You can have this one for free, Republicans.

This photo was taken on Thursday, September 11, in New York City, when senators John McCain and Barack Obama participated in a Time magazine-sponsored forum on national service at Columbia University. Doesn't Obama look scary in this picture? Doesn't he look like he's threatening the white-haired old white man? That's not what he was doing, but doesn't it look like that's what he's doing? And isn't that worth more than the thousand words Democrats could use to justify the thousand other things that were probably going through Obama's mind at that particular moment?

Do you want your next president to threaten your sweet, defenseless, white-haired grandpa, America? On November 4, vote for the white-haired man. He only threatens our godless enemies. Plus his running mate is totally do-able!

(Paid for by the Committee to Elect a President Who Isn't Mean to Grandpas or Grandmas or Puppies or Rainbows.)

memories that hang by a thread

As we get older, our brain pushes out older memories for newer ones. Sometimes that's not such a bad thing, like when someone from high school reminds you of a pretentious thing you said when you were 15 and you have no recollection of it whatsoever. Therefore it never happened. I savor this kind of small victory.

But there are other times when you have only the thinnest strand of a memory still trapped in your head, like an image from a movie or a TV show or a music video, but the image isn't enough to help you identify where it came from, even in the Internet age, where information on seemingly everything is available whenever you want it.

In January I mentioned that I'm glad to go into a grocery store these days, hear a song I haven't heard before on the PA, and not be able to identify it even if I write down a line or two and then look up the lyrics on Google when I get home. (Some people, of course, can access the Internet on their phones or PDAs and would be able to identify the song right away. But I don't want that much Internet in my life.) It's nice to not know. And yet a part of me still wants to know, especially if I want to hear the song again.

I remember a video that came on MTV in the summer of '87 that featured some sort of jungle setting, though the jungle was created on a soundstage and was meant to look fake. That summer I looked for the cassette that featured the song while I was with my grandfather in a music store in Douglas, Georgia, where my grandparents used to live. But that's all I remembered about the song—not the title, not the artist's name, not even a basic melody. Just a vague image from the video and a vague recollection of the location where I briefly considered buying the entire album so I could have that song. (I'm sure I just wanted to buy something that day, no matter what. That allowance money/spoiled-grandchild money was burning a hole in my pocket.)

On April 23 Dave Steed helped me solve this minor mystery in his Popdose series called Bottom Feeders, where he meticulously tracks down every song that peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 in the 1980s below #40. On that day he featured a song by Jon Astley (no relation to Rick) called "Jane's Getting Serious." I thought I hadn't remembered anything about the melody of that mystery song from 21 years ago, but something clicked when I listened to Astley's minor hit. I love how the brain works that way.

Now that I had the title, I started looking for the video for "Jane's Getting Serious" on YouTube. It wasn't there, but I did find a sentence or two on another site about it being set in a jungle, which made sense in terms of "Me Tarzan, you Jane." It took 21 years, but I'd finally identified the Song With No Name. And a few months ago the video showed up on YouTube:



Another vague image that's never left my memory comes from even earlier in my life—I was probably four or five when I saw a TV show in which milk was poured on a person's head while he was sitting at a kitchen table. I thought maybe it came from the TV series based on the film The Paper Chase, though I wasn't sure why. Memories get jumbled over the years, especially the ones from the first years in which your long-term memory is active.

About a month ago a rerun of Eight Is Enough came on Me TV, and at the end of the episode ("Triangles," 9/28/77) Tommy Bradford (Willie Aames) made a sarcastic comment about money to his sister Mary (Lani O'Grady), who retaliated not by yelling at him for ripping her off but by kissing him softly on the cheek, then opening the refrigerator and pouring a carton of milk on his head. Tommy didn't seem that confused by the out-of-nowhere kiss, nor did he get mad at Mary for dousing him with milk. Tommy wasn't the brightest Bradford.

But as soon as Mary kissed him on the cheek, something in my head clicked once again. I didn't know what was about to happen, but I was glued to the screen. Once the milk hit Tommy's head, another minor memory mystery was solved.

Me TV's sister station, Me Too, ran an Our Gang short recently that I remember very strongly from childhood, one in which Jackie Cooper gets caught trying to play pranks on his new teacher, Miss Crabtree. She tells him and his co-conspirators to go home and explain to their parents what they did, but right before they exit, the rest of the class is given cake and ice cream. As Jackie sits in the schoolyard crying, ashamed at what he was planning to do to his lovely, sweet new teacher, she brings him a plate of cake and ice cream.

Once again, I was glued to the screen, even though my memories of "Teacher's Pet" from Little Rascals reruns in the 1980s have never been vague like the other two examples I mentioned. I was just glad to see it again for the first time in many years. It's a tearjerker for the kindergarten set.

I also have a vague memory of where I put my wallet yesterday, but you probably don't want to hear about that.

I'm doing my part to keep the American status quo alive and well.

A few weeks ago, right after Sarah Palin was chosen by John McCain to be his running mate, this anonymous comment showed up in a Chicago Sun-Times "reader reaction" sidebar:

Well, why didn't they choose Condi? She's a good Republican. She likes to travel, too, and she wears nice suits. She's even educated like Obama. She had no experience, but look at what a fine job she has done.

lady opinion

To imply that most African-Americans aren't educated and don't dress well is condescending, ignorant, and downright offensive. Now get back in the kitchen where you belong, you silly, stupid bitch.

I was never crazy about the ending of Raising Arizona, but while I'm daydreaming ...

It makes me smile to think that in 70 years my nieces will have these same smiles, which will be captured in pictures much like this one. Side by side. Sisters and friends. With nieces, nephews, daughters, sons, and grandchildren of their very own. (The purple pajamas are optional, but if the mood strikes them, why not?)

Old Sweat

Singer Keith Sweat turned 44 in July. In the highly scientific realm of R&B evolution, that makes him "a grown-ass man."

