Minneapolis / St. Paul Music Blog

Today officially marks the end of FreyGate. Really. We promise you'll never have to hear this guy's name again. Ok, we just lied like we're James Frey wearing a pair of burning pants on Oprah and all we can think about is that awesome Queen song. But we did it for a good cause.

Upon perusing Amazon earlier today, we stumbled upon this gem of an interview with James Frey from a few months back. In the web site's "significant 7" Q&A, Frey is asked, "What is the worst lie you've ever told?" His answer: "No way I can answer that." Hmmmm...do you suppose Nan Talese prepped him for that question? He answered like someone was holding a gun, or a golden Oprah-book-club check, to his pulsating temple.

But it got us thinking. Frey, though he still remains recalcitrant and stoic, has to feel somewhat unburdened by these revelations. Plus, the beginning of the year is a great time to publicly come clean and unfasten ourselves from all those suffocating fish stories. So let's do it: What's the worst lie you ever told? I'll start.

One of the best pieces of rock writing to ever come out of this burg was penned by Larry Batson in the Minneapolis Tribune in the early '80s. This was before the electronic archives allowed us to search and find just about everything, so you'll have to trust me when I say that this column, about a proud father listening to the floorboards shake as his sons Ernie and Billy roared in the basement of their northeast Minneapolis home, was as good as anything that got the elder Batson nominated for a Pulitzer. Larry Batson died Monday at the age of 75; our condolences go out to Billy and Ernie and the extended Hypstrz and Mofos family.

If you have Apple's iTunes loaded on your 'puter you've no doubt played around with what the software calls "Smart Playlists". You can use layers of criteria to filter your library of MP3s. Simple Smart Playlists would be "All songs from 1988", or "All songs with Genre 'Metal'", or "All songs that are Track 3". A web site dedicated to Smart Playlists uses a forum to show how others use this wonderful feature.

So I wondered what sort of cool Smart Playlists others had been building? Let us know the criteria for your Smart Playlist and then post a top ten Party Shuffle list that uses your Smart Playlist as the source.

The format war between high-definition DVDs known as HD DVDs and the competing Blu-Ray discs became more complicated when Toshiba announced that its HD DVD player will be in stores in March for $500-- half the cost of the cheapest Blu-Ray player and months before those players hit the shelves. Now comes news that neither format may deliver what it promises, thanks to another war: the one on piracy. Because the hi-def discs lose their copy-protection when plugged into an analog television, the signal will be degraded to keep pirates from making perfect copies. The argument is that it won't be noticable on the average analog TV; the problem is that many first-generation hi-def TVs have analog-only inputs. In other words, the poor suckers, er, early purchasers of HD sets will be getting about one-quarter the picture they paid for, no matter what the format.

Happy obsession of the day: DJ Benzi's mashup of "Ohh" by Mary J. Blige's and "Modern Man's Hustle" by Atmosphere (via Benzi's site, via DUNation). So, how large (or small) is the crossover of these two artists? Both play great concerts and put out great albums. By the way, I'm all for acclaim for Mary's new one, but who else thinks the last one, and Atmosphere's new one, are oddly underrated?

The Onion's rave review of Robert Pollard's new album, From a Compound Eye, begins with this puzzling sentence: "Given Robert Pollard's profligacy, it's only natural to greet his 26-track, 70-minute post-Guided By Voices 'debut' solo album with skepticism."

The first definition of "profligate" is (from Random House Webster's Unabridged) "utterly and shamelessly immoral or dissipated; thoroughly dissolute." What might this mean?

1.) Duh, Mr. Safire, the writer was looking for "prolificacy," since Pollard has put out like 4,000 records and in the process bored all but GBV diehards. It's a tiny usage error, not unlike those you've made in print, asshole.

2.) Mr. Pollard is known to imbibe heavily of Satan's brew onstage. Drinking is a sin, Jesus' moderate consumption of wine notwithstanding. The Onion will not tolerate sinfulness even from the rock and roll musicians it covers and does not want to encourage dissolute behavior among its youthful readers.

3.) Mr. Pollard is prolific--too prolific. His extravagant output can in fact be called intemperate and it is clearly a sign of deep vanity ("vanity of vanity; all is vanity"!), which is also sinful.

In April, Bangle Sussana Hoffs and noted bauble Matthew Sweet are releasing "Under the Covers, Vol. 1," a duet album featuring the following '60s pop gems:

I See The Rain (The Marmalade)
And Your Bird Can Sing (The Beatles)
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Bob Dylan)
Who Knows Where The Time Goes? (Fairport Convention)
Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young And Crazy Horse)
Alone Again Or (Love)
Warmth Of The Sun (The Beach Boys)
Different Drum (The Stone Poneys)
The Kids Are Alright (The Who)
Sunday Morning (The Velvet Underground)
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (Neil Young And Crazy Horse)
Care Of Cell #44 (The Zombies)
Monday Monday (The Mamas And The Papas)
She May Call You Up Tonight (The Left Banke)
Run To Me (The Bee Gees)

Factotum, the Bent Hamer film with Matt Dillon playing Charles Bukowski's alter-ego, Henry Chinaski, has been given a second lease on theatrical life in the United States-- IFC Films picked it up at the Sundance FIlm Festival after the picture's first distributor dropped it. The film was shot around Minneapolis, which filled in for '70s-era L.A. It's a good, not great, Bukowski movie (his own Barfly is still the standard, although Crazy Love comes close). Dillon is decent as Buk, but he's just too clean. Still, some moments soar, like this exchange between Chinaski and a new friend.

Chinaski: Do you have a woman?
Friend: No, if you have a woman, all they want you to do is fuck 'em all the time.
Chinaski: Get a woman you like to fuck.
Friend: No, because if you wanna go out and drink, or you wanna go out and gamble, they don't like it because it's time away from them.
Chinaski: Well, maybe you need a woman who likes to fuck, drink and gamble.
Friend: Who wants a woman like that?

Here's a Friday afternoon time waster that I first ran into on the "I Love Music" discussion group. Pick a favorite musical act that you think has made (at least) five truly great albums, and rank those albums in order of preference. Lists cannot exceed five albums! There won't actually be any consequences for exceeding five, but just play fair. Also, greatest-hits albums don't count, which I realize punishes all sorts of great pre-album artists and singles specialists, but let's cover those folks in another time-wasting exercise.

Also, if someone does, say, the Rolling Stones, and you also want to do the Rolling Stones, that's fine.

I'll start, with the Rolling Stones:

1. Let It Bleed
2. Aftermath
3. Exile on Main St.
4. Sticky Fingers
5. Beggar's Banquet

Today on "Oprah," talk-show host Winfrey brought out James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, who is probably understandably nostalgiac for the days when he had the support of his one-time backer (read Emily Carter's take on things in this week's City Pages). His self-styled credibility as a bad-ass two-fisted addiction survivor was deflated considerably by a recent piece in The Smoking Gun that revealed, among other things, that Frey's story of beating up, and being beaten up by, several cops was actually a minor arrest without incident that saw him freed in a couple of hours.