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Graham Parker, SxSW, Covers, Advance Meat Puppets, Unicorn   Printer-friendly page   Send this story to someone
Thursday, March 15, 2007 - 08:00 AM
Posted by: kbade

Karl

GRAHAM PARKER released a new album this week -- featuring "Stick To The Plan" -- which I forgot to mention the other day.  To make up for it, I tracked down the videos for two of his best-known songs, "Local Girls" and the Motown-esque "Wake Up (NextTo You)," as well as a clip of Parker playing "Discovering Japan" and ""Temporary Beauty" Billy Bragg-style at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music from late 2005. 

SxSW:  The big music fest is underway in Austin, TX.  The Hoodoo Gurus feature in Variety's coverage of the kickoff.  Rolling Stone's blog has the obligatory "has the festival gotten too mainstream and corporate?" piece, which is pretty funny, given that SxSW was first an industry gathering.  The fest certainly has become much more tech-savvy over the years.  Selected gigs will be on DirectTV, including The Buzzcocks, Annuals, The Polyphonic Spree, Peter Bjorn & John and more.  Even more gigs are streaming live and on demand from NPR as part of its extensive coverage, including PB&J, Apples in Stereo, Robyn Hitchcock, Steve Earle, The Stooges, Okkervil River and more...

GOOD COVERS, BAD COVERS:  The A.V. Club inventories "14 cover songs that are better than the originals," while USA Today's Whitney Matheson came up with a list of 20 quality covers in response to Cracked's list of "The 20 Worst Cover Songs in Pop Music History," which has embedded multimedia.

TEGAN & SARA, The Cinematics, and Mute Match are playing live in the current installment of Spinner's 3x3.

THE MEAT PUPPETS:  Curt Kirkwood talks to Stereogum about his band's new lineup and upcoming album.  Curt gave the 'gum "Disappear" as an advance track.

IT'S TIME TO DO THE "TIGHTEN UP":  Spinner claims that soulster Archie Bell was recuperating from a leg wound in an Army hospital in Germany when "Tighten Up" topped the charts in 1968... and that other soldiers convalescing at the hospital didn't believe that he was the Archie Bell.  Bell gives a different account on the Charles Snider Show, also explaining that the tune was indirectly inspired by his draft induction notice.  And if you watch a clip of Archie Bell & The Drells from back in the day, you can see a young Steve Cropper and Donald "Duck" Dunn playing the guitar and bass. 

LESLIE FEIST and EMILY HAINES may be pursuing solo projects while Broken Social Scene is on hiatus, but they were seriously funny on the topic of women in rock when they crossed paths in London.

INDIE SELLS OUT:  The latest band to lend its music to a commercial is Animal Collective, whose "Sweet Road" is heard in an ad for Crayola crayons.

THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE QUEEN -- the project featuring Blur frontman Damon Albarn, The Clash bassist Paul Simonon, Afrobeat pioneer and drummer Tony Allen and former Verve guitarist Simon Tong -- played Washington, DC's 9:30 Club last night, so you should be able to stream the gig from NPR now.

FATS DOMINO gets an update on the restoration of his home in post-Katrina N'awlins.  The place is getting fixed up by the Tipitina's Foundation, which which helped scores of musicians after the storm find housing and new instruments.  The project will cost upward of $100,000 -- at least some of which will come from a Fats tribute album featuring Elton John, Tom Petty, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, B.B. King and others.

BRITNEY SPEARS has hooked up with a musician she met in AA, and plans to move in with him once she's out of rehab, according to the upcoming National Enquirer.  That tab's Mike Walker also reports that Justin Timberlake is getting a bit miffed at people asking him to help her.  The pop tart is also reported to be quitting rehab two days early to attend estranged hubby Fed-Ex's 29th birthday party.

BRADGELINA:  Jolie arrived in Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday to adopt a boy from Vietnam.  Indeed, she may have sealed the deal by the time you read this.

