Joel Hamilton of Book of Knots takes his Vespa cross-country for Scott Harding

There has never been a time when Vespas weren’t cool. The Italian motorbike has been a rock 'n' roll favorite since the 1960s, when natty Mods embraced it because its design kept their clothes cleaner than the greasy motorcycles that rockers drove.

When I was a wage slave at Tower Records in the 1980s, the Mod revival was on full-stop; guys in skinny ties and girls in cashmere sweaters would come on their Vespas to pick up the latest music from the Untouchables and Style Council. 1990s Britpop made Vespas hip again, though not so much in the States. Now, scooter riding qualifies as green as well as fashionable, and Joel Hamilton’s out to reinforce that message.

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

If I were to come up with a list of people whom I'd feel comfortable stealing a truck's worth of irreplaceable musical instruments from, the Stooges would not be on it. I can imagine Iggy Pop coming in through my air vents, unhinging his jaw and consuming my innards like that one yellow-eyed "X-Files" villain. And Mike Watt would probably just whale on me in a parking lot somewhere. Nonetheless, some cowardly soul in Montreal decided to disembark with the Stooges' entire tour truck worth of gear this morning, including Watt's classic Gibson bass. Full list of lost equipment after the jump from the e-mail that's being forwarded around, and how you can help ensure they have the gear to try and make a better album than "The Weirdness" in the future.

To all you Brooklyn Vegan trolls who think this is anything short of devastatingly adorable, please get some sunshine and a Popsicle or something. Sincerely, Soundboard.

-- August Brown

Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler now says that his recent stint in rehab was to help him through a developing addiction to pain and sleep medications he was taking following recent foot surgery.

"I just put the brakes on and checked into detox and just pulled the plug on all of it," Tyler told the Associated Press while promoting the new Guitar Hero 3: Aerosmith edition dedicated to his band's music.

After Lil Wayne's lyrical firebombing of the FNMTV studios last week, Pete Wentz and Co. would have a hard time finding anything short of a reanimated James Brown performance to top it. Rihanna sashaying around with Adam Levine on "If I Never See Your Face Again" didn't get there during last night's two-hour taping of the Friday night new-music show, but this weird experiment in blending old-school MTV values (making music video debuts appointment-worthy) with a hyper-stylized teen pop gloss might actually work out. For those who don't watch MTV outside of "The Hills," FNMTV premieres three videos evert Friday at 8 p.m. and features two live performances. Here's a preview of what to expect from tomorrow's show.

 

Most 28-year-old fellows have a hard time standing upright or maintaining consciousness during vacations to Mexico with their buddies. But leave it to Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst to return from his sun worship with another gosh darn album in his quiver. The album "Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band," his first venture under his legal name since his teenage years, is out on Merge Records this August (a break from longtime home Saddle Creek), and Oberst's website is streaming two new songs from it. The album was recorded in a makeshift studio in Tepoztlan, a mountain village apparently famed for alien encounters and its history in Aztec animism. The record features a gang of Saddle Creek affiliates who sound like they're having a blast playing tequila-addled blues-punk numbers they probably wrote before breakfast each day -- "Souled Out!!!" has somebody audibly asking what part comes next in the bridge. Oberst has been on quite a magick kick in recent years, so here's hoping that this jaunt brought some needed R&R, and from the looks of the album art, it did. The band plays the Troubadour on Aug. 5; get in line early.

-- August Brown

Photo of Conor Oberst courtesy of Butch Walker 

Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool on the 41st anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for a concert in which he saluted former songwriting partner John Lennon by singing “A Day in the Life,” while Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, looked on from the audience.

It was, according to McCartney's spokesman, the first time he has sung the album-closing song that was written primarily by Lennon. McCartney muffed one line midway through the song — ironically, during the brief section of the composition that he wrote. In a clip of the performance posted on YouTube, McCartney chuckles, moves on and then segues into Lennon’s anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance.”

McCartney also gave a nod to George Harrison by including “Something,” played on ukulele, Harrison’s instrument of choice for living-room jam sessions. His widow, Olivia, also attended the concert, which drew an estimated 36,000 people to Anfield Stadium. It was the centerpiece of the city’s European Capital of Culture arts series.

