"Styx Ain't Half Bad, But They Almost Are."

Okay, anybody who can make TWO great Roman Polanski jokes in a short review of a Starz album (Starz? yes, Starz) deserves my respect and admiration as a writer.

I am talking about Rick Johnson. Until I bought the Rick Johnson Reader: 'Tin Cans, Squeems & Thudpies', I hadn't read anything by him. I just knew he had written for Creem in the seventies and eighties and was considered "the new Lester" after Lester Bangs left the mag. Unfortunately, Johnson died last year. But a former editor of his put together this anthology, and Boy Howdy am I glad. I'm only halfway through the book, but am loving Johnson's wit.

For example:

He shows a nice talent for slipping in TV commercial references, such as referring to Peter Kriss of Kiss as "Meow Mix" and referring to The Who's Who Are You album as a "new pan of Who Helper."

He makes mention of George Harrison's vegetarianism, then later in the review proceeds to write: "... the real meaty parts - woops, sorry George - the real ricey parts of the album ..."

He rips the post-Exile Stones so well I want to photocopy those pages and hand 'em off to anybody who insists on the greatness of Goat's Head Soup. Or for that matter, Some Girls - it's a good album but tends to sound more like a Stones tribute band than the real Stones. I think folks who buy into Stones scams (remember the argument that Steal Wheels was "underrated"?) are ones who haven't spent quality time with Stones music pre-Beggar's Banquet. (Pick up a copy of 12 x 5 already.)

In writing about the Lester Bangs and the Delinquents album, he writes that the songwriting "if it were a nuthouse or prison, would be described as 'seriously understaffed.'"

He states that Warren Zevon would soon be starring in a film titled Zevon Brides For Zevon Brothers

On live albums: "There have been some great live albums (MC5's Kick Out The Jams; I forget the other one.)"

And even more cheap shots at George Harrison.

I have laughed out loud many times while reading this book. I am scared to write about music in the near future, fearing that my subconscious will start inserting stolen Rick Johnson cracks into my writing. Buy it, proceeds from its sale will be donated to a journalism scholarship fund at Johson's alma mater, Western Illinois University.

Thank God The Dingbats Have Left Town

Apparently when Dubya was in town today, he thought he was supposed to talk about the Iraq War. He was quoted as saying: "I make no promises on the timetable."

Yesterday we were, um, blessed by an appearance by the First Lady. I usually refer to Laura Bush as a Stepword Wife.

But yesterday, a friend called her "The Joker", which led me to specifically think that Laura Bush looks uncannily like Cesar Romero as The Joker.

The King and I August 2007 DJ Schedule

1-Wed> BUCK K.A.C. of RSE Radio
2-Thu> Die Monster presents: Christopher Jensen & Jared Thiele
3-Fri> Duets with Dj Fathertime & Miss Sara
4-Sat> BLUNT CITY = JamesPatrick+DanielPaul

6-Mon> E-DAWG!
7-Tue> D.O. +
8-Wed> Plain Ole Bill
9-Thu> Housekeeping with Brian Thomas
10-Fri> VERB X & Brigadier Woodro
11-Sat> Tone & Tonic with Julius Romero

13-Mon> Sigelman
14-Tue> Lisa Mcgrath
15-Wed> Jimmy 2 Times
16-Thu> The Saint
17-Fri> Jennifer + Free i
18-Sat> Fun Boys

20-Mon> Rockit Fuel! is *C-Gull* A-Me* T-Machine* Cecil Otter*
21-Tue> Richy Rivera
22-Wed> Brigadier Woodro of 3 King Sound System
23-Thu> Replicant Soul with Dj Tk
24-Fri> TreeHouse Records
25-Sat> JOBOT

27-Mon> James Leonardo
28-Tue> It Takes All Kinds & Platetektoniks
29-Wed> Things Kings Do... with Mike the 2600 King & King Otto
30-Thu> Ebony & Don Cacheine
31-Fri> Down by Law with Dig Dug

September 2007
1-Sat> Josh Mcdermott...

Djs 10 'til Close!

Late Night Happy Hours:
Monday - Hospitality Night 9 'til Midnight - Cocktail & Appetizer Specials... Plus $2 Buck PBRs all night!
Tuesday - Ladies Club 9 'til 1- Magaritas,Wine & Cocktail Specials
Wednesday - 2 for 1s 9:30 'til 12:30 - Single Shot Cocktails & Cheap Beer
Thursday - 10 'til Midnight - Cocktail, Wine & Beer Specials
Friday - 10 'til Midnight - Cocktail, Wine & Beer Specials
Saturday - 11 "til 1 - Coctail, Wine & Beer Specials
Sunday - Closed!