I heard Sweat's new album, Just Me, recently at work. It contains the song "Just Wanna Sex You," on which Keith banishes all thoughts of his impending prostate exam so he can tell his listeners how much he wants "sex in the morning, sex in the evening, sex in my Jeep." He also wants to "have sex on my lunch break, sex after work, and sex in a strange place." Does your nephew's high school graduation count as "a strange place," Keith? (No, you're not invited to his graduation party.)

I think recording desperately horny songs in your mid-40s to reaffirm your verility puts you in "a strange place"—I call it the land of overcompensation—but you're not the first middle-aged singer who's refused to let go of his early glory days, and you won't be the last.

This isn't to say that people over 40 can't love and lust just as intensely as a 19-year-old. Not at all. It's just that it's embarrassing when someone over 40 compares himself to the Energizer Bunny because he can "keep goin' and goin' and goin' and goin'," especially since Sweat needs the help of Auto-Tune, a.k.a. vocal-cord Viagra, throughout Just Me to help him hit the required notes.

You can grow old gracefully in pop music and still be accepted by your fans, but both sides have to acknowledge that being young at heart doesn't equal being young in the flesh. Otherwise you risk becoming a Chris Rock joke: "Every man has to settle down eventually. You know why you gotta settle down eventually? Because you don't want to be the old guy in the club. You know what I'm talking about. Every club you go into, there's always some old guy. He ain't really old—just a little too old to be in the club."

Maybe Keith Sweat really is "an addict when it comes to making love." (If that's the case, Keith, seek counseling like Michael Douglas and David Duchovny did.) But I do think anyone would agree, no matter how old they are, that sex on their lunch break would be a refreshing change of pace from eating yogurt and reading Us Weekly in the break room.

Soul Train is about to reach its last stop.

We received this e-mail at work yesterday from an employee of WGN-TV:

Got a call last week from someone at Chicago Reader regarding our final airing of "The Best of Soul Train." The timeslot has changed to 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, September 20.

I'm not the one who called, and I don't know why anyone from the Reader would've called, but it is news, because after September 20 Soul Train may be gone from the air for a long time.

According to Wikipedia (sorry, it's the only source I can find), "The future of Soul Train," which hasn't produced new episodes since the end of its shorter-than-usual 35th season in the spring of 2006, "was placed in further uncertainty with the announced closing of Tribune Entertainment's syndication division [Tribune Company owns WGN] on December 18, 2007, leaving Don Cornelius Productions to seek a new distributor for the program. DCP then secured a deal with Trifecta Entertainment & Media, which also distributes another former Tribune Entertainment series, American Idol Rewind. In May 2008, the rights to the Soul Train library were purchased by MadVision Entertainment, whose principal partners come from the entertainment and publishing fields. The price and terms of the deal were not disclosed."

Since December of '06 Soul Train has been airing reruns from the '70s and '80s under the name The Best of Soul Train. I first discovered these reruns on WGN last October when Bunny Sigler appeared on my TV screen. It turns out that episode aired again last Saturday, and now I'm a little mad that I didn't check the schedule so I could tape it.

I haven't watched the Soul Train reruns in a few months because more and more episodes from the '80s were being shown, and they just aren't as interesting to me as the '70s installments, mainly because the soul music of the '80s didn't hold a candle to that of the Me Decade. Plus, The Best of Soul Train keeps repeating the same two dozen episodes, making me wonder if the show's staff is very, very selective about what's considered "best" or if they lost most of their assets in a fire a long time ago.

By the '80s Don Cornelius had learned a thing or two about how to start off an interview, which meant fewer mind-boggling but highly entertaining faux pas like "Your new single sounds a lot like the last one" or "You look like you've put on some weight since I last saw you." That second comment was made to Village People producer Jacques Morali, who was French (he died in 1991), so I'm not sure he fully comprehended what the Soul Train host and former Chicago radio personality was saying to him. Too bad he didn't reply in pidgin English, "And I see that you are still, uh, how you say ... socially awkward, yes?"

According to Wikipedia's list of Soul Train episodes, the September 20 rerun will be from December 15, 1984, with Donna Summer and the Staple Singers as the guest performers. After that you'll only be able to hear the sooooooooooul train in the distance until Trifecta Entertainment & Media finds it a new home.

classics

Paul Westerberg wasn't the only artist to give his fans almost-free music this summer. On Friday, July 25, California rapper Murs released Sweet Lord for free over the Internet. It's his third collaboration with producer 9th Wonder, following 2004's Murs 3:16: The 9th Edition and 2006's Murray's Revenge. Sweet Lord isn't up to the level of Murray's Revenge, but it would've been tough for Murs and 9th Wonder to have reached that peak again. Besides, it gives the listener more hooks than Westerberg's 49:00, and in less time.

Though Sweet Lord was free, donations were accepted. I gave $10, partly because Murray's Revenge is one of my favorite albums of the past few years, but I heard it through a free promotional copy at work, which I still have. I feel a little guilty about that, so I was happy to donate.

Earlier this week I bought Classic, the 2005 album by Living Legends, a rap collective of which Murs is a member, along with Luckyiam, Sunspot Jonz, the Grouch, Scarub, Eligh, Bicasso, and Aesop. I heard tracks from Classic last summer at work thanks to a departed coworker whose computer still contained all the music he'd loaded onto the hard drive. Classic has a half dozen or so terrific cuts, including "Blast Your Radio," on which Murs declares that Beverly Cleary's The Mouse and the Motorcycle is a classic (I wonder if he's a Judy Blume fan too); the soulful, sultry "Good Fun"; and "Down for Nothin'," which drips paranoia and seething anger ("He's always up to somethin' ... / Forever huntin' someone / Screw over loved ones"). Classic also contains "Even Though," the best rap breakup song I've heard. The chorus is "Even though we don't get along, I still love you," sung in unison by the Living Legends at their most wistful.

