave squiggles through even the most Allman of jams -- Wilco now has both their pre- and post-rock bonafides and they can still be a shit-hot bar band when they want to be.


6. Art Brut Bang Bang Rock N' Roll (Fierce Panda) Fear not boys and girls, the raw nerve of rock n' roll is alive and well and screaming its id off. Edging out stellar releases from Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand in the Anglo angular-rock sweepstakes, Art Brut's debut crackles with the sound of spent hormones and spilled beer and old Fall records. Old school skinny-tie types can rest assured: the New Wave is in good hands.

7. MIA Arular (XL)

Maya's dancehall toasts and skip-rope rhymes double-dutch over deft grime jams and prismatic click-hop. Crazy, you think. And fun, too. Like Bollywood miniatures. But if you listen closely you can hear her father's radicalism Morse coded deep into these grooves.


8. White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan (V-2)
This may not be the White Stripes album people wanted. After all, Jackn White's great talent is sounding like both Page and Plant-something no one person has ever pulled off-and with rare exceptions on Satan he opts not to get the Led out. Not that Satan doesn't have its hellfire moments of wall-pounding rock 'n' roll. There's the White Zombie garage-stomp of "Blue Orchid," the groin thunder of "Instinct Blues" and the epic shriek-and-shred of "Red Rain."But for much of the album Jack puts down the guitar-an instrument he wields like a Jedi-or at least turns down the "gnarly" knob, relying mostly on the warm, clustered chords of a Steinway piano, the occasional marimba, an alarm clock and every now and then what sounds like something falling over. After Renée walked away and the dueling marriages that followed, who are we to complain when Jack turns out a messy breakup record? And with turnabout being fair play and all, you're welcome to listen to Satan like paparazzi-to hear it as strobe-flashed glimpses of the private moments of glamorous people. On "The Nurse" (Nurse Betty, anyone?) Jack lies in his sickbed, unwittingly spoon-fed poison by a nameless angel of mercy as a warm island breeze blows in with the distant sound of marimba and shakers. Then the music heat-warps as the nurse twists the knife while chanting, "No I'm never going to let you down," and suddenly the drums sound like slamming doors or coffin lids. Mmm. Drama.


9. Dungen Ta De Lungt (Subliminal Sounds)
Sunshine supermen from the land of Vallhalla.

10. Antony And The Johnsons I Am A Bird Now (Secretly Canadian)
That voice -- a beauiftul pearl inside this oyster of a man, born of irritation, out of the sand in the bathing suit of life. It sounds like the yawp of humanity echoing in the abyss of universal cruelty. The duets with Lou Reed, Little Jimmy Scott and Rufus Wainright remind me of the scene in Fight Club where Ed Norton is bawling into the D-cup bosom of Meatloaf. Sometimes we all need a man hug.

Home on the Strange

(Illustration by Alex Fine)


A Dispatch From Woody Creek.





First a note of justification. I'm about to say a few words about Hunter S. Thompson, the writer, in what is ostensibly a column about music because:
a) HST was rock 'n' roll incarnate; we're talking balls the size of cantaloupes.

b) Despite the pharmacopia of substances controlled and otherwise he ritually pickled his gray matter in, he was in possession of one of the sharpest minds of the 20th century, possibly even up until he personally disconnected it with a gun to his head.

c) I just happen to be hiking in the Rockies.



Which is why I'm writing this from a patio table at the Woody Creek Tavern. Located a stone's throw from HST's Owl Farm, this was Thompson's semiprivate watering hole, and I'm knocking back a few too many Flying Dogs, a tangy local microbrew with quite literally eye-popping label art by HST illustrator Ralph Steadman.



As the sun drops behind the purple mountains, Christmas tree lights twinkle into incandescence on the umbrellas overhead and a folksinger warbles harmlessly over in the corner.



HST's widow is sitting at the next table. She discusses Dylan selling Live at the Gaslight at Starbucks with her dinner companion. I apologize for the intrusion and tell her I just wanted to let her know I've come from Philadelphia to pay my respects. She seems a little gunshy ... er, poor word choice. Nonetheless, she's gracious, grateful and probably younger than I am.



So we leave it at that, and I go off in search of the signed affidavit wherein HST promises the proprietors of the Woody Creek Tavern to never again set off a smoke bomb in the bar. It's supposedly hanging on one of the walls, somewhere in the dense mosaic of HST paraphernalia and tippling snapshots of less famous habitues.



On the night of HST's funereal moonshot, at the moment of ignition, they played "Mr. Tambourine Man," but they should have played Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner," because the man clearly earned his stripes.

He was a lot of things, most of them genius or at least ingeniously funny, or true in their lies, and all of them dangerous-often to himself, sometimes to others, but always to the status quo. Chaos was the ace up his sleeve, the reason God made fire extinguishers.

But above all things, he was a great American. He was part of the Great Days-before the wave broke and rolled back. A time already long past when Jack Nicholson declared in Easy Rider, "You know, this used to be a helluva good country."

And if HST couldn't quite remember that time after years of unbuttoning his peyote mind, he could at least envision it. And he would light his hair on fire and bray to the moon every day it ceased to exist-up to a point. Eventually you just say, "Fuck it. Let's go to the bar."

