Quick entry today.  This J. Geils Band tune pretty much hits it right on the head, so I'll let it speak for itself.

Watch the video for "Love Stinks" on YouTube.

This is part of a week-long series on "love" songs.

I've posted a track from TPOH's 1988 release Love Junk before.  There, I give my whole spiel about how unlike most bands that get tagged with the "indie" label, this one doesn't bore the crap out of me.

This record just has such a great sound.  The fact that Todd Rundgren produced it may have something to do with that, but it just, well, rocks.  Way too many "indie" bands don't rock.  They plod.  Or trudge.  Stagger, maybe?  Perhaps they mosey, or just casually stroll.  But they do not rock.  TPOH does.

Hear "Killed By Love" on YouTube.

This is part of a week-long series on "love" songs.

You remember Tomster Music, right?  The guy that does all those YouTube parody songs I keep posting?  Yeah.  Tom showed up here late last night.  Perhaps after an evening of intense partying with YouTube groupies?

In any case, it was way cool of him to stop by.  As Internet-active as he is, I'd always held out some hope of him finding this thing and making an appearance.  Voila!  Keep up the awesome tunage, Tom.  You're the beez kneez.

For some ungodly reason, when they got around to shooting a video for this kickin' track from the 2001 Cake album Comfort Eagle, they decided to stage a cooking contest between the band's drummer and trumpet player.  Judged by the likes of Rick James and Phyllis Diller.

Part of me said "W. T. F."  Another part said "cool."  Yeah, it is pretty cool when bands make a video by eschewing the obvious and pulling something out of both the blue and the ordinary.

Watch the video for "Love You Madly" on YouTube.  It's from Sony/BMG, which is, of course, another way of saying "compressed to hell."

Hear it with a bit better audio quality.

This is part of a week-long series on "love" songs.

Have I mentioned how awesome Queen was?  Oh, duh.  Of course I have.  Several times.  So here's a "love" song from the superwonderful Day at the Races.  If the world made sense, everyone would have this album and love it.  No one would be insane enough to think it's anything less than terrific.

I will also mention that I think George Michael did a great job with this song at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert.  It was a really good fit for him, unlike Axl Rose doing "Bohemian Rhapsody." (shudder)

Watch the video for "Somebody to Love" on YouTube.  Seventeen thousand-plus comments?  Jeepers.

Wikipedia article

This is part of a week-long series on "love" songs.

Still playing the hell out of the Mentors album You Axed For It.  I have to hear "Sandwich of Love" and "Four F Club" almost daily.  Great way to start the day when you're half awake (and can look past the misogynistic lyrics) - play some epic sounding 80s metal that wasn't performed by complete tarts.

Hear "Sandwich of Love" on YouTube.

This is part of a week-long series on "love" songs.

I just posted a week of sex songs.  Here is a week's worth of "love" songs.  These will probably not be "love songs", per se, so Lionel Richie fans need not apply.  The titles will simply contain the word "love."  Songs like that aren't exactly hard to come by, so I should have plenty to choose from.

John Lennon said "all you need is love."  I think it was Michael Jackson that said "all you need is glove."  Ozzy Osbourne might have opined "all you need is dove."  I'll let you finish that list.

This is for Lewis, the guy who directs the Scrabble club I attend every Thursday.  He's an expert level player who goes up against the best of the best in every tournament he enters.  Edley, Cappelletto, Wiegand, GI Joel, Matt Graham, you can rattle off all of the elite players in the country and he's played nearly all of them.  He doesn't always beat them, of course, but it's simply the fact that he takes them on at all.  I will most likely never be good enough to play guys like that, so the games I have against him at the club are probably the only time I will ever play someone of that caliber.  Obviously, he wipes me out way more often than not, but I do have eight wins against him.  Yes, I'm counting.  It's a pretty big deal when I beat him, as I did last night after I dropped a 122-point triple-triple (hitting two Triple Word Scores on one play) with the word RESIDERS.  I was also lucky enough to have him not win the game by bingoing out with OVARIAL.  (whew!)

Lewis is also an attorney who works for the state of California.  He's had to concern himself with potential furloughs and/or IOU's in recent months because the state is so damned dysfunctional right now.  I reckon it's gotta be pretty hard on the guy.  Maybe that had something to do with him missing OVARIAL. In any event, here's a tongue-in-cheek Mojo Nixon entry called "Destroy All Lawyers."