— Randy Lewis

Having allowed fans to decide how much its latest album is worth, Radiohead is now allowing them to shape how its new single, “Nude,” will sound. The British band, which let fans name their own price for downloading “In Rainbows” last fall, is posting five component tracks, or “stems,” from the single for purchase on iTunes. That will let them remix the stems to their own liking, or add beats, instruments or audio effects of their choosing.

The band wants fans then to upload finished remixes to www.radioheadremix.com, where other Radiohead fans can listen and then vote for a favorite. Voting runs through May 1. Remixers can also enable voting from their own websites, MySpace or Facebook pages that will count toward their vote total at Radiohead’s remix site. A spokeswoman for the band said it's not meant to be a competition, and at least as of now, there's no prize for the winner.

A statement issued Tuesday by the band said the stems for the song’s vocal, guitar, bass, drum and strings/effects tracks are compatible with a variety of music mixing software programs. People who buy all five stems during the first week they’re available will get an access code to a file that can be opened with certain software applications.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Thom Yorke by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs... It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they'd heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

"It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

Bidoun becomes an unlikely home for great contemporary music writing

A quick stroll through the contributors' list for Da Capo's forthcoming "Best Music Writing 2008" anthology yields many of the usual suspects (including, unfortunately but inevitably, Gene Weingarten's High Culture barricade-enforcing piece on Joshua Bell playing for change in the D.C. Metro). But a surprising small-run magazine popped up a few times with very worthy entries, the Middle Eastern and South Asian cultural journal Bidoun.

The magazine, like its contemporary peers n+1 and Russia!, is a roundabout survey of long-form political reporting, interviews and essays on cultural ephemera, but its thoughtful dissections of Orientalism in the avant-garde and pop music worlds are often revelatory.

   

If I were to come up with a list of people whom I'd feel comfortable stealing a truck's worth of irreplaceable musical instruments from, the Stooges would not be on it. I can imagine Iggy Pop coming in through my air vents, unhinging his jaw and consuming my innards like that one yellow-eyed "X-Files" villain. And Mike Watt would probably just whale on me in a parking lot somewhere. Nonetheless, some cowardly soul in Montreal decided to disembark with the Stooges' entire tour truck worth of gear this morning, including Watt's classic Gibson bass. Full list of lost equipment after the jump from the e-mail that's being forwarded around, and how you can help ensure they have the gear to try and make a better album than "The Weirdness" in the future.

To all you Brooklyn Vegan trolls who think this is anything short of devastatingly adorable, please get some sunshine and a Popsicle or something. Sincerely, Soundboard.

-- August Brown

Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler now says that his recent stint in rehab was to help him through a developing addiction to pain and sleep medications he was taking following recent foot surgery.

"I just put the brakes on and checked into detox and just pulled the plug on all of it," Tyler told the Associated Press while promoting the new Guitar Hero 3: Aerosmith edition dedicated to his band's music.

After Lil Wayne's lyrical firebombing of the FNMTV studios last week, Pete Wentz and Co. would have a hard time finding anything short of a reanimated James Brown performance to top it. Rihanna sashaying around with Adam Levine on "If I Never See Your Face Again" didn't get there during last night's two-hour taping of the Friday night new-music show, but this weird experiment in blending old-school MTV values (making music video debuts appointment-worthy) with a hyper-stylized teen pop gloss might actually work out. For those who don't watch MTV outside of "The Hills," FNMTV premieres three videos evert Friday at 8 p.m. and features two live performances. Here's a preview of what to expect from tomorrow's show.

 

Most 28-year-old fellows have a hard time standing upright or maintaining consciousness during vacations to Mexico with their buddies. But leave it to Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst to return from his sun worship with another gosh darn album in his quiver. The album "Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band," his first venture under his legal name since his teenage years, is out on Merge Records this August (a break from longtime home Saddle Creek), and Oberst's website is streaming two new songs from it. The album was recorded in a makeshift studio in Tepoztlan, a mountain village apparently famed for alien encounters and its history in Aztec animism. The record features a gang of Saddle Creek affiliates who sound like they're having a blast playing tequila-addled blues-punk numbers they probably wrote before breakfast each day -- "Souled Out!!!" has somebody audibly asking what part comes next in the bridge. Oberst has been on quite a magick kick in recent years, so here's hoping that this jaunt brought some needed R&R, and from the looks of the album art, it did. The band plays the Troubadour on Aug. 5; get in line early.