The final years were sodden and fallow, save for a fairly exhaustive closet cleaning, wracked with infirmity after the better part of 67 years of abuse. With his great red shark of a legend burnished and looming, he seemed aware for some time his best work was behind him, that he was a man for his season, and that season had passed.

He went out in a blaze of self-inflicted glory, his atomized DNA snowing down on pastures where the buffalo roam. I never did find that affidavit, but nowhere was heard a discouraging word as the crescent moon set on the ridge like a smile over Woody Creek.

All That You Can't Leave Behind

Discussed:
Girls Gone Wild;Our New Orleans; Charlie Brown Christmas blues;The Fiery Furnaces' Rehearsing My Choir; The Future Has Already Replaced The Past

As with avoiding the words "funky" and or "gumbo" when writng about Nawlins, it's nearly impossible to write about a Katrina relief benefit album without bumping up against this ghoulish disconnect: A lot of people died; you should buy this album and party down. So let's start there.
The official death toll is 1,300. But as NPR reported last month, nearly 500 children are still missing. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. How do you assign a body count to a way of life?

It may be hard to imagine if you've seen New Orleans only from Girls Gone Wild videos, but the city was much, much more than a place to get hammered and throw Mardi Gras beads at coed tits. I'll spare you the oft-repeated magnolia-scented mantras about the Big Easy in the wake of the flood, save this one: There was no place on earth like it, which is an impossibly rare distinction at the dawn of the 21st century, when our big blue marble has essentially become the third mall from the sun.

The confluence of musical miscegenation, antebellum architecture, ancient humidity, cayenne peppa, bottomless bottles of bourbon and a centuries-old culture of corruption combined to create a forbidden zone on the buckle of the Bible Belt, where nothing was true and everything was permitted. That's all gone now, of course, washed into the sea like footprints in the sand.

All that's left behind is Our New Orleans: A Benefit Album for the Gulf Coast, an extraordinary gathering of the city's living musical heritage: the likes of Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, Buckwheat Zydeco, Irma Thomas and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, each and every one at the top of their game. I'm sure all you 'XPN types are already partying your Skechers off to this little gem of a release, so I won't waste space preaching to the choir.

To everyone else, I know what you're thinking: This is gonna be one of those supposed-to-be-good-for-you white-liberal-guilt-fests. Wrong. Half of Our New Orleans is a stone soul picnic-like there's a party in your pants, where the saints go marching in.

The other half is essentially a funeral march. Anyone who can sit through Buckwheat Zydeco's "Cryin' in the Streets" or Irma Thomas' "Backwater Blues" or Allen Toussaint's without being moved-well, we're gonna have to send out a search party for your humanity. As they used to say in my 'hood: This is some iconic shit. Like, Buena Vista Social Club good.

Speaking of which, a recent study commissioned by the Library of Congress suggests as much as 72 percent of American music recorded before 1965 is commercially unavailable. That's both appalling and par for the course-the future has always erased the past. To preserve instead of overwrite is to go against nature, which is in part what makes the Fiery Furnaces' Rehearsing My Choir so brave.

Released late last year, Choir is essentially a song cycle about the life of Furnace duo Matt and Eleanor Friedberger's grandmother-83-year-old Olga Sarantos-with Granny doing the narrating. It sounds like a bunch of kids down in the basement, firing up the old Victrola and reading aloud from family diary entries while grainy home movies flicker on the screen.

Some will hate it, but I think it has all the juvenile pathos and awkward beauty of a Charlie Brown Christmas special-all bare-ruined choirs, pencil-shaded blues and good grief. And like Our New Orleans, Rehearsing My Choir is a sandbag levee holding back the torrent of the future from washing away our most precious national heirloom: our cultural memory. Your purchase will help fill a bag with sand.

Wayne's World

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

Where 40 Is The New 20, And White Linen Suits Are The New Black.

Some men are born with lightning in a bottle, and others have to catch it. I'm not just talking about the forest-fire-starting, little-children-scaring, blasphemers-smiting bolts of electricity that, more often than you'd like to think, strike some Great Plains farmer dead in his shoes. The lightning is just a metaphor, people.

Let's call it the lightning of greatness. Where does this lightning come from, you ask? Nobody knows. It just shows up on the nightstand next to the crib. It waits there, glowing like fireflies, until the onset of youth and young manhood when-because they're young, dumb and full of testosterone-the first chance they get, they let it out. All of it. Right away.

Brilliant blasts of lightning shoot across the ether, lighting a page of time for an instant and an eternity. Pick your favorite premature ejaculation: Rimbaud's Illuminations, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks. It was all downhill after that. Live fast, die young, print the legend.

Other men spend their lives standing in the rain, an empty milk bottle in one hand, a cork in the other, waiting for lightning to strike. Take, for example, a fellow like the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne. He wasn't born with lightning in a bottle. He grew up Okie trash in the dazed and confused '70s, manning the deep fryer at Long John Silver's and selling dime bags on the side.