On "Blast Your Radio," one of the Living Legends (sorry, I can't tell whose voice is whose except for Murs's) says, "Now, just because it's retro don't mean that it's classic / Just because it's classic don't mean it ain't brand-new." Another Legend responds, "That's true / The Love Below was new, I considered it a classic / Like a pickle made by Vlasic." I'll give it a few more years, but I'd wager that Classic already is.

In the future Paul Westerberg will be famous again for 49 minutes (and one second).

On Saturday, July 19, Paul Westerberg released 49:00 through Amazon.com, charging only 49 cents for his latest album. Except it's not really an album—it's a single MP3, with no track listing and no breaks between songs, and some of the songs are just fragments, with one fragment playing on top of another in certain spots. 49:00 isn't 49 minutes long, either—it lasts 43 minutes and 55 seconds. But Westerberg is 49 years old. Except he's not—he turns 49 later this year.

Paul Westerberg is a mystery wrapped in a riddle, smothered with beef and cheese inside a crunchy enigma shell.

On Tuesday, August 5, Westerberg completed the puzzle, at least in terms of 49:00's length: he released a new MP3 called "5:05," which can be bought at Tunecore.com for either 99 cents or $5.05, depending on how much you want to support Westerberg, I guess. Add 5:05 to 43:55 and you've got 49 minutes. Except "5:05" actually runs five minutes and six seconds. Intentional? I'm not sure.

Amazon stopped offering 49:00 for purchase on Thursday, July 31, after less than two weeks, supposedly because Westerberg infringed on some copyrights by covering the Beatles' "Hello Goodbye," Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild," and Elton John's "Rocket Man," though only a few seconds of each song are heard. (In the last few seconds of "5:05," he sings the first line of the Beatles' "Oh! Darling," which J. Neas at Aquarium Drunkard sees as a sly acknowledgment of 49:00 being pulled as well as a reminder from Westerberg that his old band, the Replacements, copied the melody of "Oh! Darling" note for note in their song "Mr. Whirly" 25 years ago.) He does sing the majority of the Partridge Family's "I Think I Love You," an example of the type of AM bubblegum Westerberg fell in love with as a child. Could it be that Reuben Kincaid is behind all this?

No one seems to know the real reason for 49:00's disappearance from the digital marketplace, but it wasn't sold as a "protected" MP3 like the kind you buy from iTunes, which means anyone can e-mail it to their friends and post it on their websites, making it a collector's item only in spirit.

Earlier this week Westerberg released two new MP3s to add to the mystery of his recent output: "Finally Here Once" is three minutes and 27 seconds long, and "3oclockreep" runs 20 minutes and eight seconds, which qualifies it for status as an EP all by itself, if you ask me. They can be bought together for $3.99 at Tunecore. When "5:05" was released and made available for 99 cents or $5.05, 49:00 had already been removed from Amazon, leading some buyers to think that if they paid $5.05 at Tunecore they'd receive 49:00 in addition to "5:05." They didn't. They paid more than five dollars for one song. Westerberg's funny that way.

I haven't heard the two new releases, but I did buy 49:00 in July, and I got "5:05" for free off of a music blog. Sorry, Paul, but the irony is that I wouldn't have minded paying 99 cents for "5:05," since it's better than anything on "43:55."

Not that I'm complaining about paying 49 cents for an album-length MP3. But 49:00's most memorable hooks are provided by another Paul—McCartney—and a fake band created for a TV sitcom almost 40 years ago. I thought I remembered reading an interview with Westerberg last spring, when the first wave of Replacements reissues came out, in which he said that he didn't have plans for a new album but that he had recorded a bunch of new material and passed it along to his manager to see what he wanted to do with it. Maybe I imagined that. But in an interview with Billboard.com in April, Westerberg did say that his manager and he "are kicking around the idea of selling the [new] songs online, having like a song of the month club. That might be the best way."

Well, 49:00 does contain some songs, but I'd rather hear a proper album and pay $12 for it. The last one Westerberg recorded, Folker, came out in 2004, and though it has its share of filler like any other Westerberg album (he's the first to admit it), songs like "Anyway's All Right," "What About Mine?," and "Folk Star" are as good as anything he's recorded since the Replacements broke up in 1991, and "My Dad," a tribute to his father, who died in 2003, is a genuine tearjerker that avoids cheap sentiment.

Westerberg is the best lyricist of his generation, and "As Far as I Know," my favorite song on Folker, shows he hasn't lost his gift: "I'm in love with a face that I've never seen / Once upon a place, long time ago / I'm in love with a time that never took place, that's easy to trace / As far as I know." For anyone who's ever worried that they'll never find "the one" or worried that they've already peaked in life and it's all downhill from here, Westerberg elegantly reminds us that "the one" is a myth and the glory years we long to return to have been filtered through the forgiving haze of nostalgia. The title of the Replacements' 2006 best-of sums up that second point the best: Don't You Know Who I Think I Was?

Folker was the fifth album Westerberg had put out in a span of just over two years: Stereo and Mono were released in 2002, and Come Feel Me Tremble and Dead Man Shake came out the following year. Mono and Dead Man Shake bore the name of Westerberg's pseudonym, Grandpaboy, which he uses when he wants to release some lo-fi, ballad-free "rawk." But almost everything Westerberg's released since 2002, either under his own name or Grandpaboy's, has been pretty down and dirty, even the ballads. He records by himself in his basement at home in Minneapolis, generally using the first take, even if the tape runs out before the end of the song, like on Stereo's "Don't Want Never." Even 1996's Eventually, which seems to be considered the slickest of Westerberg's solo albums by critics and fans, includes a major flub that thankfully wasn't edited out: on "Hide N Seekin'," there's a long pause between the first and second verses, as if Westerberg has forgotten the words.

