TRAKIN CARE OF BUSINESS
1. Michael Walker, Laurel Canyon (Faber & Faber): A breezy summer page-turner that recalls those halcyon days when L.A. was the epicenter of the music industry and the counterculture, with the famed “woodsy” tumbleweed-and-eucalyptus-strewn thoroughfare from Hollywood to the Valley as its focal point. A journalist for the N.Y. Times and L.A. Times, Walker doesn’t add much to the legend, focusing as he does on sex and drugs and rock & roll, charting the demise of the ’60s “peace and love and marijuana/LSD” in a torrent of cocaine-induced ’70s paranoia and the hedonistic nihilism of punk, disco and freebase. Witnesses include usual suspects like hippie photographer Henry Diltz, resident groupie muse Pamela Des Barres and amusing ex-husband, English expatriate Michael, wacky entrepreneur Kim Fowley, one-time Turtle Mark Volman and latter-day band-aid Morgana Welch, all of whose anecdotes seem rather arbitrary, if colorful.
2. Taking the Jesus Pill @King King (
3. NBA Playoffs: Not to say I told you so—truth is, even after the Heat went up 3-2, I thought the Mavs might come back with two wins at home—but almost exactly what I said would happen took place when I predicted Miami in seven . In the battle of superstars, Dwyane Wade outplayed Dirk Nowitzki, whose series went downhill after he missed a clutch free throw down the stretch that would have given
4. Dave Alvin, West of the West (Yep Roc): This Downey native is an L.A. roots-rock treasure, a vastly underrated singer-songwriter who tackles a variety of California-born and/or bred tunesmiths, some well-known, like Jackson Browne (whose “Redneck Friend” here reveals its gutbucket blues sexual double-entendre origins), Merle Haggard (“Kern River”), Tom Waits (“Blind Love”), Los Lobos (“Down on the Riverbed”), John Fogerty (“Tramps and Hawkers”), Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter (a wonderfully drawling “Loser”) and Brian Wilson (taking “Surfer Girl” back to its street corner a cappella roots and plaintive melancholia). It’s to Alvin’s credit that he makes even the familiar songs his own, though he really shines on the more obscure material, like Kevin “Blackie” Farrell’s brooding, atmospheric “Sonora’s Death Row” and ex-Kingston Trio member John Stewart’s poignant “California Bloodlines,” which Alvin recalls listening to with his mother, who came from the Central California region outside of Fresno referenced by the song. By encompassing the psychedelic expansion of the NoCal Grateful Dead, the winsome hopes of the SoCal Beach Boys and the East Side blues of Richard “Louie Louie” Berry’s “I Am Bewildered,” the veteran of the Blasters, X and The Knitters creates a canvas as wide-open, varied and filled with both possibility and pain as the state that produced it. —RT
5. Supergroup (VH1): One more sign of the a-pop-alypse now. Surreal Life meets Rock Star and Survivor as five metal veterans move into a kitschy
6. Corinne Bailey Rae (Capitol): “The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same,” purrs this 27-year-old newcomer from Leeds, England, on “Put Your Records On,” the fast-riding single from her debut, already a hit in her native U.K. Compared to the likes of Norah Jones, Sade and Billie Holiday, Rae is that rare performer who could manage to crossover from Smooth Jazz and Urban A/C to the alternative crowd that’s embracing KT Tunstall’s similarly rhythmic funk of “Black Horse & the Cherry Tree.” Her high-pitched croon combines vulnerability with a sensuousness that recalls Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis” just as surely as it evokes Macy Gray. The horn-inflected “I’d Like To” and “Butterfly” are reminiscent of Roberta Flack’s collaborations with Donny Hathaway in the ’70s, while the surface noise of “Enchantment” and “’Till It Happens To You” mark it as an homage to old-school vinyl soul at its finest. Poised on the precipice of hip and mainstream, the lissome Rae is definitely a talent capable of joining disparate audiences, of putting the pieces back together in this hopelessly fractured music marketplace. And is there a more perfect warm-weather verse than “Summer came like cinnamon, so sweet/Little girls double-dutch on the concrete”? —RT
7. World Cup Soccer: I’m not quite a hater... In fact, back in the glory days of the fledgling NASL, the forerunner to the current Major League Soccer from the ’60s through mid-‘80s, I was a fan of the old New York Cosmos, owned by Warner Communications and run by Ahmet’s late brother Nesuhi Ertegun, who signed such international stars as Pele and Franz Beckenbauer. That team regularly sold out the 80,000-capacity Giants Stadium. My appreciation of the sport increased after several years of watching my daughter play club and then high school soccer, but I can certainly understand