He couldn't really sing or play guitar-still can't, really. But by trial and error and a stubborn refusal to accept repetitive defeat, he eventually willed himself into that place where the sheer power of curiosity overcomes ineptitude and greatness follows. Actually, truth be told, greatness took its sweet ol' time.

Eureka did not come early or easy to the Lips. How do you get from manning the deep fryer in a pirate costume to the man in the bubble, floating messiah-like over the multitudes at Coachella in 20 years or less? Pacing. Slow and steady wins the race.

Besides, everyone knows that when it comes to prog rock, a spoonful weighs a ton. It's a tribute to the sheer density of The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots that the band can wring so much promotional mileage out of them, maintaining buzz with a soft, steady parade of super-furry mirrorball tours, remix EPs and film projects.

Three years after its initial release, Yoshimi has just been rereleased in 5.1 surround sound. There's a new photo book Waking up With a Placebo Headwound, a new video collection called Void, and the Lips are already streaming a video for the track "Mr. Ambulance Driver" that'll appear on their next full-length At War With the Mystics in 2006. The band's long-delayed sci-fi spoof Christmas on Mars is expected to be completed for holiday release.

Brad Beesley's recent Lips documentary The Fearless Freaks is remarkable for any number of reasons you've probably already discussed, not the least of which is the suggestion of a newly calibrated rock 'n' roll clock, where 40 is the new 20. On this clock, you no longer check out at 27, drunk, high or with a gun in your mouth. In fact, you don't really get undeniably great until you're a graybeard.

That's how, at the at the ripe old age of fortysomething, Coyne has established himself as the Phileas Fogg of alt-rock, megaphoning the news from his hot air balloon that the sun doesn't actually go down-it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

(Illustration by Alex Fine)


EXHUMING THE TOMB OF AMERICANA'S KING TUT

At the height of the Summer of Love, in the year of our lord 1967, Johnny Cash was fixin' to die. Men in black were no longer in fashion. It was the time of the Nehru jacket, when people were fair and had stars in their hair.
Ten years into an amphetamine addiction that started as a crutch but soon became a truncheon with which he couldn't help but beat himself unmercifully, Cash could no longer walk the line. Up for days, chain-smoking, with dark circles under his eyes, he thought enough was enough.

And so he retreated into the clammy darkness of Nickajack Cave like a dog hit by a car crawls under the house. To die. His plan was simple: Keep walking until the flashlight dies, then he won't be able to find his way out. He hiked deep into the belly of the earth, where he could hide his shame from friends, family and even the Almighty. Or so he thought. He sat on a rock and waited for death to take him. But death didn't come.

As he would tell it later, God made it clear to him that he wasn't done with Johnny just yet. There was work to do. And it occurred to him that you couldn't hide from God because God was within us. Even a sinner like you, Johnny Cash. And God guided him to the light. A year later he would record At Folsom Prison, and a year after that Life magazine would proclaim Johnny Cash and Muhammad Ali the two most famous people in the world.

How great is that? It's like red state porn. But wait, there's more. He never really shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, or did time, but he probably knew what he sang of in "Cocaine Blues." And there were more than a few punch-ups and nights sleepin' it off in the jails of Mayberrys across the South, while Andy Griffith types paged lazily through comic books and boasted of Aunt Bea's pie-making prowess.

He once got busted for trying to smuggle 1,163 pills across the Mexican border in a guitar case. In the '60s he really got into his train-hopping troubadour image, not just wearing dirty vintage cowboy threads, but packing a vintage pistol, sometimes loaded. And of course he was high as a kite.

If you ask me, Johnny Cash gives Christianity a good name. Hell, they should start a church of Cash for the true believers, the ones sometimes embarrassed to call themselves Christians. Aside from all the gangsta shit-the pills and the punches and the most famous middle finger in showbiz-the man in black was at bottom a man of mercy. He afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted. The poor and the screwed over. Prisoners, Native Americans, nonunion factory workers, fat no-neck crackers at county fairs and people like you and me. Who even tries to cast a net that wide anymore?

It's all here on Cash: The Legend, a fairly exhaustive four-CD overview of Cash's career that ends where the Rick Rubin revival begins. Timed to synergize with Walk the Line, the Cash biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix, this box will be the gotta-have this Christmas season. Buy it for anyone who even remotely cares what Jesus would do. And also buy it for the devil worshipper on your Christmas list. Johnny Cash died for their sins too.

Everybody Must Get Scones

(Illustration by Alex Fine)


SCORSESE, STARBUCKS AND DYLAN TOGETHER AT LAST!

There are two ways to sell out: sooner, and later. Back in '62 they sure as hell didn't sell double skinny caramel mochiatto decaf lattes with whipped cream on top at the Gaslight Cafe, the rough-hewn subterranean coffeehouse that served as Mecca for the Greenwich Village folk boom.
That little bit of cognitive dissonance will be airbrushed out of the minds of future generations starting next week, when Bob Dylan: Live at the Gaslight 1962 goes on sale exclusively-for 18 months anyway-at Starbucks.

I know, I know-Starbucks. Get over it. Think about it: A dearly departed Ray Charles sold 775,000 copies of Genius Loves Company at your friendly neighborhood Starbucks, and the one across the street from that and the one around the corner. And so on. All told, Starbucks accounted for a quarter of Genius Loves Company's worldwide sales.