49:00 takes the DIY warts-and-all aesthetic as far as it should probably go, even if Westerberg does sound like he's having fun layering those song fragments on top of each other and skipping from one to another, creating the illusion of a radio dial being controlled by an impatient listener. Impatient for a memorable song, maybe?

Westerberg has said that he has attention deficit disorder, so this approach feels honest, but it doesn't compare with, say, the song suite on the second side of the Beatles' Abbey Road, or a real ADD-style album-length masterpiece like Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, a True Star (1973). On that album the listener is left with the impression that the artist has so many wonderful melodies in his head that he wants to get them all out right now before he forgets any of them, not that he's reached a dead end after only 60 seconds and is moving on because he's bored and thinks you probably are too. In the end 49:00 feels like an experiment, a storage shed of random thoughts being emptied out.

I assume that artists like Westerberg enjoy the freedom of releasing their music when they want in whatever format they want, without a record label telling them, "Your new album is amazing! Oh my God, Paul, you've outdone yourself. Seriously. No, really. But this one's going to need special care on the marketing side, so we're going to put it on the shelf for now, and we'll let you know once we've come up with a good strategy for selling it, okay?"

But the more I hear self-distributed music like 49:00, or Josh Rouse's last two albums, which were distributed through the Nettwerk label but paid for by Rouse, I wish these artists did have a label questioning some of their decisions and saying, "I don't hear a single." That sort of thing drives artists mad—always has, always will—but creative tension between artist and label, or artist and producer, can often lead to stellar results.

Geffen Records financed Aimee Mann's Bachelor No. 2 but never released it. When it finally came out in 2000, after several years on the shelf, it was through Mann's own label, SuperEgo. Near the end of 1995 Mann released her second solo album, I'm With Stupid, through Geffen, but it'd been financed by Imago Records, which went bankrupt in 1993 right after releasing her first album, Whatever. It took two years for Mann to get out of her contract with Imago and shop I'm With Stupid to other labels. (The album's title was a dig at Imago, though Mann would soon be calling Geffen stupid as well.) Previously she'd been absent from the music scene for three years as she attempted to get out of her contract with Epic Records, the label she was on with her former band, 'Til Tuesday.

It's easy to see why Mann doesn't like dealing with major labels; anger and frustration sometimes lead to creative breakthroughs, but not many artists willingly seek out collaborators or superiors who want to infuriate them. After Geffen executives heard Bachelor No. 2 for the first time and didn't like what they heard, they sent Mann back to the studio to record some potential singles. She came up with "Red Vines" and "Nothing Is Good Enough," the latter a relationship song that was also directed at Geffen ("Nothing is good enough for people like you / Who have to have someone take the fall / And something to sabotage / Determined to lose it all").

The thing is, those are two of the best songs on Bachelor No. 2. Mann had been forced to come up with new songs that could be played on the radio, and even if they didn't get played, she still succeeded in creating pop singles that didn't compromise or betray her songwriting talents. The push-pull had worked.

(Other successful examples of push-pull between artist and label are Wheat's sole release on Columbia Records, the 2003 album Per Second, Per Second, Per Second ... Every Second and Sara Bareilles's "Love Song," a 2007 single that's still going strong on radio this year, but it wouldn't even exist if Bareilles hadn't been asked by Columbia's sister label, Epic, to deliver a certain kind of single; she responded with an irresistible melody and ironic lyrics: "I'm not gonna write you a love song / 'Cause you asked for it / 'Cause you need one, you see.")

But when Geffen's parent company, Seagram Universal, bought Polygram in 1998 and consolidated its old and new assets, Geffen was lumped into a trio with Interscope Records and A&M Records. When Interscope-Geffen-A&M chairman Jimmy Iovine heard Bachelor No. 2 in 1999, he reportedly said, according to Mann, "Aimee doesn't expect us to put this record out as it is, does she? If Aimee just wants to put out a record for her fans, this is not the place to do it."

So she left, luckily without all the legal hassles she'd had when she left Epic and Imago, plus she now had an Oscar nomination for Best Song thanks to "Save Me," from the movie Magnolia (1999), whose hit soundtrack featured nine songs by Mann, four of which reappeared on Bachelor No. 2 six months later. Magnolia's writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, said he originally conceived of the soundtrack as an Aimee Mann mix tape because he was such a big fan of her work, even using a variation on the opening lines of her song "Deathly"—"Now that I've met you / Would you object to / Never seeing each other again?"—as dialogue in the film.

(I saw Mann on her "Acoustic Vaudeville" tour with Michael Penn and comedian Patton Oswalt shortly after Bachelor No. 2 came out. Worst concert experience of my life thanks to two women almost getting into a fight while Mann was singing "Wise Up." How appropriate. But the woman who started the fight was right, and the offending loud woman and her loud yuppie-scum friends left before the encore, even though it was clear they were there to hear just two songs, 'Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry" and Michael Penn's "No Myth." Both were played during the encore. Ha!)

Bachelor No. 2 earned a lot of critical acclaim, and Mann's follow-up, 2002's Lost in Space, was recorded and released without any label interference whatsoever. It also happened to be really really dull.

I'll admit that by the fall of '02 I'd gotten over the quarter-life malaise that'd attracted me to Mann's music in the first place, but if I'd been a label head at that time and she'd tried to pass Lost in Space off on me, I would've told her, "Sorry, but I only hear two or three songs worth keeping."

Rick Rubin, one of the music industry's most successful producers over the past 20 years, said in a New York Times profile last September that when artists come to him with new songs they've written, "Most people will write 10 songs and think, That's enough for a record, I'm done. When they play the songs for me, invariably the last two songs they've written are the best. I'll then say, 'You have two songs, go back and write eight more.'"

