I posted a link to an unaccompanied, unreleased vocal track by Smashmouth about a week ago, noting how spectacularly god-awful it was. It got a little attention from BoingBoing and a few other blogs … and as you might imagine, the comments just came rolling in. Many of them more or less agreed with this guy, who said

How is this humorous or worthy of posting? This is a raw, dry vocal track (obviously through a quality pre and with compression applied). There is no music and no discernible reverb applied to the vocal. It seems most of the negative commentary on this comes from folks who have no experience in the audio field, or comes from people with little experience with music production.

True. Very true. However. I have no experience in the stand-up comedy field, and little to no experience in stage production — but I stand by the fact that Gallagher sucks, no matter how well-crafted his props are.

Admittedly, the track was unreleased, just left to lie there in the studio. And if someone took a page out of one of my notebooks, scanned it, posted it and laughed at it I wouldn’t be too thrilled. But if I had a couple smash hits under my belt, millions in the bank, money for nothing and chicks for free, I’d probably shake the insult off pretty quick.

A couple folks got in the act, too, and actually made and posted mashups of the track! I couldn’t be more thrilled, frankly. Web 2.0 — it lets so many strangers strewn about the country, throughout time, lift our voices in a brilliant, unique harmony. Or in this case, burp the entire alphabet.

Check out the mashups, though:

From Chris at Agents and Reactants: Terrible Smashmouth Electro Mashup

From Jimbo, who says

… his vocals reminded me a little of trent reznor so i took a recent NIN remix and added Steve Harwell’s vocals on top, made a purdy nice mashup …

Nine Inch Mouth

If anyone else has got one, I’d love to hear it …

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Eliza Skinner is performing her one-woman show “Shameless!” for one night only at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theater on Wednesday, February 27th.

Time Out New York said that

Both in her writing and in her nuanced performance, Skinner wrenches humor from awkward circumstances and cringe-inducing comments … And you will love her.

It’s true. Eliza plays a catty girl at a nightclub, a young mother who seduces teenaged boys, and a mom whose need to be adored just barely exceeds her need to seem cool. All three characters are as lovable as they are loathsome. Their neediness is colossal — you just want to give them each a great big hug but run screaming at the same time.

Eliza just posted another video from “Shameless” on Funny or Die. Her other video from the same show got over 4000 Diggs and turned her into a weird kind of internet celeb when it posted a month or so ago … I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happened again.

If you look carefully, you’ll see that the video was done all in one take.”Shameless” is not to be missed … it’s hilarious and heartbreaking, and you’ll know that soon you can turn to your friends at a party and say “yeah, I saw her back when …”

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Free Love Forum, mentioned here previously, will be performing a free show Tuesday, February 26th at 6 PM at the People’s Improv Theater. They (and some other groups who are thus far unnamed) will be auditioning for a chance to perform at the Montreal Just For Laughs Festival.

I’ve never seen these jokers live before, only snickered at them while hunched over a flickering laptop alone in a darkened room. This should be a great chance to snicker with a bunch of strangers in a larger darkened room, with slightly better posture. And, it’s FREE!

Here’s another video, just as a taste:

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My eyes are dingy dirt-covered cheesecloth wrapped around a camera lens — sending jittery images into an old dented CPU, an Old B.O.B wrapped in hairy meat.Today I am a forgotten 8-bit cartridge played for ironic nostalgia purposes - someone needs to blow the dust out of the grooves in my brain. And video game on a hiccuping system the camera angle coming into that dusty processing unit keeps flicking, cycling fast.

I can see my fingers hitting these keys from above, from the side, from my face and even from the keys themselves in slow motion, each fingerprint looming and zooming in fast like giant greasy piano hammers. All day long I’ve seen everything and everyone fro a million angles at once, a comic book disconnected from a narrative or a film re-edited by narcoleptic gibbons huffing silver paint.

Imagine a deer that was in someone else’s headlights, knocked dead the somehow reanimated and lurching around a frozen graffiti-stained city.

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I was buying a Spongebob Squarepants-themed rectal thermometer for my uncle online this afternoon (his Shrek one is broken) when I noticed something really, really weird. Yes, weirder than a Spongebob Squarepants rectal thermometer that ACTUALLY PLAYS THE THEME SONG when it’s done reading one’s temperature.

And just relax about my uncle, okay? He collects these sorts of things. Spongebob paraphernalia, I mean. My uncle does not, to the best of my knowledge, have a collection of musical rectal thermometers.

But look. I was buying the thing from a website called America RX, and filling in my shipping information when I noticed a really weird caveat. See if you can spot it in this screencap:

See? Isn’t that weird? According to that website, UPS has trademarked the color BROWN. That can’t be true, can it? I checked the UPS site myself, and sure enough, under trademarks:

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Looking Interesting and Looking Good are Potentially Very Different Things. Exhibit A, college, 1998:

Some lessons you learn immediately — it hits you in a flash and you carry them forever. Like when Dad takes a belt to your ass in front of America’s forefathers. Other lessons come to you slowly, looong after the fact and you just kind feel this lingering aftereffect for months, sort of like the universe itself kicked you in the bag an hour ago. The worst part’s long over, but you keep that uneasy stomach pain for a long, long time.