Now consider this: There are 18 Starbucks in Philadelphia. How many Philadelphia record stores can you name? At this point, I'm required by law to point out that the times, they are, um, a-changin'.

If you can forget the crass commercialism of 21st-century hyper-capitalism for a moment-c'mon, this is America, you do it first thing every morning!-fork over your $13.95 to the nearest green-aproned barista, and you'll walk out of Starbucks with something far more long-lasting than a wicked-ass caffeine buzz.

Long available only in the shadowy redoubts of bootleggers, Live at the Gaslight 1962 is an extraordinary document of a time and a place, when a rumpled man alone with a guitar and a yellowing songbook of old, weird Americana could become a shining beacon of conscience.

In '62 Dylan wasn't that far removed from Robert Zimmerman, a chubby-cheeked Jewish kid from Minnesota who'd recently reinvented himself as a wizened bard of dust-bowl sadness, cowboy arcanum, humid Delta blues and sharecropper suffrage.

As Live at the Gaslight makes abundantly clear, he was utterly convincing in all those guises, wheezing righteously against the evil American gothic of the Jim Crow South, against the crushing poverty that drives a South Dakota dirt farmer to kill his family rather than hear them starve, against the war pigs wringing blood and profit out of atomic paranoia.

At the Gaslight he had them all eating out of his hand-the corduroy folkniks, the civil rights kids, the angel-headed hipsters and the stray tourist couple just off the bus from Sheboygan. In a few short years, wild-haired and wired, the ghost of electricty howling in the bones of his face, he'd turn his back on all of them at the Newport Folk Festival.

Why all this happened will, presumably, be explained with a Goodfellas-esque montage in Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home doc, airing Sept. 26 on PBS.

The accompanying two-disc soundtrack to No Direction Home (set for simultaneous release with Live at the Gaslight, but available in record stores) is another embarrassment of riches for armchair Dylanologists, as it spans his first recordings in 1959 through the punkish snarl of "Maggie's Farm" at Newport 1965, to the thunderously raw rock 'n' roll and resulting jeers of "Judas" at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966.

All of which is a long way of saying to you, Mr. Starbucks Hatin' Man, that if you want to call Bob Dylan a sell-out, well, you're gonna have to stand in line.

Black Thoughts

(Illustration by Alex Fine)


WHY THE ROOTS WILL ALWAYS BE PHILLY

A friend of mine has a funny I-met-the-Roots-and-made-an-ass-of-myself story. This friend, for obvious reasons, shall remain nameless, but for sheer entertainment value, let's refer to him hereafter as Horsecock.
Around the release of 2002's wonderfully artsy-fartsy Phrenology, good ol' Horsecock and his girl went to see the Roots perform at Indre Studios. Joining the Roots for said performance was one Cody ChesnuTT, the dirty South rubber-band man who lent his Smokey Robinson-like pipes to the single "The Seed (2.0)."

Later Horsecock and his girl ventured up to an impromptu VIP after-party on Indre's roof deck, and promptly struck up a conversation with ChesnuTT. Understand that Horsecock is/was a longtime Roots fan, but at the time he was completely taken with ChesnuTT's The Headphone Masterpiece, calling it "the black Bee Thousand," a reference to Guided By Voices' landmark lo-fi breakthrough album.

Another after-party guest approached, thrust out his hand and introduced himself as Tariq. Horsecock responded with something along the lines of, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, nice to meet you Tariq, but I'm talking to my new pal Cody ChesnuTT. He's down with the Roots, yo."

Horsecock's girl elbowed him in the ribs and, out of the corner of her mouth, reminded him that Tariq was also known as Black Thought, the Roots' frontman and MC. D'oh!

Horsecock tried to cover with something along the lines of, "Oh, Ta-reek ... sure, sure, love your flow. Love it." But by then the damage was done, and Black Thought went off in search of the less clueless in attendance.

I mention this for two reasons. First, I just like seeing the word Horsecock in print. Second, it's indicative of why the Roots-despite the Grammy, the globe-trotting acclaim, the killa-dilla live rep and the white critical mass approval earned over the course of six diligently diverse and diversely innovative albums-have never been sprung from commercial death row, a life sentence meted out for the crime of failing to shake the alt-rap tag that's stuck to them like flypaper since their days at the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts.

The Roots have great taste; the buying public wants rap that tastes great. Their problem is that the drummer is more iconic than the frontman. This isn't entirely the fault of Black Thought: As an MC his formidable skills should theoretically pay the bills. He's just not enough of a cartoon: no gold tooth, no Courvoisier to pass, no big clock hanging around his neck, no bullet holes, no body count, no body armor.

Nicely anthologized in the excellent recently released Home Grown!: The Beginners Guide to Understanding the Roots volumes one and two, the sum and essence of Black Thought's words mirror Jules' famous imprecation in Pulp Fiction: "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and goodwill, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers."

