Willie... What the Hell?


Was flipping through the channels the other day when I came upon CMT... on the stage was the now countrified Sheryl Crow with veteran country icon Willie Nelson... Now, I like ol' Willie, but what was happening on that stage was... welll... for lack of a better word, shitty. They were doing duets... or at least supposed to be... Sheryl was belting it out in her usual way, but it was like Willie didn't know any of the words, was late with them when he did, his harmonies were horrible at best... man, it was just horrible. I was kinda sad, 'cause like I said, I dig the guy... His usually-way-cool guitar parts were absent in favor of a single note here, a single note there... Well, it was awful.

Maybe he was just reeeaaalllllly high, or something.


Listening to: NUdE - "Rising" (2003)

Oh, Man...


As some of you know, I like to see where and how people are getting referred to here from. I get a lot of hits from people at search engines. One of the bigger referrals to my site in the past few months has been a search for Lillix guitar tabs, which never fails to crack me up, because if you need tabs to work up Lillix songs... well, that's a whole 'nother joke unto itself.

But there's been a referral to here that I've found a bit disturbing as of late, I guess you could say... a sign of the dumbing down of America's musical youth... so let me clear something up for some people, out there:

"Behind Blue Eyes" was NOT written by Fred Durst, nor is it even a Limp Bizkit song. It is a song by the band the Who. Just like "What I Like About You" is NOT a Lillix song... It's a song by the Romantics.

I suppose I should be lenient to all the 15 year-olds out there that have never heard of the Who or the Romantics, but y'know what? "Not gonna do it." You guys have parents, for cryin' out loud. Chances are, you probably don't talk to them, anymore. You come home from school and you lock yourselves in your room with KaZaA or whatever and rip off a bunch of music (well, to your defense, I wouldn't pay a nickle for some of the music you listen to, either)... but shit... communicate, for cryin' out loud. Go ask your parents about the music they liked when they were your age. Find out about the life outside your little bubble of existence, why don't ya?

...and for the love of God... stop listening to shitty bands like Limp Bizkit and Lillix...


Listening to: Drain STH - "Freaks of Nature"

More P. Doody-dom


So, P. Diddy raised two million dollars for kids by running in the NY Marathon... none of it was his money... pretty lame (even if I couldn't raise fifty bucks for kids, I still say it's lame)... So, he turns around and gives J-Lo a $720,000 necklace for Valentine's Day... That's almost half the total money he raised for kids... and this was his own money...

I really don't care what people do with their money and stuff... for the most part. I mean, they earn it, they spend it (even if they don't remotely deserve it). But I have to say that this doesn't make him look any better as a person, in my eyes or many others', I'm sure. "I can't give no kids dat needs it none o' my moneys (unh...unh), but I can give a trizzy with mo' moneys dan me (I'm jus' tryin' to get one fo' Biggie, y'all...) big bling-bling so maybe she'll wax muh jimmy some mo' (baaad boyz fuh life)..."

No, I'm not even remotely racist (sorry to disappoint you)... but I am anti-douchebag-idiot-pimp-daddy-chump-suckas.

Listening to: John Coltrane - "A Love Supreme"

Iron Maiden - Still Rockin' After All These Years


I was flipping through the channels last night after talking to my friend Duncan in North Carolina, and I came across "Back Yard Videos," a music video show produced by CSU (Colorado State University). I've caught it a few times in the past, but had forgotten that it's an every Friday night thing. While the production is pretty stank and the hosts (which vary from week to week) both suck and blow, the video selection isn't all that bad... Actually better than I've seen from most of the major-market music networks... The do pick nu-metal and rap-metal poseur vids here and there and try to tout them as "killah," but you'll have that, I suppose.
Anyhow, so Iron Maiden's video for "Rainmaker" comes on... The last Maiden album I owned, or gave a shit about, was Live After Death. I still to this day listen to Powerslave, Piece of Mind, and Number of the Beast, but I've heard other stuff after Live after Death and I didn't really care much for it... But I guess the killer lineup from the '80s has reunited, 'cause I saw them all in this video (well, I couldn't really tell if the one guitarist was Adrian Smith or that Jannick Gers fella that replaced him in the early '90s, but it looked like Smith, anyway). Anyhow, without babbling on too much about it, it was actually a really wicked piece of Maiden-dom... harking back to the good ol' days, even...
What made the evening even better was the fact that after "Rainmaker," it was Glassjaw with "Cosmopolitan Blood Loss," then A Perfect Circle's "Judith." Heck of a good set of videos...
So, hats off to "Back Yard Videos." All you need are some hosts with personalities a little more palatteable than the "piece of wet cardboard" hosts they have, now, and it will be even better.