-- August Brown

Photo of Conor Oberst courtesy of Butch Walker 

Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool on the 41st anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for a concert in which he saluted former songwriting partner John Lennon by singing “A Day in the Life,” while Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, looked on from the audience.

It was, according to McCartney's spokesman, the first time he has sung the album-closing song that was written primarily by Lennon. McCartney muffed one line midway through the song — ironically, during the brief section of the composition that he wrote. In a clip of the performance posted on YouTube, McCartney chuckles, moves on and then segues into Lennon’s anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance.”

McCartney also gave a nod to George Harrison by including “Something,” played on ukulele, Harrison’s instrument of choice for living-room jam sessions. His widow, Olivia, also attended the concert, which drew an estimated 36,000 people to Anfield Stadium. It was the centerpiece of the city’s European Capital of Culture arts series.

— Randy Lewis

Having allowed fans to decide how much its latest album is worth, Radiohead is now allowing them to shape how its new single, “Nude,” will sound. The British band, which let fans name their own price for downloading “In Rainbows” last fall, is posting five component tracks, or “stems,” from the single for purchase on iTunes. That will let them remix the stems to their own liking, or add beats, instruments or audio effects of their choosing.

The band wants fans then to upload finished remixes to www.radioheadremix.com, where other Radiohead fans can listen and then vote for a favorite. Voting runs through May 1. Remixers can also enable voting from their own websites, MySpace or Facebook pages that will count toward their vote total at Radiohead’s remix site. A spokeswoman for the band said it's not meant to be a competition, and at least as of now, there's no prize for the winner.

A statement issued Tuesday by the band said the stems for the song’s vocal, guitar, bass, drum and strings/effects tracks are compatible with a variety of music mixing software programs. People who buy all five stems during the first week they’re available will get an access code to a file that can be opened with certain software applications.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Thom Yorke by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs... It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they'd heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

"It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

Gear thief makes a lifelong enemy of the Stooges

If I were to come up with a list of people whom I'd feel comfortable stealing a truck's worth of irreplaceable musical instruments from, the Stooges would not be on it. I can imagine Iggy Pop coming in through my air vents, unhinging his jaw and consuming my innards like that one yellow-eyed "X-Files" villain. And Mike Watt would probably just whale on me in a parking lot somewhere. Nonetheless, some cowardly soul in Montreal decided to disembark with the Stooges' entire tour truck worth of gear this morning, including Watt's classic Gibson bass. Full list of lost equipment after the jump from the e-mail that's being forwarded around, and how you can help ensure they have the gear to try and make a better album than "The Weirdness" in the future.

To all you Brooklyn Vegan trolls who think this is anything short of devastatingly adorable, please get some sunshine and a Popsicle or something. Sincerely, Soundboard.

-- August Brown

Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler now says that his recent stint in rehab was to help him through a developing addiction to pain and sleep medications he was taking following recent foot surgery.

"I just put the brakes on and checked into detox and just pulled the plug on all of it," Tyler told the Associated Press while promoting the new Guitar Hero 3: Aerosmith edition dedicated to his band's music.

After Lil Wayne's lyrical firebombing of the FNMTV studios last week, Pete Wentz and Co. would have a hard time finding anything short of a reanimated James Brown performance to top it. Rihanna sashaying around with Adam Levine on "If I Never See Your Face Again" didn't get there during last night's two-hour taping of the Friday night new-music show, but this weird experiment in blending old-school MTV values (making music video debuts appointment-worthy) with a hyper-stylized teen pop gloss might actually work out. For those who don't watch MTV outside of "The Hills," FNMTV premieres three videos evert Friday at 8 p.m. and features two live performances. Here's a preview of what to expect from tomorrow's show.

 

Most 28-year-old fellows have a hard time standing upright or maintaining consciousness during vacations to Mexico with their buddies. But leave it to Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst to return from his sun worship with another gosh darn album in his quiver. The album "Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band," his first venture under his legal name since his teenage years, is out on Merge Records this August (a break from longtime home Saddle Creek), and Oberst's website is streaming two new songs from it. The album was recorded in a makeshift studio in Tepoztlan, a mountain village apparently famed for alien encounters and its history in Aztec animism. The record features a gang of Saddle Creek affiliates who sound like they're having a blast playing tequila-addled blues-punk numbers they probably wrote before breakfast each day -- "Souled Out!!!" has somebody audibly asking what part comes next in the bridge. Oberst has been on quite a magick kick in recent years, so here's hoping that this jaunt brought some needed R&R, and from the looks of the album art, it did. The band plays the Troubadour on Aug. 5; get in line early.