DREW BARRYMORE was caught canoodling with director Spike Jonze during a romantic date in Santa Monica. 

SCARLETT JOHANSSON is in the running to play Nellie Forbush in a sexy revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center, according to the New York Post.

ELLEN DeGENERES and PORTIA de ROSSI are getting married in June (though presumably not legally married), according to the National Enquirer.  Portia reportedly grilled Ellen about her marriage intentions and forced her to set a date.

AMERICAN IDOL:  Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest were throwing the gay innuendo around freely the other night.  Maybe they can get Ann Coulter to be a guest judge.  Is it all downhill frome here for the hit show?

TOM-KAT UPDATE:  According to super-reliable Star magazine, Cruise thinks Holmes is straying from Scientology and would like her to have a five-hour sauna session and a vegetable oil enema to help get her mind right.

HOLLYWOOD'S DRUG PROBLEM is nothing new, but in a frightening turn, it appears to have become more publicly accepted.  Mischa Barton, Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Kirsten Dunst, were a bit more old skool bout things last week in NYC, partying until Barton puked... and then partying some more.

FERGIE:  The Black Eyed Peas frontwoman was banned from boarding a jet in L.A. for being drunk.

ASHTON KUTCHER is flacking for NBC's new reality series The Real Wedding Crashers, but the network told the press not to ask him any "personal" questions -- a request that is reigniting those Demi Moore pregnancy rumors.

CHRISTINA AGUILERA has revealed she likes to play naughty doctors-and-nurses sex games with her music producer husband Jordan Bratman... to a soundtrack by Radiohead?

AUSTRALIA'S TOP MUSLIM CLERIC, who used a Ramadan sermon to complain about long sentences for gang rape and to compare immodestly dressed women to uncovered meat, suggesting they invited sexual assault, is urgently working on the creation of "The Australian Peace Party."

IRAN:  London-based Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Tehran has lost contact with a senior Iranian officer serving in Iraq and that dozens of members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and military intelligence units have defected to the US forces in Iraq over the past three years.  The government is also outraged by the smash movie 300.

IRAQ:  US troop fatalities are down 60 percent since the start of the new security plan in Baghdad, even though the plan puts the troops directly in contested areas of the capital.  (Iraqi numbers were even rosier) Car bombs blamed on al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab terrorists spiked in February, though another day since Coalition efforts to disrupt the bomb factories has passed without a spectacular attack.  There has been a slight uptick in violence in the past few days, however, and it is possible that terrorists will have something planned for the fourth anniversary of the Coalition's invasion.  IraqSlogger reports on the decline of Al Qaeda in Anbar province.  The Times of London reports on former Prime Minister Allawi's attempted comeback with a new secular political bloc, though regular Pate visitors should already know about it.  Iraqi security forces captured a top al-Qaeda leader in Mosul, local television said.  Richard Miniter has an unconfirmed report that the US is talking disarmament with commanders of the Mahdi Army.

HASSENFEFFER the BEAGLE was rescued from a 125-foot-tall mountain ledge by a six-man team from the Blount County Fire Department in Tennessee.  He has since been reunited with his owner.

TWO STRAY CATS attacked three people after they got into a house in North Platte, Nebraska.  Brian Setzer claims to have an alibi.

SUICIDE SQUIRREL takes down the grid in the wild and wooly rodeo town of Pendleton, Oregon.

AKILI the GORILLA came from Germany to Amsterdam to impregnate three previously unlucky females.  Artis Zoo spokesman Bart Kret said that the first offspring appears to be "very heavy and hairy, with very thick arms," making him a master of the obvious.

SNAKE in a PRESS BOX at the Mets-Indians spring training game on Tuesday.  How popular are sportswriters?  "As the snake slithered across notebooks and laptop computers in the bottom of the fourth inning, fans stood up and laughed as they gazed into the press area."

UNICORNS don't let friends drive drunk.

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