Bob Dylan – Live at the Gaslight 1962 (The Bootleg Series Vol. 6.5) (2005) Bob Dylan – No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (The Bootleg Series Vol. 7) (2005) I like…
Music
David Gray – Life in Slow Motion (2005) There was a time when I thought David Gray’s music was insufferably boring. Either I was wrong, or I’ve become insufferably boring…
[Note: As I mentioned last night, todayÁ¢€â„¢s Guide was written by my good friend Ted, who has been patiently and tirelessly defending Rush to me since we met. I take…
Two announcements: 1. Tomorrow’s Complete Idiot’s Guide will be Part One of Two. 2. It will be about Rush. 3. It’ll be written by my good friend Ted. Not to…
Shaw/Blades – Hallucination (1995) Though his work with Night Ranger and/or Damn Yankees never has or will win any awards for originality or subtlety, Jack Blades is, to me, sort…
Mike Stern – Odds or Evens (1991) The words “jazz fusion” have become a sort of sneering code phrase for crappy instrumental music, but once upon a time, the genre…
Like many a budding homo, I was quite the little fashion plate in high school. Yes, that’s me with the grey pleather pants, white nylon vest, white leather skinny tie…
I apologize for the current mp3 outage:we’ve been heavily linked this week, our traffic spiked, and our host noticed what we’ve been up to, so plasticmusicsociety is under involuntary lockdown…
Eric Clapton – Back Home (2005) It’s been a long time since the world sat up and paid attention to a new album from Eric Clapton, and I guess he…
Oh, goddammit. Hi, my name is Jeff, and I’m a Bee Gees fan. Not a “cool” one, either Á¢€” I’m not down with all that disco shit and I don’t…
“The radio, that was my big influence … Bands that were faceless, that didn’t really have anything other than what you heard on the radio. And I liked the real…
I don’t know whether or not they still publish it, but when I was a kid, Marvel Comics had a title called What If? that answered questions like “What If…Spider-Man…
Hey, have you read this book? Bruce Springsteen: Two Hearts — The Definitive Biography, 1972-2003 by Dave Marsh I’m a sucker for rock biographies. Well, I’m a sucker for lots…
Darden Smith – Sunflower (2002) Having spent large chunks of my life around musicians and other assorted music geeks, I’ve grown accustomed to a certain amount of bitterness with regards…
Joe Strummer was not a very popular guy when 1986 rolled around. The year previous, he, alongside a new crew of imposters, had taken a nice healthy dump all over…
No Idiot’s Guide this week, amigos — as the list of artists about whom I am qualified to expound at length continues to dwindle, I will be required to plan…
I’ve just finished reading the most informative and entertaining biography of Stephen Foster ever written: Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture – Ken Emerson (1998) The…
Hootie & The Blowfish – Looking for Lucky (2005) Once, when asked to explain his fondness for Beavis & Butt-Head, David Letterman remarked that there was something comforting in knowing…
Á¢€Å“ContentiousÁ¢€ is probably the word IÁ¢€â„¢m looking for to describe the recording of the third (and at the time Á¢€” har har Á¢€” final) album from The Time. While Á¢€Å“Ice…
Kissing the Pink. Yes, that’s totally what it means. Ahem. Now that we’ve dispensed with all that, Kissing the Pink formed in 1980 in London and never really broke through…
LetÁ¢€â„¢s talk about the blues. It only seems appropriate, after all, given that itÁ¢€â„¢s Tuesday, the bluesiest day of the work week Á¢€” last weekend a distant memory, Friday a…
As Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith once famously noted, everybody wants to rule the world. In the literal sense, they were imagining some dystopic Orwellian society, but on a deeper…
I love artists past their prime. As I’ve repeatedly mentioned here, I derive endless fascination from the things musicians do after they’ve been forgotten by the public at large. They…
King Sunny Adé and His African Beats – Juju Music (1982) I’m not quite sure what to say about this album. If you know about King Sunny Adé, you’re probably…
IÁ¢€â„¢ve been working up to a Ry Cooder IdiotÁ¢€â„¢s Guide for awhile now. HeÁ¢€â„¢s one of my longtime, all-time favorites, but heÁ¢€â„¢s released so many albums in so many different…
So, I heard the news this morning — David Foster is splitting from his wife of over a decade, Linda Thompson-Jenner. I read it about it first over at ohnotheydidnt,…
In a nice bit of blog synergy, it seems everyone is talking about blue-eyed soulÁ¢€¦which leads me to one of the sadder stories of the also-rans (at least in the…
The Refreshments Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy (1996) Here’s a little gem I stumbled across the other day while dusting my CD collection. You remember CDs, right? They were all…
Talk about a guy who should have been huge. An accomplished guitarist and songwriter who paid his dues playing for established artists, worked his way up through the ranks, and…