Amen, right? Still, it's hard to dress those vows up in bling and boo-tay, gunplay and G-units, and sell it to horny 14-year-old suburban white boys with appetites for destruction. And to their credit, the Roots have never even tried. History will be kind to them, even if radio isn't, because the Roots always did the right thing.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Van Morrison
Astral Weeks
WARNER BROS.

My current fave Sunday-morning-coming-down album, Van's transcendental 1968 masterwork still holds its secrets all these years later. The converted need no further preaching about Astral Weeks, so it's the uninitiated I'm reaching out to here. First you need to dispense with the image of Van as the largely irrelevant pot-bellied sourpuss we know today. Flash back to Belfast in the mid-'60s: Van is winding down his tenure as blues shouter for Them--a roughneck collective of bruising whiteboy R&B and flame-throwing garage-punk snarl--ready to make the leap from drunk-up wailer to cosmic poet-seeker. Legend has it that Van laid down these songs with just his voice and acoustic guitar like one of those paint-by- numbers sketches, and that a team of crack session men fingerpainted in all the breezy jazz-blues swirl and Celtic-soul sorcery afterward--which, if true, is all the more astonishing given how symbiotic and intuitive everything sounds. What any of it means is almost beside the point. The closest analog is the luminous ambiguity of James Joyce's Ulysses in that Van was trying to evoke feelings and visions--tar-black blues and red wine ecstasies--that transcend literal meaning on their way to, um, higher altitudes

If Six Were Five

(Illustration by Alex Fine)


We Got Yer Sixth Borough Right Here!

I still think we should've gone with "Philadelphia: You Comin' or What?" instead of "City That Indicts You Back" or whatever it is. But if media-friendly catchphrases really are tourist catnip, we could do a lot worse than being called the sixth borough.
Really, some of you protest too much, methinks. Would it really kill you to be so hip it hurts for 15 minutes? You don't have to believe the hype, but at least enjoy it. Like I tell my celebrity friends: There will come a day when they don't ask you for your autograph. And then you got worry.

We are living in interesting times, my friends. Not since, well, ever-but let's just say the glory days of Gamble and Huff-have technology, talent, buzz and geography aligned in such a fortuitous orbit. If we're going to be the next "it" city, we're going to need an emblematic music scene.

In the near-distant past, the spirit was willing. There was some great music, and some even got over. But most of it didn't, because the infrastructure was weak: no house label, few opening slots on the big stages and at best token access to the commercial airwaves (plus the usual corruption, ineptitude, drug problems, bad luck and life's essential unfairness).

With the recent move of the Plain Parade gals into the label business, we now have one of those vacancies filled. They recently released Songs From the Sixth Borough, a compendium of Philly indie kids covering Philly songs from then and now. And seriously, this thing is so good, I'm going to have to insist they do at least four a year.

The thing that makes this both practical and necessary is that Plain Parade is a download-only label. Now, I know what you're thinking: junior league. Maybe in the past, but now I hear the future. CD technology has gotten so cheap that even the most pitiful have their own "release." You're still looking at a few grand to start up, and I couldn't in good conscience ask Plain Parade to do that four times a year. And nobody can hear a CD if nobody plays it on the radio. And you can't buy a CD if nobody stocks it in their store.

But if you go to www.plainparade.org/songs you can hear every song beginning to end and then download the whole thing, with artwork, for a measly $8. Easy as pie and dirt-cheap to make. Most of the bands recorded fast and on the fly, giving everything a pleasantly medium-fi quality. It's like a digital dirigible of Philly indie sounds hovering over the city that anyone anywhere in the world with decent Web access can beam up to.

Look up in the sky! It's a bird! A plane! No, it's us. And this is our music. Keep it comin', I say, even if this thing would be worth twice the price with a third less tracks-but such is the messy nature of the comp beast.

Still, there are at least eight great tracks here-not just great for Philly-and at least as many good ones. I'm not going to say which; after all, I have to drink with these people. And while I could quibble with the sequencing, none of that really matters anymore.

After you download it you make all those decisions-you edit, delete and sequence to taste. You're the DJ. You are what you play. I know you've heard all this before, but this time it's really true.

Rockism And Its Discontents

(Illustration by Alex Fine)


Hello, my name is Jonathan, and I am a rockist. (This is the part where everyone says "hello" back to me in a warm and welcoming fashion. What, like you've never been to an AA meeting?) Actually, I'm not really a rockist anymore; I just play one in this column.
For anyone who can't distinguish a rockist from a sexist or a fascist, let me explain. It's essentially a neutral term that's been kicking around rock-snob circles for going on 20 years. As of late it's been seized by Gen Y happy-asses to kick against the phallocentric old-boys'-club critocracy.

As such, the phat-pants kids level the term as a pejorative at geezers who can't see past rock's storied but antiquated constructs (shark-shagging shamanistic lead singer/elegantly wasted guitarist/vomit-asphyxiating drummer) and time-worn narratives (boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-starts-band-and-gets-girl-back-plus-free-drugs-and-picture-on-the-cover-of-Rolling-Stone).

These rockist guys-and they're invariably guys-are bitterly irked and utterly befuddled by this crazy modern world of white rappers, Lolita lip-syncers and dance music fashioned by annoying gay robots from planet Neptune. Wigga, please. Life's rich pageant is far too nuanced to be reduced to a narrow choice between Nick Hornby or American Idol.