-- August Brown

Photo of Conor Oberst courtesy of Butch Walker 

Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool on the 41st anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for a concert in which he saluted former songwriting partner John Lennon by singing “A Day in the Life,” while Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, looked on from the audience.

It was, according to McCartney's spokesman, the first time he has sung the album-closing song that was written primarily by Lennon. McCartney muffed one line midway through the song — ironically, during the brief section of the composition that he wrote. In a clip of the performance posted on YouTube, McCartney chuckles, moves on and then segues into Lennon’s anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance.”

McCartney also gave a nod to George Harrison by including “Something,” played on ukulele, Harrison’s instrument of choice for living-room jam sessions. His widow, Olivia, also attended the concert, which drew an estimated 36,000 people to Anfield Stadium. It was the centerpiece of the city’s European Capital of Culture arts series.

— Randy Lewis

Having allowed fans to decide how much its latest album is worth, Radiohead is now allowing them to shape how its new single, “Nude,” will sound. The British band, which let fans name their own price for downloading “In Rainbows” last fall, is posting five component tracks, or “stems,” from the single for purchase on iTunes. That will let them remix the stems to their own liking, or add beats, instruments or audio effects of their choosing.

The band wants fans then to upload finished remixes to www.radioheadremix.com, where other Radiohead fans can listen and then vote for a favorite. Voting runs through May 1. Remixers can also enable voting from their own websites, MySpace or Facebook pages that will count toward their vote total at Radiohead’s remix site. A spokeswoman for the band said it's not meant to be a competition, and at least as of now, there's no prize for the winner.

A statement issued Tuesday by the band said the stems for the song’s vocal, guitar, bass, drum and strings/effects tracks are compatible with a variety of music mixing software programs. People who buy all five stems during the first week they’re available will get an access code to a file that can be opened with certain software applications.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Thom Yorke by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs... It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they'd heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

"It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

Feist counts to four on ‘Sesame Street,’ bears most unwarranted commenter hate of ’08

To all you Brooklyn Vegan trolls who think this is anything short of devastatingly adorable, please get some sunshine and a Popsicle or something. Sincerely, Soundboard.

-- August Brown

Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler now says that his recent stint in rehab was to help him through a developing addiction to pain and sleep medications he was taking following recent foot surgery.

"I just put the brakes on and checked into detox and just pulled the plug on all of it," Tyler told the Associated Press while promoting the new Guitar Hero 3: Aerosmith edition dedicated to his band's music.

After Lil Wayne's lyrical firebombing of the FNMTV studios last week, Pete Wentz and Co. would have a hard time finding anything short of a reanimated James Brown performance to top it. Rihanna sashaying around with Adam Levine on "If I Never See Your Face Again" didn't get there during last night's two-hour taping of the Friday night new-music show, but this weird experiment in blending old-school MTV values (making music video debuts appointment-worthy) with a hyper-stylized teen pop gloss might actually work out. For those who don't watch MTV outside of "The Hills," FNMTV premieres three videos evert Friday at 8 p.m. and features two live performances. Here's a preview of what to expect from tomorrow's show.

 

Most 28-year-old fellows have a hard time standing upright or maintaining consciousness during vacations to Mexico with their buddies. But leave it to Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst to return from his sun worship with another gosh darn album in his quiver. The album "Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band," his first venture under his legal name since his teenage years, is out on Merge Records this August (a break from longtime home Saddle Creek), and Oberst's website is streaming two new songs from it. The album was recorded in a makeshift studio in Tepoztlan, a mountain village apparently famed for alien encounters and its history in Aztec animism. The record features a gang of Saddle Creek affiliates who sound like they're having a blast playing tequila-addled blues-punk numbers they probably wrote before breakfast each day -- "Souled Out!!!" has somebody audibly asking what part comes next in the bridge. Oberst has been on quite a magick kick in recent years, so here's hoping that this jaunt brought some needed R&R, and from the looks of the album art, it did. The band plays the Troubadour on Aug. 5; get in line early.