Don’t Run Into the House

We got to the party at half- past fashionably late, guts sloshing with pre-game bourbon. The night was really really foggy and dark — so was the house hosting the party, we thought. Me and my friends stood there on the porch banging on the door for forever and an hour more and two of them said “Crap, we forgot the beer” and went to get it out of the car. I went out into the yard to think for a second and saw the light from the house next door spilling out into the yard, heard the laughter and the Skynrd on the stereo.

That’s pretty much how a Science Museum party went in Richmond, at least in my experience.

“Hey, we got the wrong house!” I yelled, pointing — “It’s over there, the door’s wide open!” I saw my boss in there and jogged toward the house, planning to burst into the open entryway and grab him in a sloppy tackle. We’d gone to college together, and while he’d told me what to do back then, too, the commands were more like “find me something to clean this bowl out with.” He could take a tackle, I figured.

Except.

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As I mentioned here earlier last week, my father’s been diagnosed with cancer. And while the prognosis is pretty good it’s still a scary prospect, at least for those of us that have never dealt with it in any way before. I was pretty freaked out for a few days there while the news settled in. A lot of you left some very kind, supportive comments and sent some very thoughtful e-mails — I just wanted to take a moment here and thank you for all of your thoughts and words.

My sister left a pretty great comment herself, saying

… We just gotta keep in mind our Dad is a BAD ASS!!! He told us he had cancer in one breath and in the next told us “I’m gonna beat this shit”. The cancer is aggressive but so is our family.

My Dad sounds pretty upbeat about it, himself. When I called him to ask how he was doing, nervously, tentatively, tiptoeing around a potentially sensitive topic, he just said

Well, I threw my back out a few days ago, I’m going blind, and I’ve got cancer. Otherwise, I’m feeling pretty good.

He sounds good, actually. He’s just going into treatment confident and upbeat, getting his P.M.A. together and gearing up. I’ve got minor guilt here, as the kid who moved off to the big faraway city while his family suffers, but that’s kinda more my load to tote. I’m going to head down for an extended visit once they figure out a treatment schedule — but for right now, this day, this moment, things don’t sound too bad.

As my girlfriend, who is herself a cancer survivor says

We’re all going to go out sometime. Cancer patients just have more detailed information.

Thanks again for all your thoughts …

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I used to think that any band who had any sort of fame has to be somebody’s favorite, just to amass the band’s base enough to push them onto the charts.

Not Smashmouth. Admittedly, I’m a bit of a music snob, but I’ve never met a SINGLE person who’s ever said “You know who really rocks me? Smashmouth.” Maybe those folks are out there, somewhere …

Smashmouth’s popularity is one of life’s great mysteries — like the popularity of “Two and a Half Men.” They have this kind of lukewarm appeal — the kind of appeal that stops me from changing the channel on a Clear-Channel-choked car radio while driving to the down-at-the-mouth outlet store when I’m visiting my parents.

Smashmouth is the music version of the best t-shirt at Hot Topic, the best of a rotten lot when choice is utterly not an option.

But this track, it’s something else entirely. It’s the singer’s isolated vocal track from the song “Days Like These” … and if you thought the band in aggregate was craptacular, this little gem is a white dwarf of sheer sub-par suck-rock.

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It’s Friday, and until I can think of another stunt, Friday means ferrets. Here’s a bit of ferret hula … thanks to Rob Lanham:

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Get over FM radio, forget black lights and cheap weed and wait until that awful memory of slow-dancing to “Stairway” dies a quiet, smothering death deep in the frustrated folds on your 9th-grade brain. Get past indie rock, forget techno and see punk rock for the marketing technique it’s become.

Then try Led Zeppelin again.

They never changed, they never died, they never had any goals or grand artistic mission beyond forming up like five fingers on the hand of God and rocking you like a giant floppy sock puppet. They do it time and again, year after year and squeal after squeal — they are thunder, they are the thudding ocean and a perfect glass of bourbon on a hot summer evening.

Talk about Page all you like — his guitar was hot lava, but Bonham’s drums were the plate tectonics that let that lava squirt up so pretty in the first place. Every beat was perfect and every hit was an asteroid making a crater. Bonham did for drums what Leatherface did for chainsaws — nobody will ever hear them the same way again.

I found these tracks, outtakes from Zeppelin’s recording of “In Through the Out Door.” Bonzo’s totally isolated from the band, apart from studio chatter and the faint sound of Zeppelin down the hall in their soundproof cubicles.

These things are dense, luscious snapshots of perfect rhythm and a window into a time long dead, a time when rock was a dinosaur and dinosaurs ruled the earth. Listen in bed, in the dark, with your eyes shut. You can see the smoke curling up from a cigarette, smell the sweat spreading across a shirt and hear the engineer sigh.

And man, are these ever ripe for mashups, remixes and some incredible hip-hop. Go nuts if you’re inclined, send me what you make with ‘em and I’ll definitely post it here.

Here’s the link, crammed with SEO keywords:
Bonzo bangs out Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door

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