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I was thinking about musicians who have belonged to at least two major rock bands. There’s a lot of them, so let’s narrow it down: I’m interested in the sidemen, not stars like Dave Grohl or Eric Clapton. For our purposes today, spinoff projects don’t count (where two or more people from one band start […]
posted 1 March 2010 in Tasty Bits. 8 comments
Number of Google results for the following phrases:
“first banana”–92,500
“second banana”–88,200
“third banana”–39,100
“fourth banana”–4,010
“fifth banana”–1,830
“sixth banana”–292
“seventh banana”–522
“eighth banana”–344
“ninth banana”–9,070
“tenth banana”–264
“eleventh banana”–29
“twelfth banana”–40
“thirteenth banana”–270
“fourteenth banana”–10
“fifteenth banana”–617
“sixteenth banana”–113
“seventeenth banana”–110
“eighteenth banana”–57
“nineteenth banana”–3
“twentieth banana”–53
“twenty-first banana”–3
“twenty-second banana”–0
You have to go pretty far down the banana pecking order before getting to “no results found.”
posted 4 January 2010 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments
In case you hadn’t heard, a grassroots movement put Rage Against the Machine on top of the British charts this week (over Joe McElderry from Simon Cowell’s X Factor talent show). This tickles me on numerous levels–but it’s hard for most Americans to understand how attentive Brits are to the question of who’s got the […]
posted 23 December 2009 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments
1. “Meeting Across the River”
2. “Nebraska”
3. “Seeds”
4. “Cautious Man”
5. “Wild Billy’s Circus Story”
More than I expected, but I’m sure there’s others I didn’t think of. Some of them would work better as talking blues than others.
“Seeds” seems the most anomalous, by virtue of being an uptempo rocker.
posted 7 December 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment
In my youth, when I owned only twenty or thirty albums, I’d guess that about half of them were greatest-hit collections. I was focused on value for money, but it was also an efficient crash course on recent musical history. Many of these records, however, had a song that just didn’t seem to fit. (This […]
posted 30 November 2009 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments
It took me a long time to notice this lyric, from Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”:
Just like a rainbow, you know you set me free
Now, Vince Clarke has always been a goofy guy, but this is extra-silly. This is not one of the things that rainbows are traditionally good for! “Just like a rainbow, […]
posted 19 October 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment
Nobody ever accused Sammy Hagar of being a genius. But I would have guessed that he passed driver’s ed.
Unfortunately, the opening line of “I Can’t Drive 55” is as follows:
One foot on the brake and and one on the gas
Not only can you not drive 55 with that technique, you can’t drive 5. If Hagar […]
posted 28 September 2009 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet
Five musicians I’ve interviewed who are no longer alive:
1. James Brown
2. Kurt Cobain
3. Left Eye
4. Barry White
5. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
posted 22 September 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment
I hadn’t heard Billy Joel’s “Pressure” in a long time: it hit #20 in 1982, but it doesn’t seem to have entered Joel’s canon of hits. So thank you, Sirius-XM ’80s channel. I thoroughly enjoyed the song this time around, even the throbbing synth sound (which sounds more dated than Joel’s ’50s pastiches on An […]
posted 14 September 2009 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments
Five B-sides that got regular airplay in the ’80s on Z-100, then NYC’s leading top-40 station:
1. Prince, “Erotic City”
2. Bruce Springsteen, “Pink Cadillac”
3. Bruce Springsteen, “Jersey Girl”
4. U2, “Everlasting Love”
5. The Police, “Murder By Numbers”
posted 2 September 2009 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments
