You're browing the archives for the month of May 2008
And we go to a commercial break! First, there’s an MTV promo touting their dedication to new music. “Every major band was a new name at one time,” says a bass voice (moderately portentous, but without enough presence to get movie-trailer work). Then they flash the names of these brand-new bands that they’re backing with […]
posted 15 May 2008 in 1988. 2 comments
YouTube being what it is, I don’t expect these clips to stay up indefinitely, but I’ll post links to the videos I write about in the 1988 countdown when they’re available. (I tried embedding them, with nasty results–when I’m feeling more industrious, I might try downloading the plugin that allegedly solves the problem. For now, […]
posted 14 May 2008 in 1988, Links. no comments yet
My favorite unpublished piece ever might be this profile I wrote of the late, lamented Darkness. It got spiked for wholly unremarkable reasons: two issues in a row it got bumped because pages were tight in the magazine, then One Way Ticket to Hell… and Back (the band’s second album) came out and did a […]
posted 14 May 2008 in Archives, Articles, Unpublished. no comments yet
The lower reaches of this countdown seem to be filled with tracks that weren’t actually hits, but were presumably beloved of somebody in the MTV programming department. (Or maybe some favors were owed to record companies.) Take, for example, the non-hit “Better Be Home Soon,” from Crowded House’s second album Temple of Low Men. My […]
Last month, The New Yorker published a fine profile of George Clooney by Ian Parker, which quoted from my 2005 Rolling Stone conversation with Clooney on the subject of suicide bombers and the afterlife: “But really, who wants seventy virgins? I want eight pros.” So I’ve put my interview with Clooney up in the archives. […]
posted 12 May 2008 in Archives, Articles. 5 comments
With the encouragement of the mighty Bill Tipper, I’ve been doing some book reviews for the Barnes & Noble Review (which hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, but is worth your time–there’s some real good stuff in there). Last year I reviewed Clapton: The Autobiography (who knew he had slept with Yvonne Elliman?); last week […]
posted 9 May 2008 in Outside, Reviews. no comments yet
The first time I ever saw this video was in my college’s basement TV room, where I watched MTV and not much else (The Simpsons, Twin Peaks, and election results rounded it out, I think). The camera swooped dramatically over a black-and-white lunar landscape as a dirty guitar riff came out of the speakers. Then […]
Contrary to the musical wisdom of Albert Hammond Sr., sometimes it does rain in Southern California. This past January, Los Angeles had rainstorms of Biblical proportions. A few weeks later, we discovered that a whole bunch of stuff we were keeping in cardboard boxes in the garage had gotten drenched, and were now covered in […]
A few months ago, I went to New York City and South Carolina to write a profile of teenage country superstar Taylor Swift for Rolling Stone. (Between New York and South Carolina: a private jet flight. Between Greenville and Spartanburg in South Carolina: not much except a BMW plant.) The piece got dropped from the […]