(Editor's note: These schedules are sent to me by my pal the lounge's bar manager. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe those $2 PBRs on Monday are tallboy sixteen ouncers!)

Bridge Collapse In Mpls

There was a tragic bridge collapse here tonight in Minneapolis on I-35W. I won't bother linking as you can find info on Yahoo, Strib, etc.

In case you're trying to call me, I shut off my cell phone as officials have asked people not to use their cell phones for the time being. I am okay and just hoping casualties and injuries are minimal.

The Red Cross Twin Cities website

Memorial Blood Centers

Best Summer Ever Rolls On

When I was a kid, I had a jackknife. I either got it from my Dad or absorbed it from my brother. I don't remember using it for anything, but it was sure fun to open and close. The dream knife to have for my circle of friends was a Swiss Army Knife. They looked damn cool and had all kinds of utensils included - bottle opener, can opener, screwdriver, etc. But such as knife was out of my price range. Then when I got older and the Swiss Army Knife was financially in my reach, I thought: "What the hell would I do with it?"

Well this week I was at a client's office and jammed a stapler. I racked my brain trying to get that jammed staple out. Eventually, I ended up making use of one of my keys as a tool and got the stapler fixed. But while I was working on it, I thought: "Damn, I should pack stuff like a screwdriver and tweezers in my bookbag just for situations like this." Then the Swiss Army knife popped into my head. That night, I headed to Target and bought the Spartan model of the Swiss Army Knife. Don't know if I'll run into another scary stapler jam, but it sure is fun to open and close.

The University of Minnesota is hitting up the former owner of Scheik's strip club to contribute money to their new football stadium.

I'm sure some prudes in town will frown upon this. But Gopher althetic boosters are familiar with stripping. After all, in last spring's Western Regional final game against North Dakota, Tony Lucia, Erik Johnson, Derek Peltier, and Jeff Frazee all shed their jock straps while getting burned by the play that led to Chris Porter's winning goal.

Props To Nik Cohn

There is a scribbling on the scratch pad next to my Mac. I made it to myself Friday night, I think right after I got back from my bike run to the bar. (I got a smooch on the cheek from my gal! Best summer ever?)

The scribbling is titled "Props to Nik Cohn", and here are the reasons:

1) He wrote Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, one of the first histories of rock 'n' roll.

2) He was the inspiration for "Pinball Wizard."

3) He was the writer on Rock Dreams, one of my two favorite rock books ever. There are days where I think: It's Psychotic Reactions and Rock Dreams and then there are all others.

4) He wrote an article which became the inspiration for a great movie, Saturday Night Fever, which spawned a great soundtrack.

Forget The Summer Of Love, Let's Talk '67 Baseball

Nice article in the Strib today by Patrick Reusse on the 1967 pennant race. I was only two when this happened, so don't have any bad memories of the Twins losing the race to the Red Sox.

Reusse also had a sidebar about the myth of the long-time love affair between New England and the Red Sox:

Nothing has been more romanticized in this generation in American sports than the relationship between New Englanders and their baseball team, the Boston Red Sox. There's a mythology this love affair never wavered, even as it went unrequited from 1918 until 2004.

In a word, this is hogwash.

The Red Sox were so inept and the recipients of such indifference in the early 1960s that their ownership floated stories that the team might be forced to move if it was unable to replace antiquated Fenway Park.

Next we to enlist Reusse in an effort to get ESPN to drop the hogwash of Red Sox vs. Yankees being "the greatest rivalry in sports." Rivalries are usually based on a notion of equals slugging it out year after year, yet the Yankees have won a couple of hundred championships and the Red Sox win one every hundred years or so. (It pains me to type this as I hate the Yankees like every other true American.) Giants vs. Dodgers has simply been a much better baseball rivalry than Sox/Yankees. And even ESPN's own website rated Sox/Yankees as #7 in all of sports.

Great Sitcom Intro

I never got into The Drew Carey Show. It was promising at first and then it lost me. (Always had a "TV Girlfriend" thing for Christa Miller as Kate though. Now love her all the more for doing the opposite meanie role as Jordan on Scrubs.) (Yes, I am aware of her two separate Costanza-related roles on Seinfeld.)

But I had never seen the ENTIRE beginning of the "Cleveland Rocks" intro until I found it on YouTube. In case you're wondering, the song is Presidents of the USA doing an Ian Hunter song. Lotsa fun - enjoy!

How Do You Say "Pay Through The Nose You Criminals" In Latin?

"The One True Religion" (newflash: it turns out all humans are fallible!) should be thankful it hasn't gotten the RICO Act thrown at it the way it has allowed child molestation to go on and on and on.

"I Bet You're A Big Lee Marvin Fan, Aren't You?"

My new writing hero is Charles P. Pierce, who in his portrait of John Edwards in the August issue of Esquire fires of these tasty cheap shots:

1) Mike Huckabee, a greasy Rotarian gasbag from Arkansas ...

2) The imporant thing to remember is that toughness is a semiotic dumb show now. In the same debate in which Mick Huckabee flexed for the camera, John McCain pointed out that in his experience, which is considerable, torture doesn't work. On this, he was disputed by a former mayor of New York, who was once tortured by the thought that his second wife would not vacate the mayoral digs in favor of his second mistress, and the former governor of Massachusetts, who once was tortured by the fact that gay people were getting married. Toughness was now a performance skill in a cowardly country taught to fear the best things about itself.

3) George H. W. Bush flew fighter planes when he was a teenager, and couldn't overcome the "wimp factor" against Ronald Reagan, whose primary combat experience was battling his way to the bar at the Brown Derby.

God Bless Those Sputniks

Terrestial radio was getting to me. I can only handle so much NPR. On KFAN they seem to talk about the same stories on every program, so I might as well only listen for the two hours of tomfoolery and the "Tough Love Covenant" that makes up the genius that is the Common Man Progrum. The Current plays too many chick singer-songwriters, hardly any rock 'n' roll, and is just too soft for me. Radio K will always have a place in my heart, but sometimes the screamcore and third world music drives me nuts. Needless to say, the commercial music stations in town are a joke - though an hour or so of KOOL 108 now and then is generally fun. (Especially if The Geezer is on the air.)

So a couple of weeks ago, I signed up for Sirius Internet Radio. I mostly did this so I could listen to Little Steven's Underground Garage station. I had heard it before via a friend, and it's one of the top three stations I've ever heard in my life (the others being Z-Rock and REV 105.) (Also on this station I heard an awesome song by the Pretty Things. I tracked down the album on which it appears and bought a copy. I will pretty much use this song as an excuse to do another podcast just so's I can play it.)

This service will come in handy when I'm at clients plugging away at a computer all by my lonesome. Plus via gadgetry, I am able to beam the sound of Sirius from my Mac to my home stereo receiver.

I've slowly been checking out the other stations. The Outlaw Country station is pretty cool, and it's also programmed by Little Steven. I heard a bit of a weekly program hosted by Joan Jett last night that sounded cool. But tonight I knew my decision had paid off: On one of the hard rock stations, I heard "Stealin'" by Uriah Heep.

Damn You Euros!

It was a moment that was Homer Simpson-esque.

Friday night I had bought a six-pack of Lowenbrau. I was rather excited as the store I normally shop at usually had Lowenbrau in twelve-packs and I didn't have the dough on hand to be able to buy a twelver. But now the store has sixers instead - sweet!

So because I thought that "tonight is kinda special", I got a glass out of the freezer and poured myself a Lowenbrau. As soon as I picked up the bottle, I thought: Something isn't right here. This bottle feels light. Sure enough, I read the label and the bottle held only 11.2 ounces of beer! For some reason, I have an empty bottle of Lowenbrau from a few years back in my kitchen (I think of it as a decoration, I guess.) I looked at it, and yep - Lowenbrau used to come in the correct size of 12 ounces.

Damn you Euros and your weird sizes! I was robbed!

Enough Already!

No more describing your product as being "on steroids"!!

In the past couple of days I have heard:

- KFAN in one of its promos being described as "AM radio on steroids"

- Dan Barrerio in a commercial on KFAN declaring a Toshiba HD DVD player as being a "DVD player on steroids"

- Some seeds in a TV commercial being called "grass seed on steroids"

- In a radio commercial on KOOL 108, a car show at Brainerd International Raceway is proclaimed "a car show on steroids"

As A Doornail

I understand there was a "Concert for Diana" in the UK on Sunday. I don't know how to break it to everybody (and if they're stupid enough to love royalty, they're probably too stupid to get it at all), but the condition that Diana has is fatal and there ain't no bringing her back.