J. EDGAR HOOVER WAS GAY! HOLY SHIT!

Walking into a screening of J. Edgar at the local 2.00 dollar theater (the only place to take in the cinema in Raleigh with any class), I was expecting to be bombarded with fascinating information about the life and career of J. Edgar Hoover - founder and director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for some 48 years.  Unfortunately, the movie revolved around one thing and one thing only: his relationship with his boyfriend.

Famous for keeping secret files on literally everyone he possibly could and serving under  7 presidents, my expectations were high as to the volume of information this film would provide.  Instead, it touched on some anti communist shit, a little bit of info on Eleanor Roosevelt, and his trouble with certain members of congress.  Besides that, it was just a continuous exercise in homosexual angst.  now, I am not in any way anti homosexual.  What two men or woman do in the privacy of their own sex life is their call.  I just hoped this movie was more informative and less, well...gay.  His BF was played by the same guy who played the Winklevi, so that made it easier to swallow.

2 thumbs way down.

GIRL DRINK DRUNK

Gene Ween loses his shit at the Cradle!

Too bad I missed this because I was getting my hip fixed, but rave reviews keep rolling in from fans.
"It was a total shit show!" exclaimed a young fan of the singer songwriter.  An avid Ween fan and blood relative of mine suggested Mr. Ween had , in fact, had a complete "melt down"  on stage.  "I mean, he could not remember the chords or words to songs he himself wrote twenty years ago...songs he has played live literally thousands of times.  It was laughable!"

At least he played SARAH

HIP SURGERY !

I just got home from the hospital today from Duke after having my right hip replaced.  I must say the experience wasn't as miserable as some might think.  I was well medicated throughout the entire ordeal and the fat nurses did not try to touch me in any way I wouldn't normally allow.  The first night in , I woke up at 3:00 am with a peculiar itch on my nose.  I of course scratched it and went back to sleep.  About an hour later again my nose tickled enough to take me out of deep sleep to deal with the itch.  I quickly put my hand my face ready for a satisfactory scratch when I suddenly realized my hand was covered in whipped cream.  As I became more cognoscente of the situation laughter echoed from all around the small room.  It turned out the nurses were having a laugh and did the old tickle the nose, cream the hand camp trick.  Well, I fell for it alright.  In fact, I slipped and fell on some of the spilled whipped cream and broke my new hip.  I had all the nurses fired.  The end.

Its The End Of The World As We Know It - Julee Cruise (R E M )

True Romance - 'So You're Sicilian huh?'

Live: Atlas Sound, "Walkabout"

worst wedding DJ evz.

ZONAL OFFICE

Ms. Elizabeth Hawkins

show details 12:12 PM (2 hours ago)

Attn: Beneficiary, Note that in regards to your over due funds release to you, your due required fees has been settled by the central bank through the federal high court in Lagos in a 14 page affidavit sworn on your behalf and we hereby notify you that your funds have been cleared to be delivered to you through the UN zonal office here in New York. Be officially informed that Mr. Gregory Williams, a diplomat attached with the UN zonal office will inform you of his arrival with your funds by tomorrow, please you are urgently required to forward your address and your direct telephone number immediately. Thanks for your urgent co-operation. Regards, Mrs Elizabeth Hawkins. UN Zonal Office, New York,Usa

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dan reeves to hawkinsmrseliz.

show details 2:16 PM (12 minutes ago)

Mrs. Hawkins,

I have long awaited a response from the Zonal office in New York. Thank you so much for officially informing me that MR. Gregory Williams will inform me of my arrival of funds tomorrow.

My address: 2866 Blumpkin Avenue
Reah, Pennsilvania
267 - 878-1325

thanks,

They sure don't make em like they used to...

Thank you Steve Hobbs!

Jazz Vibraphonist Steve Hobbs was kind enough to write in to Metro Magazine regarding a piece I wrote about his latest album Vibes Straight Up. You can read my article here.

Dan’s Gift

I usually don’t do interviews because writers always twist what I say to make a point that they — the writer — want to make. I have to say, of any interview I have done in my career, Dan Reeves did an incredible job of writing straight to the points I was trying to make in his interview with me for Metro Magazine (“Raleigh Vibraphonist Hits Top of Jazz Charts With New CD” — March 2010).

I had four hours of sleep the night before my interview with Dan, and was speaking all around my points, which he amazingly figured out — and put on paper so eloquently.

