Lovin’ Wreck: Blindfold Test #7

The most exciting part of these columns, immediately after I listen to all 25 songs (okay usually I’ll make it 26 just in case I mess up and one of my writeups is completely flat and incoherent), is going back and checking the app queue to find out what music I was just taking notes…

Bible of Being Average: Blindfold Test #3

Quite a relief to learn the person singing my favorite song below, which embarrassingly turns out to be not only by far the oldest (that’s not the embarrassing part) but the one with by far the most problematic lyrics (that is), is of not the ethnicity I feared but rather the ethnicity he refers to…

10 LPs I Liked in Early 1982

Given the date (“one third of 1982 gone” = at least May 1, and pretty sure I got my Army commission that May 15), quite likely my last contribution to University of Missouri weekly the maneater. And far from my worst, even if my thesis is full of baloney (10 British acts who put out…

The Offspring profile, 1995

I dunno, maybe I gave the subjects of my only Spin cover story ever short shrift in my top 150 albums of 1994/’95 list. The singles on Smash are swell. But beyond that, I just get irritated. Maybe I’ll be able to hear pop-punk again after another decade or two, when I’m in my 70s…

Bad Brains profile, 1987

Frank Kogan had a field day way back when with my delusion that anger is an emotion that needs to be “earned,” whatever that could conceivably mean. (I blame my guilt-ridden Catholic upbringing.) Also, had I been aware at the time, it would’ve made sense to inquire about Bad Brains’ now well-documented history of homophobia,…

Antiseen profile, 1989

Published in Jack Thompson’s fanzine; reads like something I could only have originally written for Creem‘s metal magazine. Since Creem never “killed” anything I wrote, my best guess is that it was left without a home when the magazine went bust. Last I heard of Jeff Clayton, he was covering “When Electricity Came To Arkansas”…