-- August Brown

Photo of Conor Oberst courtesy of Butch Walker 

Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool on the 41st anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for a concert in which he saluted former songwriting partner John Lennon by singing “A Day in the Life,” while Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, looked on from the audience.

It was, according to McCartney's spokesman, the first time he has sung the album-closing song that was written primarily by Lennon. McCartney muffed one line midway through the song — ironically, during the brief section of the composition that he wrote. In a clip of the performance posted on YouTube, McCartney chuckles, moves on and then segues into Lennon’s anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance.”

McCartney also gave a nod to George Harrison by including “Something,” played on ukulele, Harrison’s instrument of choice for living-room jam sessions. His widow, Olivia, also attended the concert, which drew an estimated 36,000 people to Anfield Stadium. It was the centerpiece of the city’s European Capital of Culture arts series.

— Randy Lewis

Having allowed fans to decide how much its latest album is worth, Radiohead is now allowing them to shape how its new single, “Nude,” will sound. The British band, which let fans name their own price for downloading “In Rainbows” last fall, is posting five component tracks, or “stems,” from the single for purchase on iTunes. That will let them remix the stems to their own liking, or add beats, instruments or audio effects of their choosing.

The band wants fans then to upload finished remixes to www.radioheadremix.com, where other Radiohead fans can listen and then vote for a favorite. Voting runs through May 1. Remixers can also enable voting from their own websites, MySpace or Facebook pages that will count toward their vote total at Radiohead’s remix site. A spokeswoman for the band said it's not meant to be a competition, and at least as of now, there's no prize for the winner.

A statement issued Tuesday by the band said the stems for the song’s vocal, guitar, bass, drum and strings/effects tracks are compatible with a variety of music mixing software programs. People who buy all five stems during the first week they’re available will get an access code to a file that can be opened with certain software applications.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Thom Yorke by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs... It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they'd heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

"It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

Aerosmith’s Tyler went to rehab for pain meds

Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler now says that his recent stint in rehab was to help him through a developing addiction to pain and sleep medications he was taking following recent foot surgery.

"I just put the brakes on and checked into detox and just pulled the plug on all of it," Tyler told the Associated Press while promoting the new Guitar Hero 3: Aerosmith edition dedicated to his band's music.

After Lil Wayne's lyrical firebombing of the FNMTV studios last week, Pete Wentz and Co. would have a hard time finding anything short of a reanimated James Brown performance to top it. Rihanna sashaying around with Adam Levine on "If I Never See Your Face Again" didn't get there during last night's two-hour taping of the Friday night new-music show, but this weird experiment in blending old-school MTV values (making music video debuts appointment-worthy) with a hyper-stylized teen pop gloss might actually work out. For those who don't watch MTV outside of "The Hills," FNMTV premieres three videos evert Friday at 8 p.m. and features two live performances. Here's a preview of what to expect from tomorrow's show.

 

Most 28-year-old fellows have a hard time standing upright or maintaining consciousness during vacations to Mexico with their buddies. But leave it to Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst to return from his sun worship with another gosh darn album in his quiver. The album "Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band," his first venture under his legal name since his teenage years, is out on Merge Records this August (a break from longtime home Saddle Creek), and Oberst's website is streaming two new songs from it. The album was recorded in a makeshift studio in Tepoztlan, a mountain village apparently famed for alien encounters and its history in Aztec animism. The record features a gang of Saddle Creek affiliates who sound like they're having a blast playing tequila-addled blues-punk numbers they probably wrote before breakfast each day -- "Souled Out!!!" has somebody audibly asking what part comes next in the bridge. Oberst has been on quite a magick kick in recent years, so here's hoping that this jaunt brought some needed R&R, and from the looks of the album art, it did. The band plays the Troubadour on Aug. 5; get in line early.

-- August Brown

Photo of Conor Oberst courtesy of Butch Walker 

Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool on the 41st anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for a concert in which he saluted former songwriting partner John Lennon by singing “A Day in the Life,” while Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, looked on from the audience.

It was, according to McCartney's spokesman, the first time he has sung the album-closing song that was written primarily by Lennon. McCartney muffed one line midway through the song — ironically, during the brief section of the composition that he wrote. In a clip of the performance posted on YouTube, McCartney chuckles, moves on and then segues into Lennon’s anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance.”

