Judging from the Live in Phoenix album, Fall Out Boy is the worst live band ever. Great albums… horrible live.

Bonus… also contains the worst cover of Beat It ever put to tape.

How did I miss this. Last week, Wilco released a double live album, Kicking Television. Read the Bitchfork review or pick it up at Amazon.

The top 5 songs to play on my iPod today:

1. Superchunk — The First Part
2. Tiger Trap — Hiding
3. Old 97s — Barrier Reef (Live)
4. The Jealous Sound — The Fold Out
5. Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince — Summertime

I don’t care what you say… I can’t stop listening to Ashlee Simpson’s Autobiography. Much like the Dukes of Hazzard movie, it knows exactly what it is, and doesn’t try to be anything else.

Whiskeytown might be reforming. So what? Whiskeytown was known as much for destroying stages as releasing albums, so why should rumors of a possible reunion register on the musical radar, especially in the wake of the reunions of so many other bands — Mission of Burma, Slint, Dinosaur, Jr.? Somewhere between Jeff Tweedy “inventing country rock” and Ryan Adams’ solo debut “Heartbreaker” sits Whiskeytown — Uncle Tupelo’s flash-in-the-pan snot-nosed little brother. It shouldn’t be that five years and three albums should mean so much to so many people.

But it does…

I don’t remember much of 1999. The previous year had ended very badly for me with the death of a friend. It was one more shock than I could take, so I guess my brain sort of shut off. At the time, I didn’t recognize the forgetfulness — I kept a job, paid rent, played in a band, and had a girlfriend — but it has only been in the subsuquent years, after reading birthday cards, letters, and old emails that I recognize just how much happened that year, and just how much of it I cannot remember. What follows is drawn from those emails and letters, and the reverberations of one amazing event.

One thing I do remember is the time I spent sitting behind a drum set in the back room of my house on Lorimer Road in Davidson, helping my friend Cameron finish his demo. He wanted to move to Austin, the country-rock capital of the universe, and get famous. I needed something to do.

The house on Lorimer Road was an old fraternity house with huge common areas, wrap-around floor-to-ceiling windows and a patio that comfortably sit 25. (If anyone reading this has pictures of the old place, I’d love to see them.) Built into the exterior wall of the kitchen was a huge commercial-sized exhaust fan, designed to suck the air from the room in the event of a grease fire, activated by a tiny switch right above the comically underpowered electric stove. Flipping the switch would cause the fan to roar to life, darken the rest of the house and raise the noise level in the house by several decibals. It sounded like a rocket launching into space and so we christened the house “The Lauchpad”.

In the fall of 1999, I was introduced to Cam over beers at the Davidson Depot through a friend who knew I played drums. I’d seen him around campus, and because Davidson was so small, we had some mutual friends, but we had never been introduced. Cam was looking for a drummer and place to practice, so we convinced a mutual friend Christian to play bass and moved all of the equipment into the back room of the house, set up shop and got ready to record Cam’s demo.

Cam wanted to call our little project AM, after the first Wilco album, and I wanted something a little longer, so chose AM-80. At the time, all of the bands on the radio had numbers in the band name; Seven Mary Three, Matchbox 20, Marvelous 3. We chose 80 because it looked really cool in a font that Cam had picked out (Lucida Typewriter).

I’d not played drums in years, so to shake off the rust and immerse myself properly in the genre, I sat down with Whiskeytown’s Faithless Street album and practiced until I could play the entire album front to back. For an encore, I moved on to Stranger’s Almanac, Son Volt’s Trace, Uncle Tupelo, Old 97’s, The Backsliders, and Six String Drag. By that time, we had worked out the different song parts for the demo, and got ready to set aside some time to record.

And so it went. The week before New Year’s Eve 1999, Cam told me that he’d read in the newspaper that Whiskeytown was playing the the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, ringing in the New Year by playing their two albums, Stranger’s Almanac before the New Year and Faithless Street right after. Yes, we went.

I don’t remember most of the first set, but towards the end, right before midnight, Ryan Adams introduced the last song of the set, then got ready for the toast. We all drank the drink — Cam and I both kissed the girl standing in front of us — and as Whiskeytown broke into the first track from Stranger’s Almanac the flood gates opened in my head and the entire year’s worth of memories, everything I experienced but not remembered during 1999, rushed into my head. My knees buckled under force of it all and I sat on the floor of the Cat’s Cradle, breathing deeply, ringing in the New Year, listening to Whiskeytown.

In the years since, most of those bands I listened to have disbanded and Ryan Adams went from alt-country poster boy to loud-mouthed debutante.

For my part I’ve tracked down a bootleg of that New Years Eve show so I can remember what I’ve forgotten and made peace with the year I lost.

It looks like Whiskeytown might be re-forming for an album and a tour. Please let it be true.

http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2005-06-15/porch.html

The best thing — the absolutely best thing — about Real Rhapsody, iTunes, or anything that allows you to create a massive playlist, is the Sprite of Serendipity. I just heard R.E.M.’s “Good Advices” for the first time in probably 10 years. Thanks, Real!

Hey Mercedes - Stay Six

In the summer of 2000, I pulled up stakes and moved from North Carolina to the District to work at Away.com. I’m a bit of a nester, so it was a big deal for me. Working at a start-up was tough, with long hours and huge expectations. I was fortunate enough to work with a great group of people who made the transition easier; chief among them was Patrick, a music hound music hound like me. In the winter of 2000, Pat lent me the first Hey Mercedes EP, and I was immediately hooked, especially the song “Stay Six”. That EP stayed glued in my stereo throughout the winter and into the spring; I must have listened to those four songs 50 times a day.

For me, Stay Six is about that time — my first cold winter, living in a one bedroom apartment with my then girlfriend, trying to adjust to adulthood and life in the city. Like the song says, “Somehow I made it through”.