Oh, just so you know, OVARIAL has an anagram - VARIOLA.

Watch a badly compressed version of the video for "Destroy All Lawyers" on YouTube.

Watch a fanvid with better audio quality.

Slash (the guitar guy with the snakes) turns 44 today.  Seems like a good time to post a track from an album that I surprisingly had never pulled anything from.

In a previous entry, I talked about a guy named Adrian, whom I met in 1987 during the one year I spent in a college dorm.  He was a HUGE metalhead and I was totally anti-metal when I first knew him.  After being force-fed a steady diet of hair bands, I wanted nothing to do with it.  But it was through him that I discovered, hey, being a metal group does not automatically imply suckitude.  He first turned me on to the likes of Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax.  Wow, this speed stuff is pretty cool.  It's exciting and it's genuine.  I am still a casual speed metal fan, and it's solely because of him.

One evening, when I probably should have been studying but instead chose to hang out in his room, he unveils a vinyl record called Appetite for Destruction, by a band I had never heard of called Guns 'N Roses.  Remember, this was around September of 1987.  Practically NO ONE had ever heard of them at that point, and that album had only been out for about a month and a half, tops.  He puts it on, and it's like, hey, these guys sound, well, different.  No hair band ever sounded like this.  Priest and Maiden don't sound like this.  Holy cow, these guys groove.  They shake.  They rattle.  They roll.  They have a raw, relatively unprocessed, almost punkish quality.  "Paradise City" rocks.  That "Welcome to the Jungle" track is way cool.  I was officially paying attention.

About a year later, I had moved out of the dorm but still kept in contact with Adrian, and he told me he had seen GNR play a show at a tiny downtown dive called the Old Town Saloon.  He said the place was packed.  The band hadn't really hit it big yet, but they were definitely generating something resembling a buzz.  Then about two months after that (hell, it probably wasn't even that long), "Sweet Child O' Mine" started getting regular airplay on MTV.  Almost immediately, Guns 'N Roses was arguably the biggest rock band in the world.

I picked up the CD eventually.  It became a favorite for bass guitar play-along sessions.  I soured on tunes like "Paradise City", due to intense overexposure.  Their succeeding releases, like the Use Your Illusions, did nothing for me.  But I still dig some of Appetite's filler tracks, "My Michelle" most notably.  So here it is.

Adrian, by the way, was a great artist, and went on to work in the entertainment field.  He's in the IMDB and everything.  I know too many people who are in the IMDB.  I wanna be in the IMDB.  I have no clue as to how that would ever happen, but oh well.

Hear "My Michelle" on YouTube.

Wikipedia entry

OK, I'm gonna discuss the old Marquee channel one last time.  Today's entry wasn't shown as a standalone video, but it was featured in a movie I saw on it.  As I've mentioned before, this cable service would air about two or three films repeatedly throughout any given day, and it's not like they were top flight blockbusters.  Usually they were 70s B-flicks no one had ever heard of.

As you can imagine, many of them were made by the ever budget-challenged Roger Corman.  That's how I first discovered Rock and Roll High School, a wonderful flick that I still love.  But more often than not, the movies exhibited a cornucopia of bad acting, cheap gags, bare breasts and fake blood, often at the same time.  Of course, with me being a prepubescent boy at the time, the bare breasts were mandatory.  Ah, what a great time it was to be a preteen male.  Nowadays you would just go directly to hardcore pornography and bypass the whole adult entertainment evolution process entirely.  It's tragic, really.  Today's 11-year-old boys are truly missing something.

Anyway, one of the Corman "classics" I watched on several occasions was a 1976 piece of celluloid called Hollywood Boulevard, and it contains a lip-sync performance of a ditty called "Everybody's Doin' It" by the immortal Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen.  I fell in love with this song instantly.  I swear, you will rarely if ever hear the F-word thrown around in a song so casually, as if it's like any other word.  It just bounces right along, so happily, with some nifty saxophone, piano, guitar and pedal steel soloing.  Great, great stuff, even if the film it's used in isn't quite so great.

Man, I'm gonna have this song running through my head for days now.  Hopefully the co-worker annoyance factor will remain at a minimum.

Watch the Hollywood Boulevard film segment featuring "Everybody's Doin' It" on YouTube.