Happy Fourth of July, everyone! As the mayor of Bootleg City, it’s my responsibility to give you the best aural fireworks display money can buy, but therein lies the problem — Bootleg City has run out of money.
You see, Fiscal Year 2008 was kind of a bust in Bootleg City, just as it was for many other cities around the world. Did you hear Gotham City is liquidating its entire police department and putting all further law enforcement in Batman’s hands? And in Erotic City, the Fruit on the Bottom Edible Underwear factory closed earlier this year, putting thousands of citizens out of work and forcing them to wear real underwear for the first time. Mayor P.R. Nelson responded to the crisis by saying, “If we cannot make babies, maybe we can make some time. Thoughts of pretty you and me, Erotic City come alive,” which seems to indicate City Hall is heavily courting the cuckoo-clock industry to set up shop there sometime soon.
Here in Bootleg City I was hoping to present you with a great Jackson 5 bootleg on the Fourth, but instead you’ll have to settle for 3. You remember 3, don’t you? Yeah, neither do I, but here’s a little bit of background …
Six years after prog-rock trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer broke up in 1979, keyboardist Keith Emerson and bassist Greg Lake got back together without drummer Carl Palmer, who was in Asia at the time — the ’80s supergroup, not the continent, but then again, I don’t have the man’s itinerary for that decade, so anything’s possible — and formed Emerson, Lake & Powell with drummer Cozy Powell, thus turning ELP into a slightly different ELP with a drummer whose initials were the same as the first guy’s. Totally uncool, guys. But Steve Augeri, the Steve Perry look- and soundalike who replaced Steve Perry in Journey in the late ’90s, can’t say there wasn’t precedent.
But then ELP2 broke up, Emerson got back together with Palmer, and they added a new guy, Robert Berry. Somewhere along the way they must have decided EBP wasn’t catchy enough, so they went with 3, making their record label’s marketing department reach for the nearest noose.
Like ELP2, they only recorded one album — 1988’s To the Power of Three — and on April 14 of that year they performed a show at the Ritz in New York City. The concert was then broadcast on WNEW-FM, and is brought to you today by our own Dw. Dunphy. Thanks for the bootleg, Dw.!
Next week the budget cuts continue, with a bootleg of Three Dog Night performing one song — Nilsson’s “One,” of course — that’ll only be available for download for half a minute. We all have to make sacrifices, people.
Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.
“But Mayor Cass,” the children always ask, “where did people go when they wanted to download music for free and write comments underneath the accompanying text that was only tangentially related to said text?”
The Lemonheads’ new album, Varshons (The End Records), kicks off with Gram Parsons’s “I Just Can’t Take It Anymore,” in which the resigned, lovelorn protagonist declares, “Well, we could’ve done a lot / We certainly did not / So I’ll try to do the things I did before.” In his own way, 
Here are some fun facts about singer-songwriter Jules Shear:
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It’s been more than 25 years since Vanessa Williams was crowned the first black Miss America. But once nude pictures of the former photographer’s assistant were published without her consent in Penthouse magazine in the summer of ‘84, she was forced to relinquish the title. After all this time, the question remains: whatever happened to Bob Guccione?
Collins, of course, was a hugely successful solo artist in the ’80s as well as the lead singer and drummer for Genesis, which made its name with progressive rock in the ’70s but shifted its focus to radio-friendly pop the following decade, scoring five top-ten hits alone with its 1986 album Invisible Touch. Collins has taken his fair share of abuse over the years for the earworms he’s created, with “Sussudio” showing up on many “worst songs of the ’80s” lists.