McCartney also gave a nod to George Harrison by including “Something,” played on ukulele, Harrison’s instrument of choice for living-room jam sessions. His widow, Olivia, also attended the concert, which drew an estimated 36,000 people to Anfield Stadium. It was the centerpiece of the city’s European Capital of Culture arts series.

— Randy Lewis

Having allowed fans to decide how much its latest album is worth, Radiohead is now allowing them to shape how its new single, “Nude,” will sound. The British band, which let fans name their own price for downloading “In Rainbows” last fall, is posting five component tracks, or “stems,” from the single for purchase on iTunes. That will let them remix the stems to their own liking, or add beats, instruments or audio effects of their choosing.

The band wants fans then to upload finished remixes to www.radioheadremix.com, where other Radiohead fans can listen and then vote for a favorite. Voting runs through May 1. Remixers can also enable voting from their own websites, MySpace or Facebook pages that will count toward their vote total at Radiohead’s remix site. A spokeswoman for the band said it's not meant to be a competition, and at least as of now, there's no prize for the winner.

A statement issued Tuesday by the band said the stems for the song’s vocal, guitar, bass, drum and strings/effects tracks are compatible with a variety of music mixing software programs. People who buy all five stems during the first week they’re available will get an access code to a file that can be opened with certain software applications.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Thom Yorke by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs... It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they'd heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

"It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

Tomorrow’s news today: recapping FNMTV’s upcoming T.I., No Age and Day 26 premieres

After Lil Wayne's lyrical firebombing of the FNMTV studios last week, Pete Wentz and Co. would have a hard time finding anything short of a reanimated James Brown performance to top it. Rihanna sashaying around with Adam Levine on "If I Never See Your Face Again" didn't get there during last night's two-hour taping of the Friday night new-music show, but this weird experiment in blending old-school MTV values (making music video debuts appointment-worthy) with a hyper-stylized teen pop gloss might actually work out. For those who don't watch MTV outside of "The Hills," FNMTV premieres three videos evert Friday at 8 p.m. and features two live performances. Here's a preview of what to expect from tomorrow's show.

 

Most 28-year-old fellows have a hard time standing upright or maintaining consciousness during vacations to Mexico with their buddies. But leave it to Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst to return from his sun worship with another gosh darn album in his quiver. The album "Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band," his first venture under his legal name since his teenage years, is out on Merge Records this August (a break from longtime home Saddle Creek), and Oberst's website is streaming two new songs from it. The album was recorded in a makeshift studio in Tepoztlan, a mountain village apparently famed for alien encounters and its history in Aztec animism. The record features a gang of Saddle Creek affiliates who sound like they're having a blast playing tequila-addled blues-punk numbers they probably wrote before breakfast each day -- "Souled Out!!!" has somebody audibly asking what part comes next in the bridge. Oberst has been on quite a magick kick in recent years, so here's hoping that this jaunt brought some needed R&R, and from the looks of the album art, it did. The band plays the Troubadour on Aug. 5; get in line early.

-- August Brown

Photo of Conor Oberst courtesy of Butch Walker 

Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool on the 41st anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for a concert in which he saluted former songwriting partner John Lennon by singing “A Day in the Life,” while Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, looked on from the audience.

It was, according to McCartney's spokesman, the first time he has sung the album-closing song that was written primarily by Lennon. McCartney muffed one line midway through the song — ironically, during the brief section of the composition that he wrote. In a clip of the performance posted on YouTube, McCartney chuckles, moves on and then segues into Lennon’s anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance.”

McCartney also gave a nod to George Harrison by including “Something,” played on ukulele, Harrison’s instrument of choice for living-room jam sessions. His widow, Olivia, also attended the concert, which drew an estimated 36,000 people to Anfield Stadium. It was the centerpiece of the city’s European Capital of Culture arts series.

— Randy Lewis

Having allowed fans to decide how much its latest album is worth, Radiohead is now allowing them to shape how its new single, “Nude,” will sound. The British band, which let fans name their own price for downloading “In Rainbows” last fall, is posting five component tracks, or “stems,” from the single for purchase on iTunes. That will let them remix the stems to their own liking, or add beats, instruments or audio effects of their choosing.

