Double Agent Double-crossed: Blindfold Test #13

Recurring themes this time out: Catholicism, nonsense syllables, bands whose music here didn’t come out until decades after it was recorded (including a different Red Asphalt than the one in Test #2 though both were evidently named after a graphic scare-you-sober ’60s Drivers Ed film series produced by the California Highway Patrol), Central European art-rock…

Guilty of Noise Pollution: Blindfold Test #8

Did things a little bit differently this time — Instead of typing out notes while random-shuffling a 5000-song playlist at home, I handwrote out notes while listening to a 5000-song playlist in the car. (No I wasn’t driving at the time. I was waiting to pick my teenage daughter up from EMS Scouts.) In fact,…

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…

Early ’80s Mizzou, Part 2

Late last year, Randall Roberts assigned me a 2000-word piece for my alma mater University of Missouri-Columbia’s alumni magazine about Columbia’s music scene (clubs, record stores, bands, radio) in the early ’80s, when I was a student there as were Sheryl Crow and Brad Pitt. Eventually, after plenty of interviews and legwork, I convinced the…