And in addition to representing me the musician, Dan grasped what I said about being a teacher at Powell Elementary Magnet School and tied it in with the entire article. Helping children is just as important as playing music, any day of the week.

Dan is one hell of a writer. Tell him never to stop writing. He has a gift.

Steve Hobbs

Raleigh

Mahavishnu Orchestra

So sickening :

Band of Horses releases long awaited new record, opens for Widespread Panic

It wasn't so long ago when Band of Horses was a fresh discovery. A new sound stuffed with potent lyrics and a vocal resonance unlike anything else around. Everything All The Time was outstanding for a debut album from a band so young. Song by song, the entire album was simply amazing; seeking and skipping was completely unnecessary.

Remarkably, Cease To Begin was equally if not more entrancing than Everything All The Time. All of the sudden everyone and their brother was a fan of BOH. We have anxiously awaited the release of album number three for quite a while and have memorized every song Band of Horses has recorded frontwards and backwards.

This weekend BOH is opening for Widespread Panic at Walnut Creek in support of their new record Infinite Arms available May 18th. I think opening for the gig is a smart move for the Horses since fans of jam bands like Widespread Panic are starting to explore other types of music. Usually, the opening band is ignored. This time everyone should get their early and open their eyes and ears to one of the undisputed best bands of the past 5 years.

Recommended listening:

The Funeral

No One's Gonna Love You

Ode to LRC

Marlins Will Soar by Scott Stapp

WHAT A FUCKING TOOL

Panic

You know spring has sprung and summertime is not to far off when Widespread Panic comes to Walnut Creek. The Athens born jam band is giving Raleigh the usual two night stand over the weekend of April

23^th and 24^th and will, as always, draw a huge crowd of youngsters, hippies, lovers of music and a lot of

people who just wanna party.

That is the leading reason I avoid attending Panic shows. Too many kids on to many drugs who really don’t care about anything except being seen at the show pumping their fists, screaming the words, hitting all the right lines from all the big songs and wearing really unoriginal t-shirts.

For instance, my personal favorite is the Fed EX take off which says “SPREAD EX” on the front and “SEND YOUR MIND” on the back. This leads me to my next point, Panic is truly a great band. I have a special place in my heart for their music and I always will. But, they cover a lot of songs written by a lot of important song writers and their audience hasn’t the slightest clue.

“Send Your Mind” is a Van Morrison Song, but ask almost anyone at the shows and they will say it’s an original. In fact “Satisfied” was and still is the most popular slogan for the band on stickers, t-shirts, hats - you name it. And lead singer John Bell does a terrific cover of the song and even goes off on tangents and raps of his own design much like the original writer of the song – Van Morrison.

I guess what I am trying to get across here is that Widespread Panic is good, great even sometimes. They are clearly influenced by some of the greatest musicians and bands of all time : Warren Zevon, Talking Heads, Van Morrison, Neal Young, Joe Strummer, Frank Zappa, JJ Cale, and so forth and so on. I just wish more of the fans knew that.

POST BISCO FIGHT

Do's and Don'ts

Do's and Don'ts from Vice Magazine never ever ever get old.

Duster!

Listen to what this dildo has to say about Ween. I smell Templeton!

HERE is the article which states the opinion of a fake journalist who essentially cheated on his term paper:

Even as teenagers spazzing around in their suburban Philadelphia homes, Dean Ween (Mickey Melchiondo) and Gene Ween (Aaron Freeman) offered a giddily irresponsible, snot-fueled antidote to the tiresome PC earnestness that characterized popular music throughout the 1990s. Ween began in the mid-’80s as a lo-fi bedroom act, producing a handful of unhinged four-track cassette releases and rapidly moved up the indie-label chain—first Twin/Tone, then Shimmy-Disc—to land an inexplicable major-label contract with Elektra for the group’s third “official” album, 1992’s remarkable Pure Guava. Since then, on both label-attached records and a dizzying stream of self-released recordings, Ween has delighted in nothing more than vivisecting pop music forms and twisting them into new shapes—or pushing them far beyond their logical endpoints. In addition to their astonishing talent for mimicry and parody, however, Freeman and Melchiondo are also (and this is a point that’s rarely been made with sufficient emphasis) musicians—and students of pop music—of the very first order. Anyone who’s heard the group tackle note-perfect readings of ’70s sap rock with a straight face (such as Billy Joel’s “Honesty” or Wings’ “Band On The Run”) has to recognize that for all its smartass, for two decades Ween has been one of the smartest, most exceptionally gifted bands in rock. That may seem an odd claim to make about a group so energetically dedicated to absurdist goofing, but to sink into Ween’s catalog is to nuzzle the brown underbelly of pop-music history and hear what the top-40 hit parade might have sounded like after a steady diet of whippets, Ballantine’s scotch and carry-out chimichangas. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of debut GodWeenSatan: The Oneness, here’s our take on the most overrated and underrated songs in Ween’s catalog. Hail the Boognish, mang.

