I didn't really know who they were but one of their members, a bald-headed guy, looked so much like my ex-boyfriend that it freaked me out some. We ended up staring at each other a lot during the meal.

Heh. That's David Nields. He's... a little freaky himself. I worked for their manager a couple of years ago, and I got to be friendly with both Nerissa and Katryna, but I never felt totally at ease around David.

It's not like X ever had a platinum album, so they should know they mattered.

It's strange you would mention X -- "See How We Are" came up on my MP3 player yesterday, and I was thinking how great it was and trying to figure out which album I should start with. (I have that song from a compilation. I had "Los Angeles" on cassette, but I have no idea where it is now.) Any advice?

I was pleased that I was able to form a coherent sentence

I would also be very pleased if I managed that.

It never occurs to me until later that there's guys like me in every single damn college town these people visit.

See, I can never stop thinking about it. When I got my copy of "Endless Nights" signed by Neil Gaiman, the first thing I said was, "I'm sure you'll hear this a thousand times today, but..."

Any advice?

Their first four albums are all classic (in my opinion), though I am a huge fan. The first album, Los Angeles is the most punk rock, but has some of their most dynamic songs, and Ray Manzarek's keyboards give it some more-than-punk textures.

Wild Gift is my favorite, probably their very best collection of songs. Dark, smart, dramatic, very musical, rocks hard. Most songs are about emotional betrayal (Exene and John had a tumultuous marriage).

Under the Big Black Sun is where they began to stretch out musically a bit more. Some haunting songs about the death of Exene's sister. "The Hungry Wolf" is a powerhouse.

More Fun In The New World is where they really showed their musical range. Their songwriting is at its most politcally pointed here (aimed dagger-like at Reagan's heart). They looked like they might conquer the world at this point. Didn't happen, but they were peaking here in a way.

I just heard this morning that Greg Shaw passed away earlier this week. For those who are unaware, Greg founded Bomp magazine, as well as the Bomp and Voxx record labels. He's credited with coining the term "Powerpop". His widow just released a statement:

It is with deepest regret that I must tell you that my husband, Greg Shaw, passed away in the hospital Tuesday night.

Greg had a vibrant spirit, but his physical health was always fragile. Last week, for reasons that are unclear, he developed an extremely high blood sugar and was rushed to the hospital. The level of blood sugar was so high that all of Greg's vital functions were subjected to trauma, and he developed complications as a result. Nevertheless, for several days he remained in stable condition. He was conscious the entire time, and his doctors were quite optimistic that he would recover. Sadly and shockingly, he went into cardiac arrest on Tuesday night around 11:30pm. The wonderful people at the hospital worked for a long time to try and save him, and Greg fought very hard too. He was tenacious to the end.

Greg was given the very best care, and during his stay in the hospital he had the constant love and support of his family. His passing was not gentle, but I am comforted by the feeling that he is now at peace and free of all pain.

Tristan and I are grateful for the sympathy and support we have already received, and we ask for your prayers for Greg and for us throughout this difficult time. We also send our condolences to everyone who is sharing our grief.

Very best wishes to all of you,

Phoebe Shaw
Tristan Shaw

I can't find any more info on the web, but you can visit Bomp if you want to learn more about him.

Didn't get to see the Decemberists. Bad intelligence reports led us to believe it hadn't sold out well in advance when it had.

Aw, man.

Kate!! Remind me to call you and tell you what happened at the Rose Polenzani concert, because no one else here will care!

I just heard this morning that Greg Shaw passed away earlier this week. For those who are unaware, Greg founded Bomp magazine, as well as the Bomp and Voxx record labels. He's credited with coining the term "Powerpop". His widow just released a statement:

Wow. He contributed to the Bubblegum book, and way more than aptly, the new book is dedicated to the first generation of rock zine writers:

Dedicated to Mojo Navigator, Bomp, Teenage Wasteland Gazette, Back Door Man, Phonograph Record Magazine, Creem, Crawdaddy and every writer who ever danced about architecture out of a compulsion to share the music.

