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The Old Pollution

As you may have heard, Beck’s new album, Modern Guilt, comes out next week. (A couple of months ago, I interviewed Beck and wrote a short preview of the album. Beck’s changed some of the song titles since then; after some back and forth, “Beggar’s Shoes” became “Gamma Ray.”) I thought this would be a […]

posted 2 July 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

It’s a law of rock that a supergroup will split up superacrimoniously, and you’ve probably heard that’s what happened this year with Velvet Revolver: Scott Weiland ditched the band to return to Stone Temple Pilots, leaving the rest of the group to look for a lead singer again (and bat away rumors that they’d reunite […]

posted 25 June 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

Darwin’s Cousin

About ten years ago, Wired had a regular feature where they did “interviews” with dead people. They kicked it off with a cover story on Marshall McLuhan; it turned out that skillful excerpts from the works of sufficiently interesting thinkers of the past could create the illusion of a modern conversation. I stumbled on a […]

posted 16 June 2008 in Archives, Articles, Unpublished. no comments yet

Whither the Funky Bunch?

I’ve interviewed Mark Wahlberg three times over the past two decades, during which time he turned into an movie star and improbably complex screen presence. (He’s playing the lead in this week’s new M. Night Shyamalan joint, The Happening.) The first interview was back in 1991, when he was still the frequently-shirtless rapper known as […]

posted 11 June 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

Yesss!

Marv Albert’s my favorite sportcaster of all time. I’ve spent more hours than I can calculate listening to him. I’ve kept watching bad basketball games just because he was the guy calling them. The best description of his style: “Albert broadcasts like a man who has bet every penny he has on the game, and […]

posted 9 June 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

Veritas

I almost wrote a college recommendation for Rivers Cuomo. Between Weezer and Pinkerton, he had decided to go back to college, and so he left me a voicemail asking if I would write him a recommendation for his Harvard application. We weren’t able to connect on the phone for a few hours, and by the […]

posted 4 June 2008 in Archives, Articles, Links. no comments yet

Ears Deluxe

Deluxe magazine was a very fine but short-lived men’s magazine in the UK, circa 1998. I knew its editor, Andrew Harrison, because he had been my successor as music editor at Details. (He provided many amusing moments in the office, including his British bafflement at the Offspring: “What is this ‘self-esteem’? I’ve never heard of […]

posted 28 May 2008 in Archives, Articles. 1 comment

Jetlag Special #2

As promised a couple of weeks ago, I’ve added my 1996 profile of Oasis to the archives. I did most of the interviews for the article in London (I met up with the band again a few weeks later in Boston). I went to the UK on a redeye flight; because I was young and […]

posted 21 May 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

They Just Turn Their Heads

As you may have heard, this is Robert Downey Jr.’s summer. He’s currently ruling the box office in the hugely entertaining Iron Man, and he’s even better in the upcoming Tropic Thunder (written and directed by Ben Stiller), in which he plays an over-the-top Australian actor who dyes his skin black for a role in […]

posted 19 May 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

Darkness Falls

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