First of all, the profession of music writing-or as goes the famous quote, dancing about architecture-has been brought low by years of editorial neglect, forced to subsist on a low-wage diet of beer money, free records and a pat on the head. Thus it no longer attracts the best and brightest. So there's that.

Second, the way music is made and the way we consume it has changed radically since, say, Live Aid: better hair, "free" downloads, more thongs, less mousse and Pro Tools-style digital technology that allows musicians to defy the laws of physics, acoustics and gravity itself.

As a result, pop music has become sexier, more disposable and almost without exception head-fuckingly psychedelic. (Waiter, I'll have whatever Timbaland's smoking.) And because it's largely free, we eat a lot more of it knowing full well that if we don't, pop will eat itself.

Meanwhile, good rock music has once again become something exotic and otherly-a semisecret society replenishing itself annually with a steady diet of old myths and new tones. Or an aging confederacy of dunces, depending on which side of the rockist/anti-rockist seesaw you sit.

Me? I straddle the fulcrum. I see pop music as all of the above: good, bad and indifferent. I put rock music both beneath and above contempt depending on the time, the place and the tune.

For example, I think the new M.I.A. is way more important than the new Springsteen. M.I.A. is pan-cultural (a Sri Lankan living in London who toasts like a Jamaican), ecstatic (her music is legitimately fun for all ages) and more than a little subversive (her dad was a Tamil Tiger, hiding out in the mountains as a freedom fighter).

And Bruce is, well, doing pretty much what he's always done: alternating between stadium-stuffing bar-band roughhousing and small-room, man-alone-with-a-guitar sepia-toned folk-blues-with the former being a little silly at this late date and the latter being a little dull.

Being able to make both the Boss and M.I.A. compute, I have a much bigger pillow to dream on. That's the Third Way between the specious ultimatum: American Idol or Nick Hornby-which side are you on?

I play the ends against the middle. I get off on the shock of the new, but I don't think that excuses you from doing your homework. There are more gigabytes to heaven and earth, Virginia, than is dreamt of on your iPod.

Never forget that, and you'll be fine.

London Falling

(Illustration by Alex Fine)

Pete Doherty's Cracked Music

It starts with a bang and ends with a whimper. Structure becomes shrapnel, air becomes fire, people become obituaries. Everyone-even the most candyass of heart, those who dare not think in curse words let alone utter them-reacts the same way: You motherfuckers.
When the London Underground came under attack earlier this month by Islamic killbots purchasing four tickets to Allah's bootycall with a backpack of C-4, I know the first thing you thought and the last thing you'd ever admit: God save the Libertines.

There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke, and discerning laughers know the Libertines dropped some of the best punchlines since the Clash and the Kinks before them. Like the Replacements in their stray-dog prime, the Libertines raised shambles to an art form, sizzling like a short fuse during a brilliant, blurred and ridiculously fractious two-album career.

Produced by the Clash's Mick Jones, Up the Bracket and The Libertines are the sound of the live-wire synapses of youth crackling with electricity, hormones and lashings of ginger beer. Baudelaire does the "Blitzkrieg Bop."

The Libs had that ultra-rare blend of style and substance, decadence and Dior-standing in the gutter and looking at the stars. They pledged allegiance to Albion-the ancient and mythological name for England-and set sail for Arcadia, the equally mythological realm of the senses where the only law is: If it feels good, do it. Nothing can hurt you in Arcadia-not coke, not crack, not even heroin.

It was the central fallacy of this last premise-proven time and again in an infinitely repeating loop of arrests, rehab and jail time-that would be the undoing of the Libertines, splitting the band's brotherly songwriters Pete Doherty and Carl Barat into irreconcilable differences and solo careers. Barat wanted to live. Doherty wasn't so sure. "Crack is gorgeous," he said.

Doherty-porcelain pale, frail as a fairy, his coal-eyed babyface dappled with a faint constellation of freckles-went on to form the aptly named Babyshambles, dropping natty Libs-like singles on the 'Net before they went straight to the Top 10, playing hastily announced gigs to overflow flashmobs in pubs, parks, student unions and his own living room.

It was a shaky but workable orbit, and then Doherty met Kate Moss last winter and it was love at first bite. The two became instant tabloid catnip-the most badass rock 'n' roll couple since Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg. But soon the whole world started crashing down around his ears.

In the last six months Doherty's managed to add a list of high crimes and misdemeanors-including assault, theft and blackmail-to a colorful CV that already includes gravedigger, Rimbaudian thief of fire, rent boy and punkish poet laureate of Albion. Hard to tell if all the low-life hijinks give the music its convincing aura of danger and glamour or vice versa, but Doherty's come to resemble A Clockwork Orange's Alex, his ever-elusive redemption serving every agenda but his own.

As I write this, the London Underground is blowing up again, and Babyshambles seems to have fallen down, cradle and all. A summer tour was canceled, the band was fired, and the debut album, once slated for fall release, is still unfinished, according to an apoplectic NME.

