By Drew Adamek

I am a metalhead through and through. Occasionally, a little 1990’s hip-hop, Chicago Blues or Rolling Stones will poke through, but I am on a steady diet of screaming guitars and thundering drums.
I’ve tried to experiment; I’ve tried listening to other music. figure I’ve bought, on average, one album a week for the last 25 years. That means I’ve probably bought somewhere between 1,200 and 1,400 albums. Some were garage sale cassettes for a dollar, others were CDs, and most recently it’s been iTunes impulse buys.
My CD and cassette collection was several hundred strong before the iPod and I now have 400 purchased albums. Some are classics, some are forgotten and some are absolute, gut-rot stinkers.
Here, then, are 20 albums I wish I never bought:

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Posted on February 25, 2010

By The Beachwood Tyrannical Rock Stars Affairs Desk

Get your tickets this week for Sting’s show at Ravinia this summer?
Good. (Er, just play along with me.)
Now consider this report from the Guardian about an earlier stop on Sting’s tour:

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Posted on February 23, 2010

By Don Jacobson

Randy and Al are two self-described “cheesy DJs” from Fargo having a great ol’ time spinning psychedelic tunes on non-commercial KNDS-FM up on the cold and forlorn NoDak prairie.
On the their show, Psychedelic Velveeta, Randy is more of the “straight” man, if one can use that term in connection with a program whose stated goal is to take listeners “on a musical experience of neo-interplanetary space, in a groovy 3-Dimensional popcycle sort of way.” He’s the musician and record-geeky guy who seems to enjoy providing the nuts and bolts kind of info.
Al, meanwhile, is a little harder to describe. His voice reminds me of those kind of Minnesota-Wisconsin-Dakotas guys who are good-natured but whose idea of fun is disappearing into the woods with a case of Leinies and a rifle. You wonder if he’s had a few too many when he makes these off-the-wall jokes whose punch lines seem to make sense only to him, followed by raucous laughter. Then he comes back and reels off a few dozen rock factoids that only a true scholar of the form would know.
One of the things I really like about Psychedelic Velveeta is that Randy and Al aren’t afraid to mix in new psych bands along with the trippers of yesteryear, something that’s absolutely vital for the survival of the species.
Here’s a playlist of their Feb. 10, 2010 show:

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Posted on February 23, 2010

By Matt Harness

Jane Baxter Miller is to Bloodshot Records what Smead Jolley was to the 1931 Chicago White Sox. Both the label and the team could count on Miller and Jolley to deliver in the pinch.
While Baxter Miller isn’t on the label’s roster, she’s what the West Irving Park crew calls a Bloodshot Drinking Buddy – somebody who isn’t in the starting lineup but still comes up huge in the clutch.
Hailing from eastern Kentucky and a theater major at University of West Virginia, Baxter Miller’s been around the blocks in Chicago for a couple of decades. Her Texas Rubies country duo in the early 1990s with sister-in-law Kelly Kessler was around before Bloodshot Records was born.
After bouncing back and forth between theater and music for several years, Baxter Miller is out with a new record, Harm Among The Willows, on the Durga Disc label. She’s not sure when her the band will play next, but she definitely wants to fill up Evanston’s Space with her sweet sounds.

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Posted on February 22, 2010

By The Beachwood Little Pretty One Affairs Desk

“Doug Fieger, 57, the leader of the power pop band the Knack who sang on the 1979 hit ‘My Sharona,’ died Feb. 14 at his home in Los Angeles,” the Washington Post reports. “He had cancer.
“Mr. Fieger, a Detroit area native, formed the Knack in Los Angeles 1978, and the group quickly became a staple of Sunset Strip rock clubs. A year later, he co-wrote and sang lead vocals on ‘My Sharona.’ Mr. Fieger said the song, with its pounding drums and exuberant vocals, was inspired by a girlfriend of four years.
“‘I had never met a girl like her – ever,’ he told the Associated Press in 1994. ‘She induced madness. She was a very powerful presence. She had an insouciance that wouldn’t quit. She was very self-assured . . . She also had an overpowering scent, and it drove me crazy.’
“‘My Sharona,’ an unapologetically anthemic rock song, emerged during disco’s heyday and held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard pop chart for six weeks, becoming an FM radio standard.”