The publicist asked us to cherry pick some choice quotes from the book. Here are some of my favs:

There’s a difference between destroying things out of anger and because you’re so happy that your limbs and head just can’t control themselves. The Greeks understand this, the Jews understand this, and Adam and the Ants understood this. - Elizabeth Herndon

In a critical-historical world where being a hairy, smelly, misshapen evolutionary link earns more props than being a beautiful, fragile insect inhabiting a dead-end evolutionary niche, this Al Kooper-produced record has had its fossils swept unnoticed into the used vinyl bins. - Brian Doherty

It came from nowhere and went nowhere, waving no flags for any trends or theories, yet even today sounds like it could represent a new advance in out-of-nowhere chamber baroque pop. - Brian Doherty

Luke Haines can’t resist poking a finger into the suppurating wound of the English class system. He swans about singing superbly bilious songs about burglars in training, murderous chauffeurs, resentful valets and domesticated showgirls, with wicked glee and an unerring knack for shiv-like guitar hooks. - David Smay (immodestly)

Futurama is so crammed with screaming guitars and thundering pianos and layered harmonies and orchestras that there is no room to think or even breathe throughout its nine gloriously overproduced tracks. If you can imagine all of your Bowie, Queen and ELO records playing simultaneously, then you might have some idea of what this LP is all about. -- Matthew Smith

The guitar intro lasts all of five seconds before Jimmy Kendzor and Frank Secich's voices come in, oozing of everything the Byrds and Lovin' Spoonful ever promised, the soaring harmonies in the chorus driving over jangling lead guitar work. It's the sound of tomorrow right here today, it's the perfect folk-rock single. It's beautiful, that's what. - Metal Mike Saunders

On tracks like the haunting “Smokey Day,” “Her Song” and “Caroline Goodbye,” Blunstone sounds like a ghostly choirboy in some Edwardian parlor, his pure tones reaching through time’s mists to find a sun dappled spot to materialize. - Kim Cooper

… well, let's take "13 And Good" as Exhibit A. It's a life-affirming jailbait story about a girl who lies about her age to bed KRS, and when her dad finds out, he wants a piece of KRS for himself—prison style! Ha! Of course, it's not all polymorphous sexual perversity and ballistic battle rhymes. - Phil Freeman

Vaulting over the usual obstacles—slack-jawed drummers with lucrative sidelines in armed-robbery, feckless sidemen too busy griping to show up for practice—Divvens did it the hard way, playing organ, guitar, duck-call and hair-on-fire screaming for a series of self-released singles that needed to be heard to be believed. - Matthew Specktor

The second Brick LP is revered among the heads, but you may not be a disco-funk head, and this may not be a disco-funk album. - Andrew Earles

Being an adult with unlimited access to gambling and naked people, I don’t normally listen to children’s music. But something keeps calling me back to the eternal critics’ non-favorite Pac-Man Fever—even more now than when I was a child. - Mark Prindle

As one who, after listening to Trout Mask Replica years ago, had written off Captain Beefheart as having even more of whatever it was that annoyed me about Frank Zappa, I was floored to discover that he and his band had once put out a record that, well… rocked. - Chas Glynn

And make no mistake: Aaron’s a lousy rapper. Yet I love his rapping. For one thing, he doesn’t indulge in any wiggerisms. He never pretends to be anything other than whiter than Wonderbread—and unapologetically so, as he shouts with glee about his new dirt bike or Sony Playstation. - Peter Bagge

The band was reportedly unhappy with Red Krayola mainstay Mayo Thompson’s misty, gauzy production. But what do bands know? That sound is a vital component of the pale ghostliness that makes this a uniquely moving pop artifact. This is one of those rare (continued...)

( continues...) records that creates a new sonic and emotional world to live in, a world that no one, even the Chills, ever returned to explore more fully. But there’s enough here for a lifetime of exploration. - Brian Doherty

For me, anything unique is a kind of masterpiece that raises it above general criticism with a hearty "This is what I wanted to do, now piss off." The Psychomodo falls into the glam-era summer camp—the theatre of the "crack'd actors." It was more of a one-man show, but Steve Harley doesn't seem to care if we follow him or not, a bit like music hall for the hard of hearing. - Jim O'Rourke

Though more infamous than famous (he’s an ex-con, Mormon, masked, Outlaw Country, ventriloquist, porno-music, bigamist, biker poet) D.A.C. actually made some great recordings. With this album Coe made a mark on Country (as songwriter and performer), and produced an album so strong it can stand up with the all-time classics in the genre. - Jake Austen

