[Note: As I mentioned last night, today’s Guide was written by my good friend Ted, who has been patiently and tirelessly defending Rush to me since we met. I take…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Saw it Friday night. I had to twist Leah’s arm, but only a little — she laughs at The Daily Show just as hard as I do. Anyway, it’s very,…
Jeff Giles
4 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
2 Min Read
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…
John C. Hughes
1 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
New day, new host, new lease on life for this place. The mp3s’ new home actually provides more room and more transfer than I’d been allocating before, so that’s nice….
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
5 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Oh, goddammit. Hi, my name is Jeff, and I’m a Bee Gees fan. Not a “cool” one, either — I’m not down with all that disco shit and I don’t…
Jeff Giles
13 Min Read
“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…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
5 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
6 Min Read
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…
John C. Hughes
1 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
2 Min Read
We took The Boy to the Tech Museum in San Jose last Saturday. This isn’t the kind of thing I’ve ever really given much thought before, but there’s a lot…
Jeff Giles
6 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
4 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
4 Min Read
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…
John C. Hughes
2 Min Read
“Contentious” is probably the word I’m looking for to describe the recording of the third (and at the time — har har — final) album from The Time. While “Ice…
Jeff Giles
3 Min Read
So I’m pouring The Boy’s cereal this morning, and I notice something a little different about this week’s box of Trix: It seems our old friend the Rabbit has decided…
Jeff Giles
3 Min Read
During their Biblical forty years of wandering in the desert, the Jews subsisted on a miracle food that fell from the heavens each night. Described as a grain tasting like…
Jeff Giles
1 Min Read
Haven’t been able to write this morning because a squirrel fell down the vent above our stove — the last couple hours have been spent trying to get the little…
John C. Hughes
1 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
10 Min Read
Let’s talk about the blues. It only seems appropriate, after all, given that it’s Tuesday, the bluesiest day of the work week — last weekend a distant memory, Friday a…
Jeff Giles
7 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
2 Min Read
This is it, my friends — the end of Week Boy-Ar-Dee: It’s been a bumpy road, to be sure, but an educational one nonetheless. We’ve learned, for instance, that it’s…
Jeff Giles
3 Min Read
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…
Jeff Giles
2 Min Read
So. We meet again, my fat, toque-headed nemesis: I won’t lie to you — yesterday’s Boyarxperiment hurt me, and hurt me bad. Judging from the way my hands were trembling…