I can imagine that's painful for any artist to hear, whether a newbie or a veteran, but if it pushes the artist to dig deeper for better lyrics or melodies, he or she will be grateful in the end for the creative push, right? Well, maybe. Sometimes the end result isn't worth the pain that can go hand in hand with the creative process. I don't think any musician can completely erase memories of heated arguments with bandmates or producers (though drugs can help), just as they can't judge their work objectively from the inside looking out the way a listener can from the opposite direction.

Westerberg has produced his own work all by himself since Stereo and Mono in '02, and even Don Was, who coproduced 1999's generally ignored Suicaine Gratifaction with Westerberg, ended up using several of the singer's home demos on the finished product. Westerberg knows what he's doing at this point, but I'd still like to hear a proper album. (Between Folker and 49:00 he recorded some songs for the soundtrack to Open Season, a 2006 animated film, and Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? The Best of the Replacements included two new songs—both "Message to the Boys" and "Pool & Dive" were written by Westerberg around the time of the Replacements' breakup in '91 and are terrific additions to the band's resumé, a far cry from lackluster pseudo-reunions like Big Star's 2005 album In Space.)

In an interview with Pitchfork.com's Joshua Klein in April, Westerberg said the Replacements' best producer was Matt Wallace, who produced 1989's Don't Tell a Soul. "With Matt Wallace, we'd do 48 takes but use take two ... After a couple of weeks he realized that first take we came rolling in and did was the one that captured it rather than have us play 50 takes hoping the 50th would be great. It was not that way with us, and still isn't for me."

Klein then said, "A lot of people seem to pick the Replacements album they heard first as their favorite, since your songwriting is so consistent from record to record. If someone heard Don't Tell a Soul first, I could even imagine that being their favorite Replacements album."

Good grief, Charlie Brown: "I could even imagine that being their favorite." As a matter of fact, the band's next-to-last LP is the first Replacements album I heard, way back in 1991, courtesy of my older brother, and in many ways it still is my favorite.

Once I really started digging into the Replacements' discography in college in '95 I read that Don't Tell a Soul is considered by critics and fans to be their weakest album, but I still like it more than 1985's Tim, and I'm glad Westerberg has defended it, saying that the final mix of the album, which gives the songs their all-too-'80s cavernous drum sound, is what dates it, not the songs themselves.

I don't think Rhino's reissue of Don't Tell a Soul, which comes out next month, will include a bonus disc of the entire album unmixed, but I wonder if such a copy exists, sort of like the 2003 Let It Be ... Naked reissue of the Beatles' Let It Be, which stripped away Phil Spector's wall-of-sound production from the original album. (Of course, the Replacements recorded their own album called Let It Be in 1984, using that title as a nothing-is-sacred joke on their manager-producer, Peter Jesperson, a huge Beatles fan, but also because titles can't be copyrighted.)

Some fans saw Don't Tell a Soul as the Replacements' first blatant attempt at reaching for a radio hit, and "I'll Be You," one of their best songs, did reach #51 on the Billboard Hot 100. But as Joshua Klein acknowledged, the songwriting on Don't didn't deviate from previous releases, though Westerberg's writing did mature with each new release. It's a great album. Don't let that big-bam-boom drum sound fool you.

Besides, by the time Don't Tell a Soul came out, the Replacements were finally sobering up and delivering the kind of concert performances that fans of their music, not the rubberneckers who just wanted to see them fall down drunk onstage, had always hoped they could give on a consistent basis.

Or so I'd like to think.* After all, I was 13 at the time. I admit that it would've been something of a thrill to go to one of their shows and have absolutely no idea whether it was going to be a triumph or a disaster, but as bassist Tommy Stinson said in his own interview with Billboard.com in April, "When I get people coming up to me saying, 'I saw this show back when, and you guys were so f*cked up. You didn't even play any of your songs. It was the greatest show I ever saw' [laughs]. It's like, 'Well, dude, that just sounds bleak. How could that possibly have been the greatest show you ever saw? You must be really living a small life.'"

And as Klein pointed out in his Pitchfork interview with Westerberg, "When you were on, you disappointed the people who came to see you sloppy and falling down. When you were sloppy and falling down, you disappointed the people who came to see you on. You could never make everybody happy." Westerberg replied, "Lots of times we would try to balance it. We'd get up there wasted, but by the end of the set we'd sober up." He laughed, "We'd bring it together at the end!"

The best Replacements bootleg I know of is Shit, Shower & Shave. It contains portions of two concerts from the second leg of the Don't Tell a Soul tour, which found the band opening (unhappily, according to them) for Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. Six songs from the band's show on August 28, 1989, in Mansfield, Massachusetts, are included, as are 12 songs from the August 31 show in Bristol, Connecticut. (Happy 19th birthday, Bristol show!)

The Replacements sound terrific on both sets, especially the August 31 show, as they storm their way through classics like "Bastards of Young," "Alex Chilton," and "I'll Be You," while "The Ledge" sounds much more urgent live than it did on 1987's Pleased to Meet Me. Their cover of Chuck Berry's "Around and Around" (titled "Round and Round" on the back cover of Shit, Shower & Shave, like David Bowie's version) has a swagger I don't think they could have managed if they'd been wasted. Here they don't end songs early like on bootlegs I've heard from the Tim and Pleased to Meet Me tours, where they're too drunk to remember all the chords and lyrics and try to blame the lighting guy for breaking their concentration.

They're also funnier when they're sober. For instance, when Stinson does pass along some constructive criticism to the lighting guy, it's "Hey, Joe, I don't want no spotlights tonight. I don't feel very pret-ty." And right before "Around and Around," which the Rolling Stones covered on 12 x 5 in 1964, Westerberg tells the crowd, "The Rolling Stones are playing in Philadelphia tonight. But we're better, so fuck 'em."

