Minneapolis / St. Paul Music Blog

Their only eventual claim on the mainstream imagination was becoming the theme song to Jackass (with "Corona," a song about poverty), and serving as a soundtrack to a car commercial ("Love Dance," though I forget which car). But even if the greatest-ever American punk band deserves better than the new documentary opening Friday for a week at the Bell (where's the industrial landscape of San Pedro? Or the music videos? Or the stuff from IRS's The Cutting Edge? Or the bulk of their studio recordings?), I won't quibble with Spin editor Jon Dolan's eloquent rave in City Pages: "Equal parts civics lesson and group-therapy purge, a flashback to the hardly Edenic indie '80s, and an 'R.I.P.' written in sweat, We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen sends up a solemnly sweet glory-be for the corndog superheroes of American punk-rock humanism." Plus the rare live footage goes a long way.

News of a Sept. 10 benefit for New Orleans relief at the Cabooze plus more links at Complicated Fun. And read Steve Perry's straight-talking commentary and links at Blotter today. Me, I just can't accept that the cradle of jazz has met a watery grave. I won't accept it.

"Soon as I regroup with my band, we'll put everything on the table and decide where we'll go from here." Check out the interview and more New Orleans news links at Complicated Fun.

I don't get a lot of fan letters, outside the ones I compose and send from a fictional address, but we at the paper do sometimes get letters from folks presumably looking for help getting in touch with their favorite performers, such as Dom DeLuise and 50 Cent. Not so often Dom DeLuise. Here's a note that came today from a young 50 fan:

HELLO MY NAME IS [WITHHELD] AN I LOVE EVEYTHING ABOUT 50CENT, I LOVE HIM WITH ALL OF MY HEART, HE MEENS THE WORLD TO ME,I WISH I CAN MEET HIM. I WENT TO HIS CONCERT IN BUFFALO AT DARIEN LAKE ON AUG. 11 BUT I DIDNT GET TO MET HIM. I LOVE ALL OF G-UNIT, WHEN I SEEN THERE BUS WHEN WE WERE DRIVING TO THE CONCERT I COULDNT EVEN BREATH, I WAS CRYING TO HARD. I JUST WISJ I CAN MET HIM OR AT LESS WRITE TO HIM. MY YOUNGER SISTER IS IN LOVE WITH LLOYD BAN$, (CANT FORGET ABOUT BANK$ DOLLAR SIGN)I JUST WISH MY SISTERS AND I CAN MET ALL OF THEM.

Martin Scorsese's Bob Dylan doc is coming soon to PBS. Here's some info on the film and a summary of other Dylan product being released in conjunction or in response to the film.

Artist Skip Williamson, one of the beloved granddaddies of the nihilistic underground comics movement, finally has his own website. Trippier than a sheet of windowpane acid, and often more political than compatriots like R. Crumb, Williamson also invented the "Playboy Funnies" section of America's favorite lad mag. Check out his candy-colored paintings and culture-vulture collages here.

We're not one to toot our own horn (or in this case, jump the couch) over such little pleasures as "jumping the couch" appearing in Maureen Dowd's Sunday NYT column. But long before Dowd declared it part of the pop-culture lexicon, and before the phrase appeared on urbandictionary.com, CTG first claimed that "jumping the couch" had replaced the tired Fonzie-inspired expression "jumping the shark."

Sure, the phrase is about as clever as the term "technosexual," a play on 2003's ubiquitous "metrosexual." (And in that vain, we'd like to introduce the term "netrosexual," defined as someone who is obsessed with the internet and uses it to search for such ludicrous things as the etymology of ephemeral phrases.) But we have to admit, imagining George W. Bush vaulting over the couch of insanity, as Dowd outlined in her piece, is way funnier than Tom Cruise's actual psycho sofa swing. So though we declared "jumping the couch" dead on July 6, we'd like to resuscitate it, just for a moment, to honor the poor leather Rent-A-Center-like sofa sleepers that have no doubt gone through the ringer at Bush's Texas ranch.

"If more drummers played like Kevin," Doug Little said from the Artists' Quarter stage during his quartet's CD-release party, "jazz would be a lot different in a better way." Seconded. During the group's first set this past Saturday, a living-in-the-moment Kevin Washington spurred his compatriots through galloping swing, hiccupping New Orleans funk, bossa nova ballads, tango meditations, what have you. The drummer's grooves were tight, his fills and accents surprising, his solos loud and crowd-pleasing but not bombastic. Not long after Little's stage compliment, when the band played the title track from the alto saxophonist's new CD The Phoenix, Washington responded with precisely the sort of pugilistic solo that striking NWA mechanics would want to hear right about now. Pianist Mary Louise Knutson's soulful chords and melodic blues playing suited the leader's sometimes Cannonball Adderly-esque compositions, and bassist Jeff Bailey was creative and responsive. Little, formerly with the Motion Poets, writes tuneful, harmonically fertile compositions that give musicians enough to sink into and listeners enough to grab hold of. He isn't, alas, always above sentimentality. One of the set's ballads, "Reminiscence," verged on the lugubrious. But his playing is sensitive, his tone dusky. All around, very good straight-ahead jazz. Unfortunately, the quartet has no gigs coming up at present, but Little will return to the AQ in late September with his Latin jazz group Seven Steps to Havana. --Dylan Hicks

According to new documents obtained by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, "The nation's two largest alternative newspaper publishers have been in intense negotiations over a merger that would create an 18-paper chain controlled to a significant extent by venture capitalists." Click above for the article, and here for more background. UPDATE 9/7/05: NY Press is all for the takeover.

Let it be known that it was on this day, Friday, August 26, 2005, that we discovered how Steve Carell's rise to fame would cease, plummet and fizzle out. The actor came to prominence as a faux-reporter on the Daily Show, then scored some choice roles in Bruce Almighty and Anchorman. He tackled Ricky Gervais' role in the American version of The Office, and most recently fronted the number one movie in America last week, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. (Yeah, yeah he also played Uncle Arthur in that shitty Bewitched remake earlier this year, whatever). Carell's white hot star will soon leave our galaxy and cool off in the deepest darkness of space known as Evan Almighty, the Jim Carrey-less sequel to Bruce Almighty, in which Carell's newsman character is inspired to build an ark. I'm hoping this is a joke, and that I've been fished in like the dim-witted rube I am.