This album reads like a mismatched-partners buddy picture with a whisper of tragedy—One ended up in a monastery. The other went to death row!—and it’s conspicuously non-represented on the self-compiled The Essential Leonard Cohen (though I bet it'd figure strongly on its sequel, The Entirely Superfluous Leonard Cohen). And yet the combination of Cohen's weary poetics and Phil Spector's sonic bombast achieves a kind of decadent grandeur, the sound of a coffee-house discotheque somewhere in Weimar-Republican America, with the sleaziest lyrics Laughin' Lenny ever wrote plopped in the middle of a self-parodic Sargasso Sea of sound. - William Ham

“For Seeking Heat” sends us on a nineties soundtrack ride through a seventies road movie. There’s this great, dark, dual-exhaust roar of guitar velocity that never lets up, with Adam Franklin languorously telling us gnomic stories of sleeplessness, sex, violence, fashion and that horrible burning smell off in the distance. - Ron Garmon

This is one of the scariest albums ever made. Pere Ubu had made scary albums before, including at least two of the best records of the seventies, The Modern Dance and Dub Housing, but those were before. Those were before the seesawing fortunes of the band, before the religious conversion of lead singer David Thomas, before the political darkness occurring nationally in 1979-1980. - Rick Moody

Coming on the heels of his high-profile masterwork, Superfly, Curtis Mayfield's next album was bound to receive muted applause upon its release. Yet in many ways it is an equal achievement. A song cycle about a Vietnam veteran's return to a changed America, Back to the World is Mayfield exploding with realized ambition and prodigious talent. - George Pelecanos

Lewis Furey had played violin on Leonard Cohen’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony, but asserted his own rough-edged, pansexual identity on this eponymous debut with the help of Cohen’s producer John Lissauer. The result, roundly ignored at the time save by French audiences, was idiosyncratic cabaret music, very much out-of-step with the glam agenda of the period. Furey peopled his songs with characters culled from his hometown’s sleaziest neighborhood. - Richard Henderson

The dual MCs make the usual threats of lyrical domination via imagery swiped liberally from Star Wars, superhero comics, Dungeons and Dragons and other mythologies. King Lou and Capital Q assure the listener that they are hard, but deliver their boasts as if they are holding back to prevent injury. - Kris Kendall

Phases is full of little quirks that sound odd at first, but once you're on his wavelength seem ineffably, definitively right. As with Thelonious Monk, when listening to Willie Nelson one is amazed at how right and wrong it all is simultaneously. "Ugly beauty" as Monk put it. This is Willie at his ugliest beautiful.- Joe Boucher Being too charismatic, too good, too "rock," and too literate would all compound to impair the Only Ones as they ultimately faded behind the boring pub-pop and tardy, single-minded punk that highway-robbed the era. The (continued...)

( continues...) complexity, the romanticizing of bad love and bad drugs, the drummer from Spooky Tooth... like most of the entries in this book, the artist didn't make enough sense. - Andrew Earles

Since you’ve tried everything else, why not a fierce, impeccable pop concept album about jism pressure? - Ron Garmon

Flan could win an award for the most human suffering and disgusting atrocities ever in an album of gorgeous pop. - Kevin Carhart

This strange little disc first crept into my life back in the fall of 1997. Like some Dramamine-soaked response to Johnny Cash’s American Recordings, its stark, bleak tales of back-road behavior and questionable after-dinner practices left me dumbstruck.- Gary Pig Gold

These recordings remind me of not only being a big goof but also not caring what anyone thinks—simply shouting and remembering odd mottoes, onomatopoeia, and non-sequiturs. I am unabashed and ecstatic when I say that this album is now among my favorite records ever (up to this point, at least). - David Cotner

The best tunes on Spice, however, are the ones penned by Sinatra Jr. himself, particularly the stunning track that opens Side 2. "Black Night" is a haunting, evocative song that encapsulates a lifetime of disappointment and yearning. Riddle's arrangement for this song, described as "evil" by Frank Jr. in his liner notes, starts with one simple guitar and builds slowly until it coalesces into an absolutely heart-rending orchestral blast. This track is pure dynamite.- Greg Turkington

I'm tired of hearing about Pet Sounds; jump to this album—this is one of the few perfect pop albums I've ever heard. I adore the way the songs are constructed out of traded lines between instruments, a huge wall of sound built out of crisscrossing salvos that land in a monstrous pop explosion. This is true theatre of the absurd, a Gilbert and Sullivan production by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade. How can you not love that? - Jim O'Rourke

Okay, I admit I just wanted to test Gus' new code.

Sweeeeeet.