During "Nightclub Jitters"—the Replacements do stumble their way through this one, but it's charming, not frustrating—Stinson does his Axl Rose impression, which he repeated at the Replacements' final show in Chicago on July 4, 1991, captured on the It Ain't Over 'Til the Fat Roadies Play bootleg. (Chris Mars had angrily left the band before their final tour. He was replaced by Steve Foley, who died of an accidental overdose of prescription medication last weekend in Minneapolis.) Ironically, in 1998 Stinson joined Rose's band, Guns n' Roses, whose new album still hasn't been released, even though recording allegedly began in 1995. Stinson told reporters earlier in the decade that the eccentric Rose is much easier to work with than Westerberg, who replied in an interview with Harp magazine in 2004, "Wouldn't Van Gogh be more difficult than Norman Rockwell?"

The bootleggers behind Shit, Shower & Shave were also nice enough to include the entire Inconcerated promotional EP from Sire Records that came out in '89 after Don't Tell a Soul was released. It includes five songs recorded at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on June 2, 1989. (I bought Shit, Shower & Shave six years ago in Athens, Georgia. Come to think of it, I bought it on Friday, August 30, 2002. Happy belated sixth birthday, 8/30/02! Who knew there'd be so many birthdays to celebrate today ...)

I'll end this long, long one-sided conversation with one final quote from Westerberg, who told Joshua Klein that the trick to making timeless music "is doing it in a hurry without thinking about it." 49:00 certainly doesn't sound like it was fussed over for very long, but Westerberg's written so much timeless music, especially as the Replacements' frontman, that I can easily forgive him for a time-consuming, interference-free head-scratcher or two every now and then.

* I thought wrong. According to Bob Mehr's terrific biography, Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements (Da Capo Press, 2016), Chris Mars had started to sober up by the time of the Don't Tell a Soul tour, but the rest of the band was still drinking heavily. Westerberg wasn't sober until the band's tour to support All Shook Down, its final album, in 1991.

new/old music to look forward/backward to this fall

I found out yesterday from Jeff Giles at Popdose that the Lemonheads are planning to release a new album next month. I knew there was talk of Evan Dando and his revolving-door bandmates releasing something in '08, but I hadn't heard anything official.

It turns out the new album is a holding-pattern type of release—titled Varshons, it contains 11 covers, or versions, including Gram Parsons's "I Just Can't Take It Anymore," which the Lemonheads have been playing in concert for a while now, and Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful." That one may seem like an odd choice at first, but almost from the beginning the Lemonheads have covered songs originally sung by women—Suzanne Vega's "Luka," Linda Ronstadt's "Different Drum" (performed with the Stone Poneys), Patience and Prudence's "Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now," Whitney Houston's "How Will I Know." I could listen to Dando sing the phone book, so Varshons will be required listening, but I was hoping for a new album of original songs. Dando's never been a prolific songwriter, though—4 of the 11 songs on 2006's The Lemonheads were by other writers—so I'll take what I can get.

In addition to the Lemonheads' new album—which doesn't have a firm release date, so it may not come out next month after all—new releases and new reissues by several other artists I flipped for in college a dozen years ago, back when people still used phone books, will be coming out this fall. Ben Folds's Way to Normal comes out September 30, his first album of new material in three years, and Todd Rundgren's Arena comes out the same day, his first album since 2004's Liars. There's also George Clinton and His Gangsters of Love, which hits shelves September 16 and features a cameo from the once-great Sly Stone, who hasn't appeared on a record since 1987, I think. Since no new Sly and the Family Stone album is forthcoming, and since the band is still canceling concerts at the last minute after all these years, including one in Chicago back in April, fans have to take what they can get from Clinton's album.

Unlike the Family Stone, the Replacements haven't reunited in a new configuration, which is a good thing, but their four albums for Sire Records, which came out between 1985 and 1990, will be reissued by Rhino with bonus tracks on September 23. And a box set called Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia comes out October 21, featuring the usual Philadelphia International Records classics but also tracks that Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff produced before they founded PIR, plus songs that Thom Bell wrote and produced for Philly groups like the Spinners, Delfonics, and Stylistics.

an uncomfortable fit

In June an advance copy of Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III showed up at work a few days before the album "dropped" (yeah, I'm hip to the lingo) and soon became the first album since 2005 to sell more than a million copies in one week. 

I listened to it, mostly because I knew nothing about Lil Wayne beyond magazine articles in which certain hip-hop peers of his claimed he's one of the best rappers around right now. Well, Tha Carter III didn't do much for me, but the one song I liked, "Comfortable," features Babyface, the real king of pop in the '90s (face the facts, Michael). As a producer Babyface was all over the radio back then, shepherding megahits like Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" and Eric Clapton's "Change the World," and as a performer he racked up a bunch of hits himself on the pop and R&B charts ("Whip Appeal," "When Can I See You").

On "Comfortable" Babyface provides the vocal "hook," and if it was his song alone and he had a chance to write some verses to go along with the chorus, it'd probably be terrific. As it stands, it's merely a good song, because Lil Wayne raps the verses. Aside from the line "Don't I treat you like soufflé?" his lyrics aren't a crime, to paraphrase a Babyface single from 1989, but there should be a rule for rappers whose songs utilize the talents of actual singers: Do not add your singing on top of your guest's. Babyface can sing. Lil Wayne cannot. He can grunt, but he sounds like he's out of breath throughout "Comfortable," and if you can't breathe then you shouldn't sing, especially if you're singing over Babyface near the end of the track. This isn't karaoke, dammit. It's as if Babyface's obnoxious nephew snuck into his recording studio late at night and decided to play a prank by overdubbing his wheezing onto one of Uncle 'Face's finished songs.

Remember when pop/R&B/"new jack swing" songs in the early '90s would feature a guest rapper in the slot where pop songs would feature guitar solos? Songs like Christopher Williams's "I'm Dreamin'" and Michael Jackson's "Black or White," both from '91, usually didn't credit the rapper in those days the way they're spotlighted now, with their names prominently listed on the back covers of albums and on iTunes after the ubiquitous abbreviation "feat." (For the record it was L.T.B. on the latter song, while the New Jack City soundtrack's liner notes don't list any performer besides Williams on "I'm Dreamin'.")  

