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Welcome to the CB Friday Flash, where we recap the week in music and bring you some of the weekend’s top concert bets. The big news this week was the launch of MySpace’s new music portal on Thursday. Paul McCartney also played to 50,000 fans in Israel, and the Flaming Lips are finally ready to celebrate Christmas On Mars ... read more |
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Love him or hate him, Billy Joel is a guy who is just about as New York as it gets. And you couldn’t have picked a more perfect guy to send off New York’s Shea Stadium in the sort of style that the structure which has made so much history throughout the years demands ... read more |
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Everybody loves a good conspiracy, right? And in rock and roll there is no shortage of them. From who “really” killed sixties icons like John Lennon and Brian Jones, to the “truth” behind all those seventies heavy metal records that hypnotize you into a secret pact with the devil when played backwards ... read more |
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The interview took place in April 1964, shortly after the Beatles’ American TV debut on The Ed Sullivan show, and has never been aired since. In a nine-and-a-half-minute conversation with Scottish television, the band talked about the songwriting process, and how Lennon and McCartney met ... read more |
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Ladies and gentleman, Mixtape Madness is back, on a mission from God. We’ve got a full tank of gas, half a packet of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it ... read more |
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They tease us, act selfishly, and even sleep with our friends on occasion, but goddamnit, if we don’t still spend hours and hours thinking up ways to make them smile. A beautiful woman may have been behind every war ever fought, but her delicate effervescence also manifests itself in every piece of art ever created. Seems like a fair tradeoff to me ... read more |
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Since this column has been hibernating longer than Rip Van Winkle (5), I’ll give ya’ll a brief rundown of how things work. Like Glenn Close (6) after seeing an excited and injured soldier in The World According To Garp, I’ll slide in all the biggest music-related stories of the last week and thrust until happy endings are achieved for all ... read more |
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Need a get-rich quick scheme? Divorce a Beatle! Today, Heather Mills was awarded $50 million for being married to Paul McCartney for four years. And now in reiterating her reputation as a bloodthirsty money hungry bitch, the one-legged model/prostitute plans to appeal decisions regarding her daughter’s protection and may ask for more money ... read more |
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Put down those kangaroo meat sandwiches and listen up! Sir. Paul McCartney has partnered with animals rights group Viva! to speak out against the possible slaughter of five hundred kangaroos. The government has long claimed the friendly hoppers have been destroying the vegetation, but the former Beatle believes they have just as much right to the land as we do ... read more |
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Acclaimed Beatles engineer Norman Smith has passed away. Dubbed Norman Normal by John Lennon, the studio hand worked on every Beatles album up to Rubber Soul and later found pop music success himself under the alias Hurricane Smith. Perhaps most famously, he presided over the first ever Fab Four recording at Abbey Road Studios in George Martin’s absence ... read more |
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In honor of Cupid and his contumelious nature, Cinema Blend writer Jessica Grabert and I have decided to join forces on the greatest mixtape ever created. Yesterday, we took a little field trip to Staples and loaded up on Post It Notes. Then we took meticulous, irreverent and sometimes pointless musings and wrote them down throughout the day on said little yellow pads of paper ... read more |
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You can zealously keep the old, the tired, and the weary. I’ll cling to the hopelessly romantic, the pathetically love-struck, and the desperately sentimental. Sure, most of the time I’ll take John Lennon’s frenzied rantings about changing the world, but you know what, sometimes Sir. Paul McCartney and his silly love songs sooth in a mushy way I can’t begin to quantify ... read more |
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You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find another record label can. Rock legends The Rolling Stones have become the latest in a series of artists to defect from EMI, after the record label’s massive restructuring. Their current contract expires in May; so, look for Jagger and friends to bolt towards the Universal border then ... read more |
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For those who don’t know, the Brit Awards are roughly the British equivalent of the Grammys. Some consider selections for awards to be based on commercial success rather than artistic merit. This year, the White Stripes, the Foo Fighters, the Kings of Leon, Kylie Minogue, and the Arcade Fire vie with the Eagles for the Best International Album award, proving that the British Recording Industry shares equally bad taste with their American counterparts
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Like Enrico Fermi (2), I’ll research, dissect, and eventually, split open the most noteworthy musical events of the previous week, causing a chain reaction that may or may not change life as we know it. Along the way, I’ll keep a running count of every famous person mentioned, hopefully hitting 50 by the article’s “it was all a dream” ending. Ready? Than like Alex Trebek’s (3) moustache, I’m off ... read more |
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