The band wants fans then to upload finished remixes to www.radioheadremix.com, where other Radiohead fans can listen and then vote for a favorite. Voting runs through May 1. Remixers can also enable voting from their own websites, MySpace or Facebook pages that will count toward their vote total at Radiohead’s remix site. A spokeswoman for the band said it's not meant to be a competition, and at least as of now, there's no prize for the winner.

A statement issued Tuesday by the band said the stems for the song’s vocal, guitar, bass, drum and strings/effects tracks are compatible with a variety of music mixing software programs. People who buy all five stems during the first week they’re available will get an access code to a file that can be opened with certain software applications.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Thom Yorke by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs... It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they'd heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

"It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

Conor Oberst makes records even on his Mexican vacations

 

Most 28-year-old fellows have a hard time standing upright or maintaining consciousness during vacations to Mexico with their buddies. But leave it to Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst to return from his sun worship with another gosh darn album in his quiver. The album "Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band," his first venture under his legal name since his teenage years, is out on Merge Records this August (a break from longtime home Saddle Creek), and Oberst's website is streaming two new songs from it. The album was recorded in a makeshift studio in Tepoztlan, a mountain village apparently famed for alien encounters and its history in Aztec animism. The record features a gang of Saddle Creek affiliates who sound like they're having a blast playing tequila-addled blues-punk numbers they probably wrote before breakfast each day -- "Souled Out!!!" has somebody audibly asking what part comes next in the bridge. Oberst has been on quite a magick kick in recent years, so here's hoping that this jaunt brought some needed R&R, and from the looks of the album art, it did. The band plays the Troubadour on Aug. 5; get in line early.

-- August Brown

Photo of Conor Oberst courtesy of Butch Walker 

Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool on the 41st anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for a concert in which he saluted former songwriting partner John Lennon by singing “A Day in the Life,” while Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, looked on from the audience.

It was, according to McCartney's spokesman, the first time he has sung the album-closing song that was written primarily by Lennon. McCartney muffed one line midway through the song — ironically, during the brief section of the composition that he wrote. In a clip of the performance posted on YouTube, McCartney chuckles, moves on and then segues into Lennon’s anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance.”

McCartney also gave a nod to George Harrison by including “Something,” played on ukulele, Harrison’s instrument of choice for living-room jam sessions. His widow, Olivia, also attended the concert, which drew an estimated 36,000 people to Anfield Stadium. It was the centerpiece of the city’s European Capital of Culture arts series.

— Randy Lewis

Having allowed fans to decide how much its latest album is worth, Radiohead is now allowing them to shape how its new single, “Nude,” will sound. The British band, which let fans name their own price for downloading “In Rainbows” last fall, is posting five component tracks, or “stems,” from the single for purchase on iTunes. That will let them remix the stems to their own liking, or add beats, instruments or audio effects of their choosing.

The band wants fans then to upload finished remixes to www.radioheadremix.com, where other Radiohead fans can listen and then vote for a favorite. Voting runs through May 1. Remixers can also enable voting from their own websites, MySpace or Facebook pages that will count toward their vote total at Radiohead’s remix site. A spokeswoman for the band said it's not meant to be a competition, and at least as of now, there's no prize for the winner.

A statement issued Tuesday by the band said the stems for the song’s vocal, guitar, bass, drum and strings/effects tracks are compatible with a variety of music mixing software programs. People who buy all five stems during the first week they’re available will get an access code to a file that can be opened with certain software applications.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Thom Yorke by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs... It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they'd heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

"It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

McCartney salutes Lennon in Liverpool

Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool on the 41st anniversary of the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for a concert in which he saluted former songwriting partner John Lennon by singing “A Day in the Life,” while Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, looked on from the audience.

It was, according to McCartney's spokesman, the first time he has sung the album-closing song that was written primarily by Lennon. McCartney muffed one line midway through the song — ironically, during the brief section of the composition that he wrote. In a clip of the performance posted on YouTube, McCartney chuckles, moves on and then segues into Lennon’s anti-war anthem “Give Peace a Chance.”

McCartney also gave a nod to George Harrison by including “Something,” played on ukulele, Harrison’s instrument of choice for living-room jam sessions. His widow, Olivia, also attended the concert, which drew an estimated 36,000 people to Anfield Stadium. It was the centerpiece of the city’s European Capital of Culture arts series.