And these days rappers constantly show up on each other's tracks or pop and R&B singers' tracks, sometimes making a name for themselves through cameos before releasing songs of their own. The reverse is also true, as is the case with Babyface adding class to "Comfortable." I wonder if guest rappers formed a union sometime in the late '90s after years of missing out on lucrative royalty checks. (Gangsta rappers belong to Local 187, of course.)

Tha Carter III didn't make me a fan of Lil Wayne, but judging by those first-week sales, he's got plenty already. And I have to give the self-described alien credit for one thing: "Comfortable" is more memorable than anything on Babyface's 2007 album Playlist. Would his cover of an easy-listening chestnut like "Fire and Rain" have been enhanced by Lil Wayne adding "Baby, I'm your friend / You ain't gotta pretend / We go together like the Colonel's special blend"? Maybe it's time for Wayne to actually sneak into Babyface's studio and find out.

"It's not easy being easy."

A guy I passed on the street last night was wearing a T-shirt with that adorable phrase written across the front. I didn't turn around to see if the back of the shirt said, "This syphilis ain't gonna cure itself, people."

I did some more summertime spring cleaning over the weekend, so here are three more completed drafts from a while back.

5/13: sea, air, land ... and love
5/19: Don't do drugs, especially the ones that have 500 different nicknames.
7/16: "Boy, 12, slices off friend's ear"

old news about an old person

The following Associated Press story is from February 16, 2008. It's worth a read.

Singer, 104, takes stage amid protests

By Toby Sterling

Several dozen people protested outside a theater Saturday where a 104-year-old singer who once performed for Adolf Hitler took the stage in the Netherlands for the first time in four decades.

Johannes Heesters was never accused of being a propagandist or anything other than an actor who was willing to perform for the Nazis, and the Allies allowed him to continue his career after the war. But in his native country he is viewed by some as irredeemable.

"He kept singing for the Nazi regime, for the Wehrmacht, and he earned millions," said Piet Schouten, representative of a committee formed to protest Heesters' performance at De Flint theater in Amersfoort.

"Those are facts and we have a problem with that on behalf of all the victims" he told national broadcaster NOS.

In 1964, Heesters was booed off the stage in Amsterdam when he tried to appear as Nazi-hating Captain von Trapp in "The Sound of Music."

No disturbances were reported during Saturday's concert in Amersfoort, where Heesters was born in 1903.

Heesters, who lives in Germany, has been a popular figure in German-language cabaret since the 1930s. On Saturday, he performed "The Merry Widow," the German song that made him famous, and "There by the Windmill," a Dutch classic, among others. At times he asked his wife, on stage with him, to remind him of lines but his voice was steady.

Around 50 demonstrators gathered outside. A handful of neo-Nazis also turned up — uninvited — to support Heesters, and several were detained by police after throwing eggs at the demonstrators.

Concertgoers were forced to submit copies of their passports and undergo airport-style security scans before being allowed to enter the theater, which seats 800.

Many of Heesters' critics focus on a visit his theater company made to Dachau in 1941. He had never disclosed the visit, but it became known when photos of him with Nazi soldiers were published in 1978.

One of the protesters carried a banner reading "my grandfather was in Dachau too."

Heesters says he didn't perform for the soldiers and didn't know about conditions at the concentration camp.

After the war "I was ashamed of myself and I still haven't stopped feeling this way," Heesters wrote in his autobiography. "I am angry with myself for being gullible, credulous and naive."

In an editorial, Dutch newspaper Trouw wrote Saturday that "the stain will always remain, but Heesters is welcome home in the Netherlands — it's nice that he's appearing here 104 years after his birth."

"It's all too easy for people today, most of whom grew up after the war, to pass judgment on the collaborators then," the paper wrote. "What would we do under comparable circumstances?"

Faux gangsters make me thirsty.

Before Mean Streets' Harvey Keitel pitched Gatorade ...



... before A Bronx Tale's Chazz Palminteri hawked Vanilla Coke ...



... and before Scarface's Robert Loggia shilled for Minute Maid ...



... there was a pre-Sopranos Tony Sirico using his powers of persuasion to make you buy Dunkin' Donuts coffee.



If all does not continue to go well in their movie careers, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and James Gandolfini's series of Sierra Mist commercials should begin airing sometime in the next decade.

"Black Baby Born into Southern Klan Family Inspires Love and Hatred in Tale of Homosexuality and Redemption"

Hmm ... racism, homosexuality, redemption, a southern setting—you've got my attention, press release for a self-published novel. Tell me more.

Elijah, the protagonist in the book by the same name, is a black baby born into a white southern Klan family. His father hates the child and plans to kill him and the mother. The seven-year-old brother challenges the father and saves the child, hiding Elijah in a dark basement.

Alright, so far so good.

There, Elijah is visited by the ghosts of great composers and is taught by them.

Well, that's a twist I didn't see coming, but sure, I'll go along with it. Continue.

He becomes a child prodigy, and he and his brother Joshua ultimately become lovers.

Wait, why does he become lovers with—

Elijah's future father also becomes Elijah's lover and is able to help guide Elijah to a happy and useful life.

Wait wait wait, slow down—he has sex with his brother and his adoptive father? Now, I am a southerner who'd get it on with a cousin just to keep a proud, offensive regional stereotype alive ("Always keep them yankees guessing" is my motto), but nuclear-family incest crosses the line, even in salacious self-published novels.

See, when I was visited by the ghost of To Kill a Mockingbird film composer Elmer Bernstein last year, he specifically told me, "Homosexuality's no big deal, but incest is bad bad bad. Avoid it at all costs. Even if your sister looked like Natalie Wood in her prime, it'd still be a dicey proposition." And what if you're a guy and your brother looks like a young Robert Redford? Or your adoptive dad looks like a late-'70s Warren Beatty? "That bastard still owes me money!"