:: The Five Most Overrated Ween Songs
1. “Piss Up A Rope” (1996)
The idea behind 12 Golden Country Greats, Ween’s honky-tonk record, is unalloyed genius. The band recorded the album—10 songs total—in Nashville, with a staggering roster of Music City session legends, including the Jordanaires and Charlie McCoy. To date, it’s Ween’s only album-length genre exercise, and though it wisely runs shorter than most of its other records, there are a couple of moments where the joke wears thin. “Piss Up A Rope,” one of the straighter chuckles on the record, is one. The punch line here is a send-up of the macho swagger of he-man, my-woman-done-me-wrong braggadocio, but after the cheeky first verse, the rest of the song falls a little flat. Unlike other tracks on the record—the equally bratty but smarter “Mr. Richard Smoker,” for instance—the song doesn’t do much to unpack the genre other than stretch its conventions to the limit. At its best, 12 Golden Country Greats pushes country forms into uneasy territory. Though it’s a good joke, “Piss Up A Rope” is one that passes quickly.

2. “Ocean Man” (1997)
The slower demo version of “Ocean Man,” heard here, is actually a little more interesting than the album cut, heard on aquatic concept record The Mollusk. Sluggish and watery, the vocals seem to burble up from the sea floor, coating the track with a brackish slime that’s missing from the final, cleaner version. The Mollusk is filled with excellent songs, as are all of Ween’s albums, but especially if you hear it in sequence, “Ocean Man” doesn’t quite meet the standards of the best work on the record. That it’s become one of the album’s better-known songs, overshadowing more interesting moments like “I’m Dancing In The Show Tonight” and “The Golden Eel,” is something of a mystery.

3. “Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)” (1994)
Chocolate And Cheese contains three of the most profoundly upsetting rock songs ever recorded: “The HIV Song,” “Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony?” and “Spinal Meningitis.” By any standard of measurement, that’s an incredible hat trick—and one no other band could pull off, in my estimation. “Spinal Meningitis” gets nosed out by the other two, but mainly on style points. The lyrics of “Mister” paint as disturbing a picture as you’ll ever want to imagine in pop music, while the happy carnival music of “HIV” initially makes the jaw drop in disbelief. If your reaction moves to laughter, even on multiple hearings of the song, it’s an uneasy, shaky laughter. The silly “smile on, mighty Jesus” pun in “Spinal Meningitis” blunts the force of the song more fully than the others, and on multiple listenings, it’s the only one of the three that doesn’t get uglier the more you hear it. Granted, that’s like sporting the least horrifying medical abnormality in the sideshow, but who puts these three deranged songs on a single record and doesn’t expect us to rank them?

4. “Bananas And Blow” (2000)
White Pepper is Ween’s least perverse record, which may be the reason “Bananas And Blow” comes off less successfully than it might. On any other album, the song would have been a light entry, a straightforward Jimmy Buffett take (Freeman has called it a Bob Weir riff), but on White Pepper, nestled among distinctly milder genre-twisting tunes, the easy parody is made to carry more weight than it’s able to support.

5. “You Fucked Up” (1990)
Here’s the starting gun, according to the “official” discography: the opening shot on GodWeenSatan. At just more than 90 seconds, “You Fucked Up” is beloved by fans of Ween’s rawer, punkier side, and it’s a great leadoff track. But what was remarkable even about Ween’s earliest recordings was the band’s deconstruction of genres. In that context, “You Fucked Up” isn’t the most creatively grating cut on the album. I’d rate “Papa Zit” or the second half of “Birthday Boy” above it.