8. The Feeling, Twelve Stops and Home (Cherry Tree/Interscope): This U.K. avant-MOR quintet has already scored a pair of hits in its homeland with “Sewn” and the current “Fill My Little World” evincing a sound that unabashedly evokes such pure pop for now people as Queen, Supertramp, the Cars, the Beach Boys and especially 10cc. The tunes from their debut, which will be released in the U.S. this fall, sound like harmless pop ditties until you dig a little below the surface to discover a song like “Sewn” is as sinister as the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” with lines like “You’ve got my heart in a headlock/You stopped the blood and made my head soft” and a creepy-crawly video that features the bandmembers literally being sewn together, with the thread seen running through their veins. What seems like a retreat is actually an aesthetic statement, glorying in glistening, Raspberry-like harmonies and lush melodies that sound like they could be outtakes from Pet Sounds or a Wings album. The results are delivered with a po-faced seriousness that hinges on tongue-in-cheek or camp, though, as heartthrob singer Dan Gillespie puts it in “Sewn,” “Gimme the song and I’ll sing it like I mean it/Gimme the words and I’ll say them like I mean it,” which he does, elevating this from kitsch to something a whole lot more affecting. Consider this the return of the Neo-New Romantics, finally providing an answer to the question, “Whatever happened to Spandau Ballet?” —RT
9. Booking Bands: This was a hot email URL that features a rather interesting literary exercise where names of bands are mashed up with books, as in The Invisible Manfred Mann, Fleetwood Macbeth and Captain Beefheart of Darkness, the three winners cited on the website www.coudal.com. Others in the mix: The Who Moved My Cheese, Catch 182, Horton Hears a Hoobastank, Of Mice and Men at Work, Bare Naked Lunch Ladies, The Agony and the XTC, Ramones of the Day, SidVicioushartha, The Necronomiconway Twitty, Courtney Love in the Time of Cholera, Jane Eyre’s Addiction, Abba Karenina, Bridge Over the River Jamiroquai, The Scarlet Pimpernelly Furtado, Even Cowboy Junkies Get The Blues, The Sun Also RZA, Into Thin Lizzy Air, Everything but the Girl is Illuminated, Tesla of the D’Ubervilles, The Faster Pussycatcher in the Rye, Doctor ZhivaGoGo’s, Of Human League Bondage, The Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Animals Farm, The Thorn Yardbirds, Elvis Costello and the Rules of Attraction, Slaughterhouse Jackson Five, The Chemical Brothers Karamazov, Blackalicious Like Me... Hell, you get the idea. Now make up some yourself. —RT
10. Gripe of the Week: We all know the joke about how Californians can’t merge, which is why traffic backs up for miles before intersections like the
CALENDAR
Friday, June 23rd
10:00am-7:00pm
Long Grove Strawberry Fest @ Routes 53 and 83 in Downstate Illinois: Try (deep breath here) strawberry shortcake, strawberry popcorn, strawberry donuts, fresh strawberry ice cream, homemade strawberry ice, strawberry salsa, strawberry smoothies, strawberry pie, strawberry daiquiris, farm stand strawberries and the piece de resistance—just-dipped chocolate-covered strawberries from Long Grove Confectionary.
6:30pm
World’s Ugliest Dog Contest @ Petaluma Fairgrounds: Despite what their owners may think, some dogs are just ugly. In fact, some mutts are truly hideous. But nothing quite compares to the winner of the World's Ugliest Dog, a "beauty" pageant for cosmetically-challenged canines held at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in
7:00pm
Flyleaf @ Loft at Center Stage,
8:00pm
Kottonmouth Kings w/ (hed) pe and Subnoize Souljas @ House of Blues,
Keith Sweat, Ginuwine and Joe @ Gibson Amphitheatre, Universal City
Saturday, June 24th
10:00am-7:00pm
Great American Irish Fair & Music Festival @ Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre: Steering several months clear of the shenanigans related to St. Patrick's Day, the largest Irish-American cultural event in the
10:00am
Long Beach Bayou Festival: Featuring Zac Harmon and many others @ The Queen Mary Events Park, Long Beach
7:00pm
Journey and Def Leppard @ Nikon at Jones Beach, Wantagh, NY
8:00pm
30 Seconds to Mars @ Huntington Music Hall, Huntington, WV
The Fray @ City Lights Pavilion, Denver
Sunday, June 25th
8:00pm
Morningwood @ Axis, Boston
10:30pm
6ixteendays @ Club London at Boardners, Hollywood
Monday, June 26th
Hey, it’s Jennifer Kaizen’s 22nd birthday. She’s Je-c’s fiancée.
JE-C’S NEW-MOVIE RUNDOWN
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Starring: Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale, Christopher Walken, Sean Astin, Jennifer Coolidge, Rachel Dratch
Synopsis: A workaholic architect is faced with a dilemma: go on a vacation with his wife and kids or work overtime to land a high-profile design job. Saving him from making this choice is an eccentric Bed, Bath & Beyond product developer, who gives him a universal remote that allows him to rewind, fast-forward, slow down and pause his own life.
Thoughts: This movie looks like a lot of fun—plus it has a really good cast.
JE-C’S TOP MOVIES OF THE YEAR SO FAR
V for Vendetta: This is my favorite movie of the year so far, for many reasons. It's more than just a comic book adapted for the big screen; it’s a movie that makes a big political statement that we can all relate to these days. Definitely a movie that was slept on, and I advise everyone to check it out if you haven't yet.
X-Men III: The Last Stand: If this is the last one, it certainly satisfied my appetite. It had it all, including some incredible action sequences.
An Inconvenient Truth: The most important movie of the year… A MUST-SEE!!!
Nacho Libre: The funniest movie of the year. Jack Black rocks.
THE COUNT: COLDPLAY IS HOT, COUNTRY'S COOKIN' IN THE U.K.
The latest tidbits from the bustling live sector (3/28a)
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THE NEW UMG
Gosh, we hope there are more press releases.
TIKTOK BANNED!
Unless the Senate manages to make this whole thing go away, that is.
THE NEW HUGE COUNTRY ACT
No, not that one.
TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN PLAYLIST
Now 100% unlicensed!
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