— Randy Lewis

Having allowed fans to decide how much its latest album is worth, Radiohead is now allowing them to shape how its new single, “Nude,” will sound. The British band, which let fans name their own price for downloading “In Rainbows” last fall, is posting five component tracks, or “stems,” from the single for purchase on iTunes. That will let them remix the stems to their own liking, or add beats, instruments or audio effects of their choosing.

The band wants fans then to upload finished remixes to www.radioheadremix.com, where other Radiohead fans can listen and then vote for a favorite. Voting runs through May 1. Remixers can also enable voting from their own websites, MySpace or Facebook pages that will count toward their vote total at Radiohead’s remix site. A spokeswoman for the band said it's not meant to be a competition, and at least as of now, there's no prize for the winner.

A statement issued Tuesday by the band said the stems for the song’s vocal, guitar, bass, drum and strings/effects tracks are compatible with a variety of music mixing software programs. People who buy all five stems during the first week they’re available will get an access code to a file that can be opened with certain software applications.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Thom Yorke by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs... It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they'd heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

"It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

Radiohead fans can remix ‘Nude’ single

Having allowed fans to decide how much its latest album is worth, Radiohead is now allowing them to shape how its new single, “Nude,” will sound. The British band, which let fans name their own price for downloading “In Rainbows” last fall, is posting five component tracks, or “stems,” from the single for purchase on iTunes. That will let them remix the stems to their own liking, or add beats, instruments or audio effects of their choosing.

The band wants fans then to upload finished remixes to www.radioheadremix.com, where other Radiohead fans can listen and then vote for a favorite. Voting runs through May 1. Remixers can also enable voting from their own websites, MySpace or Facebook pages that will count toward their vote total at Radiohead’s remix site. A spokeswoman for the band said it's not meant to be a competition, and at least as of now, there's no prize for the winner.

A statement issued Tuesday by the band said the stems for the song’s vocal, guitar, bass, drum and strings/effects tracks are compatible with a variety of music mixing software programs. People who buy all five stems during the first week they’re available will get an access code to a file that can be opened with certain software applications.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Thom Yorke by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs... It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they'd heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

"It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

Tom Petty tours with pre-Heartbreakers band

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs... It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they'd heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

"It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

Scandal update! Maxim apologizes to the Black Crowes, offers rare Eliza Dushku prints in penance

In the first recorded instance of tact in its publishing history, Maxim has officially apologized to the Black Crowes for making up a bunch of stuff about what their album might have sounded like if they'd heard it. Says Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky in a statement released today:

"It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers."

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

You can stand under my epilepsy-inducing laser show

Yes, Rihanna's enlistment of synthy post-punks Klaxons as her backing band for her performance of "Umbrella" on last night's Brit Awards is blood in the water for music bloggers. But the pairing makes a bit more sense than, say, Fergie and John Legend, as Klaxons' biggest single was essentially cyborg girl-group pop, and Rihanna's been inching ever closer to Kylie-land house cuts. There's a long history of dance music traversing from England to the Caribbean and vice versa, so this set isn't the disaster it might have been if this were, like, Kings of Leon or another one of those bands that only Brits seem to understand. That said, if anybody in the live audience needed Lasik surgery in the near future, they can probably go ahead and cancel that appointment now.
--August Brown

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]

Kimya Dawson essentially has the No. 8 album in the country

One of the best mixtapes I ever received was from an old music-critic mentor (Hey there, Nick Marino of Paste Magazine), who in a gesture of massive inappropriateness, genius or some combination of the two, put the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack" (essentially, the K Records version of any song by Young Jeezy) in a compilation doubling as his Christmas card. A half-decade and an onscreen Ellen Page/Michael Cera cover later, that band's Kimya Dawson finds her work nestled between Garth Brooks and Colbie Caillat at No. 8 on the Billboard charts for her eight contributions to the "Juno" soundtrack as a solo artist, Moldy Peach and as a member of Antsy Pants. The soundtrack sold 38,000 copies last week, nearly all digital, as the physical release only hit shelves Tuesday. Like the film's title character, Dawson is the recent mom to a fabulously named daughter (Panda Delilah!) which, given Pitchfork's inexplicable adoration of "Person Pitch," seems to make pandas the new wolves and babies the new Italo-disco in indie circles.

-- August Brown

[Photo: Kimya Dawson. Credit: Natalie Gruppuso.]