Thanks Again to Magnet Magazine For Giving Me All That Indie Rock

The music rag Magnet is my absolute favorite magazine in existence today. But one of its columnists, Andrew Earles, seems to have gone a bit off the deep end in recent years. I really don't like a lot of his "street team" writing. That's why I was skeptical going into reading his new book, Gimme Indie Rock.

It's a survey, or his opinion, of the 500 best indie rock albums since indie rock began, according to him, in the late 1970s. Or more accurately, Earles only includes albums between 1981 and 1996, no matter how much it pains him to leave out the one classic Feelies album. He rightly describes indie rock as a combination of pop hooks and sonic distortion. He also notes that the true heyday of indie rock was 1986 to 1996, also something I agree with largely.

The book is laid out alphabetically. And when I started reading and listening to the music Earles suggested, I was pleasantly surprised to find that he was suggesting a lot of indie bands I had not really listened to. And several of them are so good that I'm rushing out to buy this book. I love his writing style in Gimme Indie Rock. It's nothing at all like his column in Magnet, which is the only thing I skip in the magazine each month.

The first album Earles lists is by 100 Flowers, which he compares to Wire, the Mekons, and Alternative TV. I only really like Wire of those three, but this self-titled 1983 album is really good.

I am a huge fan of Slint, which Earles accurately compares A Minor Forest to. So it's really surprising that I never heard the album that he suggests. Moving on, the next band is Adickded, which is a noisy punk trio of Pacific Northwest women, also equally surprisingly good.

Shortly after these reviews, Earles gives multiple-album credit to some of my favorite bands, like Afghan Whigs and Archers of Loaf. So even though he says that some of the bands and albums included are not necessarily his favorites or the most influential, he's really done his research. It's really impressive, and I hope to find a couple of hundred albums out of the 500 selections he examines to add to my library.

Thanks again Magnet, as always.

Need Some Cale? Read My Letter Printed in Magnet Magazine

For the third time in the past year, my favorite music magazine has published a letter from me. The letters don't appear on Magnet's website, but I opened it up at my mailbox today and found my screed about John Cale of the Velvet Underground.

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Thanks so much for having "A Conversation with John Cale." What a breathe of fresh air from all the other "old rockers" who appear on the pages of Rolling Stone and other music magazines. 

Ever since soon after the moment in the 1980s when I heard my older brother's copy of New Sensations by Lou Reed (still way underrated, despite the dink-pop elements), I have included the Velvet Underground in my pantheon of favorites. But despite digging deep into Lou Reed's unstoppable catalog, I had never given his former bandmate Calemuch of a chance until this past year. And now I can't stop listening.

How in the world has he floated relatively under-the-radar for so long? Perhaps he drifts too far into proggy Emerson, Lake, and Palmer territory from time to time, but my god, this man has so much incredible music! I keep being floored by song after song in his extremely diverse catalog. Sometimes he's like the best Of Montreal, often like David Byrne, and always powerfully creative and with hooks galore spread throughout his avant-garde stylings.

There is literally something for everyone with Cale. With the added benefit of having tons of great new material, something that is highly debatable with the likes of Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan.

Magnet Prints My Letter About Evan Dando of The Lemonheads

In this day and age in which I get almost all my magazine subscriptions and books on my iPad, it's still somehow thrilling when a magazine arrives by snail mail.

My very favorite magazine, a music-related one called Magnet, arrived the other day and I was reading the letters-to-the-editor section when ... lo and behold ... halfway through reading one letter, I glanced down at the name of the writer and it was ... me!

I had completely forgotten even writing the letter. This is the second time since Magnet recently rebooted as a monthly (rather than six times a year) that a letter of mine has been published. I was making the case for Evan Dando of The Lemonheads to get a little more love for his brilliant pop art, despite a semi-incoherent recent interview he granted to Magnet.

Here's my letter, and thanks for printing it, Magnet!

I'm not sure Neil Ferguson's piece on Evan Dando is totally fair, although I like his quote from Ben Lee about how the Lemonheads' leader's voice is beautiful honey reminiscent of Frank Sinatra. Dando is no doubt quirky and eccentric, but that is simply part of the many allures of the man and his vastly underrated musical legacy. I've hung out with Dando several times after shows and he is a total sweetheart. He even let me play his acoustic guitar after a show last year in Arlington, Virginia. It's refreshing to see a rock star act curmudgeonly and "real" around a fine journalist instead of spouting athlete-like cliches.

Now This is Americana! The World's Largest Catsup Bottle

This 5-minute video is awesome, especially for those of us who spent our youth passing from my hometown of Edwardsville, Illinois through Collinsville, and into Fairview Heights, where the mall was located.

The World's Largest Catsup Bottle rested along that path. It was always completely natural to the landscape. It never seemed out of place and we never questioned it. Who knew there wasn't one of these creative and colorful water towers every 50 miles or so along the highways and byways of America?

I kind of feel the same way about Edwardsville as alt-country rocker Chris Mills feels about his hometown of Collinsville. This is what he said at one of my favorite music sites, Magnet.

Mills: I used to talk a lot of trash about my hometown. But Collinsville, Ill., isn’t actually all that bad. It’s relatively safe. The friends I still have there and people I still know are all pretty awesome. The school system wasn’t that great, but it got me where I am today. I’m sure that its proportion of less-than-progressive gun-toters is not that far above or below the national average for towns of its size and general geographic location. But regardless of my feelings about growing up there, Collinsville does have one amazing, magical thing that no place else in the world has: The World’s Largest Catsup Bottle. It was built in 1949 as a water tower for the Brooks Catsup factory, and for the majority of my youth, it was just a rusty, dilapidated shadow of what I imagined it once might have been. But in 1995, the local community rallied together to stave off the tower’s impending demolition and managed to restore the giant condiment container to its former glory. I think it has even been declared a historic landmark or something.