Listening to: Frank Zappa - "Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch"

Could it Be?


Word has it that Queens of the Stone Age (at least as we have known it) is no more... Reportedly, Josh Homme (who owns the rights to the name) has fired long-time bassist Nick Oliveri for partying too much...

As much as I hate to admit it, I'm kinda happy that they "imploded," because I was much happier when they were more like "my little secret." Yeah, I loved the most recent album, but their older music was better, and I just kinda felt they were trying a little too hard to make a commercial splash, or something...

I guess the plan is that Josh Homme will form a new version of QoTSA and carry on (in name, anyway)... but without Nick Oliveri along for the ride, I don't think it will ever really be the same band... but maybe that's just me.


Listening to: Kyuss

You Got THAT Right


I heard someone on televeision refer to American Idol as "the show that changed music and television, forever." Well, yeah, I guess it did... It changed music forever by cheapening it to a whole new level of cheapness... and it changed television forever by making it even worse than it already was... Yeah, the people that come out of that show as "winners" go on to sell millions of copies of their "music," but the music is sucky shit that's made for the sheep out there with zero musical taste that will flock to anything anyone else tries to tell them is hip... Not that critics' opinions mean shit, but every one I've seen has panned both of the past two winners' albums (with the exception being that Clay Aiken guy's album, but... he wasn't a winner to begin with)...

So, all of you that watch that show with any kind of regularity, just remember... I just called you "sheep."


Listening to: Kyuss - "Blues for the Red Sun"

Moody "Reunites" with Evanescence


Yeah, that was former Evanescence guitarist Ben Moody on stage (sporting long hair and a stupid cane) with the band when they accepted their two Grammys for best new artist and best hard rock performance (a total crock of shit, at that)... But reports said that the "reunion" wasn't really a happy one... Moody supposedly just congratulated singer Amy Lee backstage and left without saying much more...

Listening to: not much at the moment, actually...

A Perfect Circle Adds Dates to Spring Tour


The added dates are as follows:

4/17 Pepsi Coliseum Indianapolis, IN
4/20 Taft Theatre Cincinnati, OH
4/22 Ricoh Coliseum Toronto, ON
4/23 Tower City Ampitheatre Cleveland, OH
4/24 Palace of Auburn Hills Auburn Hills, MI
4/30 The Centrum Worcester, MA
5/01 PNC Garden State Center Holmdel, NJ

So, the good folks back east will have another chance to see them, now, too... cool...


Listening to: Beyonce - PSYCHE!!!

Quick Grammy Post


I found out that Prince was going to be in the first hour of the Grammy broadcast that afternoon and thought that I might actually watch the Grammys for the first time in probably fifteen years... The sucky thing was that it coincided with the Simpsons... but I really wanted to see if Prince was gonna jam, or what... SO I decided to watch...
Wouldn't you know it, Prince was the first guy out of the gate, doing "Purple Rain" - it was cool (he's got such a wicked guitar sound)... then, all of the sudden... that hoochie Beyonce comes out and starts singing that thousand-notes-a-second bullshit alongside of him... and totally ruined it... DAMN! People always have to go and fuck up a good thing... I mean, Prince played a medley of four of five of his big hits from back in the day, jammed his ass off on a couple guitars (the best guitar solos of the night, mind you)... and they have to go screw what could have been a legitimate good moment up by pairing him up with that skank trizzy... A friend of mine and I later were talking about it, and we decided that the songs in the Prince medley were each better than anything that was nominated for a Grammy that night...

So I flip back to it after a couple of minutes and they were introducing the "tribute to the Beatles" from Dave Matthews, Sting, Vince Gill, and Pharrell Williams... which, again, totally sucked donkey sack. Dave Matthews didn't even know the words (he actually sang, "I saw her dancing there")... It just sucked... It was like they just got up there and said, "hmmm, what song you wanna do?" Was cool to see Vince Gill actually playing a George Harrison Epiphone, though... I was almost starting to have some respect for Dave Matthews (sans his sucky band, mind you), but he lost it, pretty quick... And how (or why) the fuck did they get Pharrell Williams to play drums?

In case I haven't said it recently... The White Stripes fucking suck...

Why does music have to suck so much, now? I mean, I guess I mean that from a corporate perspective. There were songs that were nominated for Grammys that were from albums that were two years old... How the hell does that work? I was actually glad that Outkast won album of the year, because the other choices sucked so bad... And apparently, all you need to do to win a Grammy is pass away before the following year's awards and you're a sympathetic shoe-in (no disrespect to Mr. Zevon, who actually deserved his)...
At least I only had to miss the first two minutes of the Simpsons, anyway...

Listening to: Ill Nino - "Confession" (2003)