Obviously a sore subject for Mr. Bernstein's ghost. I didn't bring it up again, and he hasn't visited since. And I'm still not a 32-year-old child prodigy of film-score composing, so thanks for nothin', Elmer. But, you know ... rest in peace and all.

I'd forgotten the real reason why Morgan Freeman has an agenda.

It's so obvious. It's because he's God.

In 2003's Bruce Almighty and 2007's Evan Almighty, Freeman plays God. Or, rather, he plays the role of God. Yes, it's another case of the Oscar winner being typecast as a wise old black man, but at least in these two movies he plays the wisest and oldest black man of them all. I haven't seen either one, but now I'm beginning to wonder if Freeman ad-libbed lines about Americans liking bad food and bad TV. Never stop pushing that agenda of yours, sir.

This summer Freeman's starring in The Dark Knight alongside Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, and Michael Caine, and in Wanted opposite Angelina Jolie. On July 18 everyone at work received an e-mail from the head of the IT department in Atlanta that read: "Don't open any e-mails that talk about nude photos of Angelina Jolie. They will appear to come from either yourself or someone you have e-mail'd previously."

Thanks, but as Morgan Freeman is my witness, I'm pretty sure I'd remember sending nude photos of Angelina Jolie to myself.

spotted on a street corner under a tree at the end of my block

A shoe, an empty two-liter bottle of Fanta, a cassette case for the Phantom of the Opera original cast recording (cassette missing), and two empty condom wrappers. I didn't realize Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber was going to be in Chicago this weekend, but he's clearly on the prowl.

Batmania 1989 vs. Batmania 2008

Nineteen years ago the first Batman film made $100 million in ten days, setting a record. It also had the biggest opening weekend of all time: $42 million. But that was 1989. Now The Dark Knight, the sixth Batman film but only the second in director Christopher Nolan's "reboot" of the franchise, stands to make $300 million in ten days, after a record-breaking opening weekend of $158 million.

Nolan's first Batman film, 2005's Batman Begins, made $205 million in its theatrical run. The general rule used to be that a sequel was expected to earn 60 percent of its predecessor's box office take, with diminishing returns each time out. But that rule changed earlier this decade, as far as I can tell, when sequels like Rush Hour 2 (2001), The Mummy Returns (2001), X2 (2003), and Shrek 2 (2004) all topped the first installments in their franchises. Shrek 2 is the most striking example: 2001's Shrek made $267 million, which is nothing to be ashamed of, but Shrek 2 made $441 million three years later.

Below is the New York Times article from July 4, 1989, that talks about Batman's record-breaking gross 19 years ago. Remember when $100 million was the magic number for a movie to gross in theaters? Now franchise films routinely cost that much or more (The Dark Knight has a production price tag of $185 million), and grossing $100 million in just three days seems almost commonplace.

'Batman' Sets Sales Record: $100 Million in 10 Days
By Aljean Harmetz 

Inexorably swooping down on movie audiences for the second weekend in a row, ''Batman'' continues to dominate the box office. The movie broke another record on Sunday. In just 10 days, the movie, from Warner Brothers, has sold $100.2 million worth of tickets, breaking the record of ''Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,'' which reached $100 million on its 19th day.

At Warner Brothers, normally the most phlegmatic of studios, executives boiled over with emotion—grinning, joking, and describing the weekend as ''Batweek No. 2.''

Barry Reardon, the president of distribution at the studio, is predicting that ''Batman'' will sell a minimum of $250 million worth of tickets. The studio says its research shows that 13- to 18-year-olds are already going back to see the movie three and four times. It is this repeat business that propels a movie into the Top 10. Although it is far too early to tell whether ''Batman'' will challenge ''E. T.'' and ''Star Wars,'' the two most successful movies ever made, Mr. Reardon said he thought it would pass ''Return of the Jedi'' for third place.

Predictions of Success

Mr. Reardon said that by Friday ''Batman'' will have earned $90 million in film rentals, that portion of the ticket sales that is returned to a movie's distributor. The most successful movies ever produced by Warner Brothers were ''The Exorcist,'' which had film rentals of $89 million and ''Superman'' with film rentals of $82.8 million.

The top movies at the box office last weekend were ''Batman'' with ticket sales of $30 million, Disney's ''Honey, I Shrunk the Kids'' ($13.1 million), Columbia's ''Karate Kid III'' ($10.4 million), Columbia's ''Ghostbusters II'' ($9 million), Paramount's ''Indiana Jones'' ($7 million) and Disney's ''Dead Poets Society'' ($6.7 million).

Of the three movies that opened last weekend, Orion's ''Great Balls of Fire'' is considered dead, having grossed a paltry $3.9 million in 1,417 theaters.

'Do the Right Thing' Does Well

By contrast, Universal's ''Do the Right Thing,'' Spike Lee's disturbing comedy about good intentions and racial violence, sold $3.5 million worth of tickets in just 353 theaters. Universal's research shows that ''Do the Right Thing,'' which has gotten glowing reviews, is playing equally well in black and white neighborhoods. The big question is whether the movie will continue to do well when it broadens to 1,000 theaters.

Although ''Karate Kid'' made more than $10 million at 1,560 theaters, its future does not look bright. The movie took in less money on Saturday than it did on Friday, something which happens only when a movie has bad word of mouth.

The major disappointments of the summer so far are Clint Eastwood's ''Pink Cadillac,'' which has grossed less than $12 million for Warner Brothers, and Paramount's ''Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,'' which continues to sink. ''Star Trek III,'' the weakest of the first four films in the series, brought Paramount $39 million in film rentals, or close to $80 million at the box office. (A studio usually ends up with 50 percent of the box-office receipts.) ''Star Trek V'' has reached $42.4 million in ticket sales.