:: The Five Most Underrated Ween Songs
1. “So Long, Jerry” (1996)
Recorded during the 12 Golden Country Greats sessions and originally released as the b-side of “Piss Up A Rope,” “So Long, Jerry” is one of Ween’s most moving performances, another aspect of the band’s art that rarely gets the mention it deserves. As much as they love exploding genres, they’re fans of the genres they explode (the joke wouldn’t work otherwise), and “So Long, Jerry” is as heartfelt a song as they’ve ever recorded. Reportedly a tribute to Jerry Garcia, who died the year before the release of the album, “So Long, Jerry” is a criminal omission from its final track list. And while I’m yapping about it, so is “I Got No Darkside,” which also dates from these sessions and is available on several unofficial compilations.

2. “With My Own Bare Hands” (2007)
You could flog a thesaurus for a solid hour and never come up with enough adjectives for this cut from La Cucaracha, one of the most punishing tracks in the Ween repertoire. The song hits like a car crusher right out of the gate. There are several wonderful things about “With My Own Bare Hands,” but among my favorites are the way Freeman bum rushes the line “I’m gonna be your lawnmower/And cut your fuckin’ grass” and the liberated cock-rock nonsense lyric breakdown that occurs in the fourth verse. It’s a rare song that can send up its genre with equal parts love and smartass. Every time I hear Freeman break forth with “take a shit on the bitch and fuck hooba-jooba,” I weep with happiness. That’s just me. Oh, and also: Melchiondo’s guitar solo sticks it in and breaks it off.

3. “Pollo Asado” (1991)
Full disclosure: I’m one of those Scotchgard-heads who finds The Pod to be Ween’s career high point, no pun intended. I love everything about that goddamn record, from the snotty ripoff of Leonard Cohen’s The Best Of cover art to the murky aura of the music, which sounds like it’s been coated in cough syrup. When I’m laid up on the couch with a high fever, this is my go-to album, and nothing on it sets me to laughing harder than “Pollo Asado,” a stoned-out sendup of a Mexican fast-food order set to a faux-Muzak score. Without giving anything away, the foozle-headed character voices and the senseless transaction they’re embarked on elevate the song from stoner skit into absurdist gibberish. It’s a hysterical performance and one that reveals why producer Kramer latched onto Ween the moment he saw them play live.

4. “Cover It With Gas And Set It On Fire” (1993)
Remember up there in the overrated section, when I talked about disturbing pop songs? I forgot to mention “Cover It With Gas,” which I first heard on double-disc live release Paintin’ The Town Brown, but which is heard in its studio version (from the Skycruiser EP) here. I haven’t the foggiest notion what this track is about, but it sums up Ween’s penchant for terror rock better than any other song I can think of. The repeated shriek of the title, the siren that wails throughout the song’s three minutes, the squalling car-crash sound effects—this is one of the most upsetting soundscapes in all of alt-rock.

5. “What Deaner Was Talkin’ About” (1994)
After the squeal and throttle of “Cover It With Gas,” how about one of the shiniest, poppiest songs in the band’s playbook? “Pork Roll Egg And Cheese” from The Pod runs a tight second, but “What Deaner Was Talkin’ About” is likely the band’s most Beatlesesque moment; Dean Ween has identified the Beatles as his favorite band (just ahead of the Butthole Surfers), and you can hear that love in the song’s bright melody and sweetly sung vocals. And in a songbook filled with snark and darkness, “What Deaner Was Talkin’ About” stands out as a charming, affable moment—not the only one in the band’s catalog, certainly, but one of its friendliest and most congenial.

My immediate response was this:

A word about the comments:

The only reason people say Roses are Free is over rated is due to the fact that Phish covers it. It is a kick ass song no matter how you slice it.

That list is off. It seems like the guy who wrote that has a touch of the Templetons. He didn't do any real research at all. I know it's an opinion piece, but he made it seem like a stolen opinion from a bunch of randoms.

The country Album is not a joke, it's a country album.

The fact that he threw "Dancing in the Show" and "Golden Eel" side by side at the end of the paragraph proves my point that he was scanning ween info without really understanding much at all.

Has he never seen "You fucked up live?" did I miss something?

"So long Jerry" is for pussy's.

"Own Bare Hands mistake again proves shades of Templeton

"Pollo Asado" = he's been waiting to use the term "faux musak" since he got a job at Swagnet.

Eric "wood paneled" Wagoneer can piss up a rope.