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 […]

posted 28 September 2009 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet

Time to visit the Duke. MTV replays their promo for “Michael Jackson Sunday”; as you might expect, it plays very differently now than it did a few months ago. “He’s been bad,” says the MTV Voiceover Guy. (A clip from “Bad” plays.) “He’s been smooth.” (A “Smooth Criminal” clip.) “Now he takes his own image […]

posted 24 September 2009 in 1988. 4 comments

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

Another picture from my trip to Australia last month (taken while I was wandering around Melbourne, trying to shake off my jet lag so that I would be able to put together complete sentences when it was time to interview Pink):

posted 18 September 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

(The countdown’s back! If it’s new to you, you can catch up here.) We open on Prince in a powder-blue polka-dot shirt, lying on the ground. “Owwww!” he comments. The background has lots of floating and rotating letters of, well, the alphabet. The blue-screen effects probably were moderately expensive in 1988, but the overall look […]

posted 16 September 2009 in 1988. 7 comments

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

I had a really bad year after 9/11. Eventually I got my internal gyroscope back, but I never really felt the same way about downtown New York City ever again. Even today, eight years after the attack, it has industrial scars and missing buildings and missing people. Taking these flipwalk photos helped me feel like […]

posted 11 September 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

“Pink dangles in the air, upside down and 25 feet above solid ground.” That’s the opening line of my feature article on, yes, Pink, reported from Melbourne, Australia (where she is so much more popular than you would guess). I have no Pink link; the story can be found in the latest issue of Rolling […]

posted 10 September 2009 in Articles. no comments yet

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