East India Trading Company ShrubTwo recent movies are blatantly allegorical, but most reviewers blinked. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN opens by hanging a ten-year-old boy in a cruel Gitmo scenario that poses a radical question: with brutes like Cheney in charge, wouldn't you want to sing the other guy's … [Read more...]

The Best of the Bad Cops Keeps Walking a Hard Line (NYTimes) By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN Published: June 6, 2007 [In lieu of writing my own big essay on the Shield's finale, I'm going at it through Heffernan's uneven piece...] ...In its six seasons, "The Shield" has won Emmys and Golden Globes but never … [Read more...]

"It was forty years ago today: the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "It's certainly a thrill," the Beatles sang; but listening today, much of the thrill is gone--except for one song. Still, it's easy to remember that day--June 1, 1967--when the first thing we saw was the cover: a … [Read more...]

(from Tony Eastley's show, May 28): MICHAEL ROWLAND: Sgt. Pepper was the Beatles as their fans had never seen or heard them before. They'd ditched their grey suits and ties in favour of technicolour military style uniforms, and the catchy two minute pop tunes had given way to musical experimentation … [Read more...]

...Still, the Spider-Man film franchise is so strange that it's not unpleasant to watch it earn money even while idling. Like the new movie itself, we have our memories, and Tobey Maguire is still with us as Peter Parker, the goofiness wearing a little thin, but the earnestness holding up (in … [Read more...]

A Sgt Pepper chat with Tim Page and Anthony DeCurtis from today's On Point, repeats tonight. (iTunes) BOUNCEBACK Drew got part of the point of my Monday post... let's see who can take the baton from him. … [Read more...]

Finally, a blues guitarist with the soul of a trombonist. Putting a junkheap like "Peculiar Hop" as the lead track takes a seriously loose screw, covering Dylan without the lyrics ups the ante ("Rainy Day #12 & 35"), but it's the rare guitar hero who literalizes the mood of the country ("Dig Myself … [Read more...]

American Journeys | Concord, Mass. A Town That Has a Way With Words by Glenn Rifkin, May 20, 2007 (New York Times Travel Section) In the 19th century, Concord, Mass., was a peaceful country village and home to best-selling writers. In the 21st, Concord is a bustling, upscale Boston suburb and still … [Read more...]

From Chris Salewicz's new biography of Joe Strummer Redemption Song (Faber and Faber): In his June 1979 NME interview with Charles Shaar Murray [Strummer] had declared, "There's ten thousand days of oil left. It's finite." Joe Strummer had been inspired to write the song riding back with Gaby Salter … [Read more...]

Amazon.com to Launch DRM-Free MP3 Music Download Store with Songs and Albums from EMI Music and More Than 12,000 Other Labels SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 16, 2007--Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced it will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the … [Read more...]

An Open Letter to Sir Paul McCartney: Save Abbey Road (Huffington Post) In 1897, a German-American inventor named Emile Berliner, inventor of the gramophone method of recording, founded the Gramophone Company in London. Five years later, Enrico Caruso recorded 10 songs for Berliner, transforming his … [Read more...]

CATEGORY: CAR AD SOUNDTRACK WITH "CELEBRITY" Elvis Costello playing air guitar to Beethoven's Ninth in his Lexus ad beats out his wife Diana Krall raving on about Oscar Peterson in hers. (Who hogs the remote in that ride?) But would anybody buy a car from Elvis? Seems telling that neither of these … [Read more...]

STEALTH COVERS Blender's new list starts off with "Jersey Girl," popularized by Bruce Springsteen, originally performed by Tom Waits, as obvious as it is predictable. The lead track on this list is still "Tainted Love," which everybody STILL thinks it's fey 80s Britpop. We learned more from the … [Read more...]

EMI's bumpy history approaches yet another tipping point: after five years of rejecting suitors, getting hit on by Warners, flirting with Warners, urging a merger with Warners, watching Sony bed down with BMG and Jeff Jones assume Neil Aspinall's Apple mysteriously vacated throne, the first major to … [Read more...]

ABBEY ROAD REUNION: KNOB-TWIDDLERS REVEAL ALL IN NEW BOOK by Tim Riley, NPR critic and Beatle author https://soundcloud.com/triley60/abbey-road-reunion In November of 2006, over 30 engineers gathered for a reunion at Abbey Road studios in London, where many of them worked uncredited on … [Read more...]