"To me, that's treason. I call it treason against rock-and-roll, because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics."

"When I read the list of people who are supporting Kerry, if I wasn't already a Bush supporter, I would have immediately switched. Linda Ronstadt? Don Henley? Geez, that's a good reason right there to vote for Bush."

i got to get back to work. i am researching the late,
great walt kelly, creator of pogo. he is next on my list.
i forgot to mention that a sparrow shat on my head
in ventura. i have been well assured this is very good
luck. so i share my good luck to all. now i must mosey
on. i got to get my clothes out of the sink and hang
them in the sun.

HELMET have moved back the release of their latest album, Size Matters to October 5th because of singer PAGE HAMILTON's collar bone injury. The band also had to rearrange its fall tour . . .

Twilight Singers She Loves You (One Little Indian)

Greg Dulli takes pride that the Shortstop, the bar in Los Angeles he co-owns with friends, has the city's best jukebox. This covers CD shows why. Dulli and mates, including Mark Lanegan on several songs, offer their interpretations of artists from Bjork and Fleetwood Mac to Marvin Gaye and Nina Simone. The album opens with a surprisingly tender version of "Feeling of Gaze," a song from Hope Sandoval's unheralded Bavarian Fruit Bread album of 2001. Dulli regains the swagger fans have come to expect of him on a street-fighting rendition of Martina Topley-Bird's "Too Tough to Die." Though Dulli shows real love for the originals, the band also turns the songs inside out, twisting Bjork's "Hyperballad" into an intoxicating pop/rock anthem and infusing Mary J. Blige's "Real Love" with a Seventies rock strut. It all comes together on Simone's "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair," which is transformed into a sweaty howling wail of desperation, love and horniness. (STEVE BALTIN)

Disney is preparing a sequel to "Pirates of the Caribbean," with Keith Richards possibly playing the father of swashbuckler Johnny Depp.

"Lean Back" comes from a rap group named Terror Squad, which probably should have thought about a new name after September 11. (Just ask the band formerly known as Burning Airplanes.)

As if there wasn't enough Pixies attention these days, Spin magazine has a cover story with the band, featuring the largest article the magazine has ever written: 16 pages! The article features appearances by band members, Evan Dando, J Mascis, Kristin Hersh, Vaughan Oliver, and a cast of thousands! Check out the Sepetmber issue, in stores very soon.

As Cheney has no soul, he cannot hear music. Lately he's been taking the stage to the sound your TV makes during a test of the Emergency Alert System.

Yo La Tengo perform tonight on the John McEnroe Show on CNBC.
Not only are they the "house band' for the entire program, but McEnroe himself joins them for a cover of "Beat On The Brat."
Tune in at 10 PM to see the show.

"A backstage pass to the wildest and woolliest ride in the history of the music...Brilliantly captures the extraordinary Joplin character in all her self- effacing glory and is the only piece of film footage like that ever to have surfaced!"
— Joel Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle

In 1970, a train journeyed across Canada carrying some of the greatest rock bands of the time. Janis Joplin, The Band, The Grateful Dead, Delaney & Bonnie, Buddy Guy, Ian & Sylvia and others lived (and partied) together for five days, giving concerts where and when they stopped. The train was called the Festival Express. Festival Express might just have been the greatest, and certainly the longest, non-stop rock n' roll party ever. Nicknamed "The Million Dollar Bash" by Rolling Stone magazine, Festival Express was designed to capitalize on the then-burgeoning craze for multi-day, talent-heavy music festivals.

• "Too Tough To Die" is available for download on iTunes.


• "Feeling of Gaze," "Real Love," and "Hard Time Killing Floor" are up on www.dullicious.com (under "News & Updates").


• Album should be out on August 24, and here's the cover art.

Kerry's bipartisan band
Sen. John Kerry mentioned at the Democratic Convention that his prep school garage band, The Electras, may be getting back together. But already there's partisan squabbling.

Jack Radcliffe, Larry Rand, John Prouty, Peter Lang and Andy Gagarin, who all attended St. Paul's with Kerry, recently got together in Hartford, Conn., to talk about re-releasing the Electras album.

At first, everybody got along fine. But Rand says "the reunion disintegrated" when the band couldn't agree on whether to go with an established label or distribute it themselves. They also couldn't agree on how to spend the potential profits.

Democratic Electras "wanted to send the profits" to the Kerry camp, Rand tells the New Bedford Standard-Times. But Republicans Radcliffe and Gagarin would hear none of it.

"If the proceeds from my songs go to the Democratic National Convention, I'll be worked up," said Radcliffe.

The band's two factions have decided to re-release two separate albums.

You can buy the Kerry-friendly version at http://www.elextrasrockandrollband.com/.

The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir is pleading with Deadheads everywhere not to vote for Ralph Nader. Performing on Saturday in Boston, Weir told the band's followers to be sure to vote, but the exorted, "Don't vote for Nader. I know him. He's an a--hole," our spies tell us. The band then broke into "Johnny B. Goode," a theme song of the Kerry-Edwards campaign ...

The Boston skyline is pocked. Sensitive eyes see it—every poetic death in this city is charted and marked. You can see the deaths like you can sort of see the Milky Way, it's just like the imprint scientists look for to identify a blackhole: debris surrounding invisible sinkholes where big souls collapsed. No afterlife for those unlucky bastards—just limbo or nihil.

Forgive me for getting carried away, but that graveyard tang is what makes Boston rockers rock more profoundly than the rockers of other cities. The great Beantown songwriters are spirit mediums for the annihilated. Every golden Boston anthem is two-parts rock, one-part funeral dirge. And each has adifferent spin of the city's melancholy.

Which brings me to my redress of the Pixie's BAM Thwok review I had posted a couple of weeks ago on this blog...

I was at a wedding at the Hyatt Harborside near the airport last night, probably the best view of the Boston skyline on the harbor. One-hundred-eighty degrees of my view, at all times, was dominated by that stone obituary. If I wasn't working, I would have been drinking.

So driving home, I've got the radio on. Not FNX, something else, and I recognize the so-called iPOD exclusive. Kim Deal cutting through the frequencies, Frank Black's dry commentary. And it's like I'm hearing all those black holes reopening as I pass along route 1A into Lynn. Just like Stephen Hawking recently said in a classic flip flop of the intellect: black holes donot destroy information, they transmute it into something unrecognizeable,something weird, let out in spurts over eternity.

Something like the goddamn bridge of this song.

I've spent a lot of time in basements—the cellar was the Fortress of Solitude for my devastating preadolescence. And in those basements, I've listened to a lot of Pixies. And for a moment, listening to BAM Thwok, downtown Lynn felt like a cellar lit with a black light and comic books spread all over the place. So much energy it hurt.

So color me a thinking democrat, I withdraw my flaccid critque of BAM Thwok, and can only say that Kim Deal has made Jim Henson, making muppets in Heaven, an even happier man.