Stay six, dear.

Since last we spoke I’ve done Thanksgiving in San Francisco with the family — where I saw one of the world famous Suicide Girls (link not safe for work) on the Haight-Ashbury crosstown bus, Christmas dinner with a crew of Real Live English-persons — British accents and all, and traveled to Argentina — and back.

For those of you who hate Snapfish and are still waiting to see the Argentina pictures, don’t worry… I’m building a photogallery here on the site and should have those pics up Real Soon Now.

I’ve also been locked in a life-and-death struggle with my ISP and Network Solutions, trying to regain full control over this domain name. This particular struggle basically involves me faxing polite missives on official-looking letterhead to my ISP, complete with photocopies of my driver’s license. It also involves rather less polite conversations with several of the least competent customer service drones at my ISP; I’ve spent alot of time lately trying to explain DNS and the difference between Admin contacts and Technical contacts to those fuckers. It’s like they draw straws for brains over there.

There is a moral here for those of you who own your own domains; keep your WHOIS record up-to-date. It’s a real bitch to change it otherwise; I’ve entered new realms of pain.

The last week has been a real blast. Holly and I took in a Hey Mercedes show at the old Black Cat on Thursday; on Friday, Kym and I took a stroll over to the petroglyph at Great Falls, followed that up with a seminar on Basic Guaranteed Income with ex-Governor of Alaska Jay Hammond, and closed out the weekend with a rock show on Sunday night with Mike and Ontwo.

Mike invited Kym and me to see the Mates of State on Sunday. They were awesome, a band I wish I had discovered months ago. The opening band was a guy-girl combo called The Hawney Troof, specializing in spaced-out trash-rock. . . just a guy, a girl, and a Casio. Dressed in matching blue t-shirts and leopard print women’s underwear, these two led the audience through a series of calls and responses - not songs or chants even — inqurying at length about our sexual preferences, including choice of partner, style, preferred actions and duration of events. Apparently, these two like to fuck. They were swinging from the rafters and yelling at the top of their lung, just begging for a little bit of energy back. Of course, DC being DC, the crowd stood there — mute — with their arms folded across their chests.

Me. . . I screamed and yelled for all I was worth. These are my factory settings, please don’t try to alter them.

You’ve got to hand it to Metallica. In twenty-plus years together they’ve endured the death of one bassist, the departure of another, a few near-breakups, alcoholism, drug addiction, and at least two cycles of “the death of rock and roll” — the New Kids on the Block era and the N’Sync era.

Add to that list of woes their creative collapse of the late 1990s — which produced a series of unlistenable albums; Loaded, Reloaded and S&M, an ill-conceived and poorly executed collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (WTF?) — the Napster battles of 2000, and perhaps most frequently, the misfortune of sharing the stage with a series of inexperienced, overhyped and under-talented bands, whose antics always seem to wreck the tour.

(The classic example of this occurred during the Toronto date of the Metallica/Guns N’Roses/Faith No More tour of 1994, when guitarist and lead singer James Hetfeld miscalculated the pyrotechnics, stepped into a ten-foot tall jet of flame, and had to be rushed to the ER, where he was hospitalized with second and third degree burns.

Meanwhile, Guns N’ Roses front man Axl Rose antagonized the already rowdy and impatient crowd before — complaining of terrible sound — storming off of the stage twenty minutes into their two-hour set. Downtown Toronto was set ablaze during the ensuing riot, and both Metallica and Guns N’ Roses were banned from Toronto.)

Hetfeld and Company fell victim to the tourmate curse again in Chicago on Sunday, when opener Limp Bizkit’s front man Fred Durst threw a temper tantrum and fled the stage twenty minutes into their hour-long set, which included “a sarcastic, gay-bashing cover of George Michael’s “Faith” with potty-mouth lyrics that would embarrass a fourth-grader“.

I’m not at all surprised that Fred Durst acted like an idiot, as he is mostly brain-dead on even his best days, but he should take a few minutes out of his busy schedule of stuff-breaking and nookie-getting to realize that no one cares any longer about his career or band. No one cares that he may or may not have slept with Christina Aguilera (and judging from her recent press photos, I may be the only man in America who hasn’t slept with her), no one cares about his psedo-rap posturing and no one cares about his new album.

What also fails to surprise me, and indeed should fail to surprise anyone familiar with the band, is that Fred’s first response to heckling was to launch into a obscenity-strewn tantrum complete with homophobic slurs.While he is hardly the first testosterone-addled ex-jock who could use a lesson in Michael Stipean sensitivity, he is the poster-boy for that musical abomination known as rap-rock and for that reason alone — and it pains me to say this — his actions matter.

It is unfortunate that a man so racially inclusive — his collaborations with the Wu Tang Clan’s Method Man almost make me believe that he has heard positive-punk pioneers 7 Seconds’ Walk Together, Rock Together — seems to have never heard that other 7 Seconds ode to equality, the anti-homophobic Regress, No Way. Fred Durst displays a finely-tuned meter of prejudice, acutely aware of the fact that while racial minorities are off limits (can you imagine the uproar if he’d screamed “fucking niggers” instead of “fucking faggots”) sexual minorities are still fair game. Even worse, I’m sure he’ll suffer no repercussions. Limp Bizkit fans — the few that remain — will point to this episode as proof-positive that Fred is “hardcore” (since when is throwing a tantrum hardcore?) and this will only enforce his bad-boy image.

I can only hope that his tantrum in Chicago was just that, a temper tantrum and the desperate act of a man who sees his star fading, who means to revive it by any means necessary. Maybe, with a little luck, by the time Metallica releases their next album, we will be able to find Limp Bizkit albums in their rightful place — the cutout bin, filed next Milli Vanilli.