Which is a goddamn shame, because now more than ever, Albion needs music when the lights go out.

Let It R.I.P.

(Illustration by Alex Fine)


GROKSTER TAKES A DIRT NAP

Remember Napster? Shawn Fanning's killer application was like a diamond bullet shot into the blackened heart of the music business, leaving it reeling, and bleeding free music for years. The first reaction of the music biz moguls-men who invariably rely on their tender-aged assistants to send and receive email-was to ignore Napster.
Upon realizing somewhat belatedly you could get the Internet on computer nowadays, their second reaction was to kill it-smother it in lawsuits until it asphyxiated in amicus briefs. After kicking Napster to the curb, they sent their goon squad-i.e., the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)-after the rats scurrying in the bowels of their pirate ship. To date the RIAA has sued more than 14,000 individuals-in many cases, the parents of illegal downloaders-for copyright infringement, seeking upward of a million dollars in damages per case.

In one notable instance a Michigan mom named Candy Chan was sued by members of the RIAA. When prosecutors realized they'd have a stronger case against Chan's daughter instead, they motioned to dismiss the suit and brought charges against the kid. Sheesh, suing children-your law school professors must be so proud, counselor. Why not just give her a wedgie? Last week the RIAA bagged its second high-value target: Grokster.

"There are legal services for downloading movies and music. This service is not one of them."

That's the epitaph that currently greets would-be swashbuckling tune pirates when they pull up Grokster, one of the pioneering peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. After a protracted legal battle, Grokster cried uncle and reached a settlement with the RIAA wherein it would stop disseminating the software that made the file-sharing black market possible and reportedly cough up some $50 million in damages.

Grokster plans to have a legal paid-subscription service up and running soon, and is rumored to have forged an iTunes-style distribution deal with Sony BMG. A big black question mark looms over the future of other high-profile P2P sites such as KaZaA, eDonkey and BitTorrent that are still operating on the fringes of legality.

The straw that broke the Grokster's back was a fuzzy Supreme Court ruling on "third-party copyright infringement" back in the spring. Basically, the Court ruled that the makers of file-sharing software can be sued if somebody uses that software to violate copyright law, and it can be demonstrated the copyright violation was encouraged by the manufacturer. This essentially opens the door for holding manufacturers liable for crimes committed by the consumers of their products. Gun manufacturers must be shitting their pants.

Oh wait. Congress recently passed a shield law protecting gun manufacturers from legal jeopardy if a customer kills or maims somebody with their product-at the behest of the big guy in the Oval Office.

"The president looks at it as a matter of stopping lawsuit abuse," said White House spokesperson Scott McClellan. "We do not believe a manufacturer of a legal product ought to be held accountable for the criminal misuse of that product."

So what's the difference between making a product that allows you to share music files and making a product that allows you to kill and maim? Why, bazillions of dollars in special-interest money, of course. At long last we have government by the corporations, for the corporations. To the executive, judicial and legislative branches of the federal government, let me be the second to say: You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie.

Money Changes Everything

(Illustration by Alex Fine)


Meet The New Payola. Same As The Old Payola?

Psst. Hey bub. Yeah, you. You wanna know a secret? This is gonna blow your mind: The music business is corrupt. A stinking, rat-infested pirate ship rife with graft, greed, grifting and deceit. Shh. I know, I know. I couldn't believe it either when I first heard. But don't tell anyone-especially not Mariah, J. Lo or Audioslave.
When the news broke last month that Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed to pay a $10 million fine and stop buying off DJs if New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer would call off his dogs, the worst-kept secret in rock 'n' roll high school was officially out of the bag.

Payola-the practice of paying DJs and radio station employees to give songs heavy airplay-has been technically illegal since 1960, punishable by a $10,000 fine and a year in jail. The term was coined back at the dawn of rock 'n' roll-a contraction of "pay" and "Victrola," those antique turntables dogs like to listen to. The first payola scandal, back in the '50s, took down Alan Freed, the godfather of rock DJs. His career in tatters, Freed drank himself to death.

After that record companies found a loophole in the law big enough to drive the Grand Canyon through: If they gave their bribes to a third party-let's call him an "independent record promoter"-who then passed said bribes under the table to the radio stations, it wasn't technically illegal.

Upward of a quarter million per song would be spread around to various flagship stations around the country, propping up sagging bottom lines and invariably used to send listeners on jet-set rock 'n' roll vacations. "You can win a trip for two to see Pink Floyd on the dark side of the moon!"-that kind of thing.

Up until last year when Clear Channel, of all things, declared they were no longer accepting "promo dollars" from independent promoters, this was business as usual. "What do I have to do to get Audioslave on WKSS this week?!!? Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen," goes one Sony employee email message leaked during the Spitzer investigation. Laptop computers, PlayStatons and plasma-screen TVs all turned up on the desks of radio playlist gatekeepers.

At a time when indie auteurs had figured out a way to make cost-free pop masterpieces in their bedrooms and others had learned how to atomize albums and send them out over the Internet like transporters on Star Trek, the major labels were still putting an Apple on the teacher's desk. Craven ass-kissing: the sad, pathetic domain of the idea-less.