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Posted on February 18, 2010

By Don Jacobson

1. Now you, too, can read the rock ‘n’ roll ramblings of Thurston Moore.
Sonic Youth has always been firmly in the category of Thinking Nerd’s Rock Band and now Moore gives it another shove in that direction with his new blog flowers & cream.
Up now is a really cool and thoughtful post about what he calls his “favorite classic record these days,” Iggy & the Stooges’ Raw Power. He says that once he got a load of the bare-chested Iggy snarling with his chipped teeth and walking on the hands of the audience, “the drama of Bowie and glam seemed all at once tame.”

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Posted on February 17, 2010

By Drew Adamek

My musical tastes have never been that varied. I’ve occupied the white trash “space” for most of my life. First, there was white trash rock: Motley Crue, Metallica, Black Sabbath; then there was white trash rap: Beastie Boys, House of Pain, Cypress Hill.
It didn’t go much further than that for me over the last 30 years until I really started listening – really, really listening – to the Rolling Stones’ classics Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers. Those albums are, to me, a blueprint of where rock-n-roll started and where it was headed.
I started running through the Stones catalog and found not-so-subtle bits and pieces of all sorts of other artists. I wanted to find the Stones’ influences for myself, and expand my own musical exposure.
Here, then, are the artists and albums I discovered because of the Rolling Stones:

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Posted on February 16, 2010

By Matt Harness

Willie Wagner spends so much time thinking about work and actually working these days, he barely carved out enough time to talk last week. Forgive him for being busy and not concerning himself with all else besides food, family and friends.
The Freeport, Ill., native’s busy making some of the best BBQ this side of . . . well, the world. Wagner took third place a couple of years back for his pulled pork sandwich at a Memphis competition.
After working in the corporate world and cooking as a hobby, Wagner, the oldest of 11 children, ditched the suit and tie for full-time smoky smells and opened up Honky Tonk BBQ in
Pilsen. The restaurant’s been featured on Check, Please! and Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.
But Wagner’s also has a taste for good music. Honky Tonk catered last summer’s Bloodshot Records’ party at the Hideout and routinely features acts such as Fulton County Line. So, Beachwood Music figured why not peek behind these curtains and reveal little more.

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Posted on February 15, 2010

By The Beachwood Groove Affairs Desk

On the occasion of VH-1’s new documentary about Soul Train, a few highlights from the show’s 35-year run.
*
1. Don dances.

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Posted on February 11, 2010

By The Beachwood Fooled Again Affairs Desk

Wow, that was brutal.
Let’s take a look.
*
Jim DeRogatis: Super Bowl XLIV gave us the saddest, most tired musical spectacle yet: the band that pretends to be the Who . . . The newest song on that set list was 32 years old; the oldest was 41. But it wasn’t even the tunes’ over-familiarity that was the biggest problem.
Townshend (64) and Daltrey (65) were woefully flat and way out of sync during the unison vocal parts, and they relied on empty theatrics to convey the musical energy of the Who when the Who really were the Who. But the lasers, fireworks, geysers of flame and an elaborate illuminated stage that put U2’s current tour setup to shame couldn’t disguise the fact that these were two grizzled old pros going through the motions for a high-profile payday, with barely a hint of the powers they possessed at their peak.
Greg Kot: The Who’s Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend huffed and puffed as they tried to match the energy and bravado of songs originally recorded more than 30 years ago Sunday in their showcase slot as Super Bowl halftime headliners . . . Daltrey and Townshend keep pushing the brand and have licensed their music to countless advertisers to keep it alive. Their set list played like a compendium of TV commercials from the last decade as much as a classic-rock primer.

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Posted on February 8, 2010