If there's any redeeming social value to this whole tawdry tale, it's that one good song became a hit: Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out." That's right, bought and paid for, alongside Celine, Mariah and J. Lo. Besides calling into question to the prevailing conventional wisdom that payola equals crapola, the news that "Take Me Out" was bribed into the charts will likely have little to no effect on the career of these great Scots.

Franz's super-excellent follow-up album You Could Have It So Much Better … With Franz Ferdinand hits stores Oct. 4. Call it poptastic, call it '80s-rific, call it the cucumber in the skinny black pants of rock. Just don't call it money in the bank.

Finally, consider this modest proposal: What if some filthy-rich lefty, like George Soros or Michael Moore, bought up the charts and stocked them with the kind of free radicals that flicker across Pitchfork's radar. Can you imagine a world where Wolf Eyes is as big as J. Lo's butt? What a wonderful world that would be.

File Under: Like Pearls Before Swine

Beulah
The Coast Is Never Clear
VELOCETTE

I recently found this holding up the short leg of my couch and--shazam!--turns out it works pretty good in the CD player, too. Once the little-pony-that-could in the Elephant 6 stable of fun-trick noisemakers, Beulah has grown into a mighty unicorn, employing a similar fuzzed-pop, Brian- Wilson-in-the-basement arrangement strategy as their brethren the Apples in Stereo and Neutral Milk Hotel. Released back when the E6 scene didn't seem quite so played, The Coast Is Never Clear is a toe- tapping glad-bag of '60s sunshine pop, fun-house mirror psychedelia and kitchen sink experimentation. The hookah-smoking-caterpillar hunch of "Hello Resolven" is reason enough for any fan of late-period Wilco to plunk down the price of admission. The band's got a charisma deficit--not a looker in the bunch and, well, their name; with all due apologies to the hot Beulahs of the world, it sounds like the name of the girl nobody wants to fuck, and will likely ensure them all the riches and fame of a gas station attendant. But for what it's worth, last Sunday they were more popular than Jesus over at my place.

Diamond in the Rough

SHINE ON YOU TACKY DIAMOND

Let us now praise Rick Rubin, the burly bearded Buddha-man with a Slayer jones and a hard-on for Donovan's soft underbelly, for he truly is a man for our season.
We live in a time where the once vast continuum of recorded music can be instantaneously traversed with the click of a mouse, affording the great unwashed the kind of helicopter-eye overview that was once the sole privilege of record store clerks, promophiliac critics and music-biz poohbahs like Rubin, who have the fuck-you money to buy everything and the limitless leisure time to actually listen to it all.

Not just listen to it all, but-and this is crucial-listen without prejudice. Having fought for the Beasties' right to party, having chauffeured rap from the five boroughs to the exurbs like a patient soccer mom, having added "def" to the wigga lexicon of street-smart superlatives, having opened and eventually shuttered one of the most fiercely eclectic record labels in the Western hemisphere, Rubin no longer stands on the shoulders of giants-he walks among them.

Which has made him uniquely qualified to seek out leaning towers of song-people like Johnny Cash, Tom Petty and Donovan and point them skyward once again, a penance that almost absolves him of the sin of creating rap-rock. Almost.

Neil Diamond is the latest sagging Metamucil-aged legend to get reconnected with what once made him great by Mr. Weird Beard. For anyone in utero when Diamond became a known quantity, you should know he is/was a gritty, Brooklyn-bred Brill Building organ grinder who scored any number of '60s transistor-radio classics before becoming a combed-over Romeo in the '70s, triggering hot flashes of nostalgia in postmenopausal blue-hairs everywhere. Nice work if you can get it. The man himself best summed up his yin and yang in the title of his 1968 album Velvet Gloves and Spit.

The just-out 12 Songs sounds like Rubin handed Diamond a spittoon and told him to take the gloves off. Whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, he must have said. As he did with Cash, Rubin drains all the florid pastels out of the arrangements, insisting on classic sepia tones that set off the folk-based austerity of the project.

He also made Diamond play guitar while he sang-something he hasn't done in the studio in years-ensuring that vocal histrionics couldn't exceed the needs of the songs. Unlike those celebrated Cash records, which were largely well-chosen cover-song compendiums, Diamond not only sings for his supper, but he writes his own tickets too. And his songs walk like a man and talk like a man-albeit a man in the autumn of his life, raking leaves of grass, taking stock of wild oats sown long ago and holding close to his vest a thinning sheaf of days.

The resulting tunes are nakedly intimate, impeccably arranged and tastefully transposed into the key of low. All songs are sung blue, and if there's fault to find, it's that Rubin errs on the side of drabness in the pursuit of gravitas with a capital G.

This doesn't become apparent until 12 Songs' 14th and final song "Delirious Love" (included only on the special Digi-Pak edition), wherein Diamond's solitary man is paired with Brian Wilson and the former Beach Boy's surprisingly portable palette of good vibrations: sunbeam harmonies, glee-club handclaps and Santa's sleigh bells. And just when the album ends, you suddenly wish Rubin would've allowed Diamond a couple of sequins and the occasional sip from his beloved cup of schmaltz.