Best Magazine Reads: 10 nuggets from Rolling Stone's profile of the EPA's evil Scott Pruitt

There is a lot of incompetence in Donal Trumpland these days, but perhaps nobody should boil the blood of voters more than his EPA appointee.

Rolling Stone's Jeff Goodell profiled all his flat-out wicked deeds in Scott Pruitt's Crimes Against Nature, in its August 10 issue. It seems people wouldn't have to be classified as liberals or environmentalists to be terrified of this person's disregard for the EPA's core mission of "protecting human health and the environment," which has nothing to do with supposedly boosting the economy.

Here are 10 interesting nuggets from the article:

1. Pruitt claimed the U.S. pulled out of the Paris global climate accord because it's a plot by European nations to stifle our economy. That doesn't account for the fact that you can count which nations of the world aren't a part of it on far fewer than the fingers on one hand.
2. He claims that 50,000 coal-mining jobs have been created by the Trump Administration, even though only about 1,000 have been created in 2017, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Coal is dying and renewables are the future, creating jobs 12 times faster than dirty coal, but oil executives give a lot of money to corrupt politicians. Why portions of the public can't see that or can't be bothered to care continues to boggle my mind.
3. He hasn't met with any environment groups yet. Big oil executives are the only meetings he ever takes.
4. Very few, almost none, of the high-level EPA staffers have ever spoken to Pruitt or even gotten an email from him.
5. After taking $62,000 from the poultry industry in his run for Oklahoma attorney general, he won and dropped a lawsuit against several major chicken producers for dumping their waste into the Illinois River. His opponent took no money from the industry and lost badly. I sense a theme here: it's "go figure."
6. We often hear about his lawsuits against the EPA as attorney general. It's true, he filed 14 of them, including attempts to promote mercury pollution because "it doesn't pose public-health hazards" and promote more air pollution in national parks. Fun guy! Now you can basically be assured he's taking these similar kinds of stealth campaigns to a national, completely terrifying, level.
7. Pruitt views fossil fuels not as the remains of dead plants and animals  but as "God's gift to mankind. Let's use them to power the world."
8. One thing he's focused on at the EPA is removing climate data and scientific information from its website.
9. The good news is, as Jimmy Kimmel says, "Put simply, Scott Pruitt is a piece of shit," and his lack of loyalty from anyone within EPA extends outside of the agency, even to Republicans and major climate deniers who think he doesn't have the wits to get any of their priorities, good or bad, accomplished.
10. And back to the bad news, Pruitt is hoping to dismantle enough of the Earth as quickly as possible before he likely jumps the EPA ship in time to run for governor of Oklahoma in 2018 or for climate-boogeyman Jim Inhofe's Senate seat in 2020. 

Note to self, don't move to Oklahoma. And also maybe consider moving to Canada, where climate change won't be as harsh and as soon as it's set to be here at home.

Best Magazine Reads: 10 things I learned about Gregg Allman in Rolling Stone's tribute

Although blues and Southern rock have never been my top musical genres, I always really liked and respected the Allman Brothers. It's strange that I think of those as relatively joyful tunes (perhaps because I listened to them a lot in my care-free early 20s), when in fact leader Gregg Allman was a sorrowful, walking ghost for basically his entire life.

Personal details beyond the death of his bandmate and brother Duane in 1971 and his marriage to Cher have always been sparse. But the always-great Mikal Gilmore grabs some good ones in his tribute, "The Last Brother," in the June 29 issue of Rolling Stone.

1. Referring to Duane, Gilmore writes: "In the early Seventies, following one of the Allman Brothers Band's legendary three-hour shows, Gregg watched horror movies with the sound off, keeping an empty chair nearby. He maintained that a spirit sat in that chair. Into the last years of his life, he said he still heard from that ghost every night."
2. Gregg's father fought at Normandy in World War II and returned home with what would today be called post-traumatic stress. He was murdered on county road by a man who stole his car.
3. He couldn't stand racism or the Vietnam War, and he shot himself in the foot to get out of going.
4. After a falling out, and before Duane and Gregg got back together to form the Allman Brothers, Gregg was stuck playing out a contract with a pop band he hated in Los Angeles and even considered suicide while Duane had great success as a session musician back home in the south.
5. The band picked its name in a blind poll and it was unanimously the Allman Brothers.
6. Gregg hated that the last thing he ever said to Duane before his brother died in a motorcycle crash was a lie, denying that he had stolen Duane's cocaine when he really had.
7. The Allmans held a benefit concert to help their friend Jimmy Carter withstand the costs of the 1974 primaries. He probably made it to the presidency because of the band, and Gregg ate with Carter at his first meal in the White House.
8. Gregg met Cher in 1975 at the Troubadour in L.A. and thought she smelled like a mermaid would smell. On her singing though, he thought she was bad. The couple released what most would say was his worst album, as Allman and Woman.
9. The couple's tour didn't work, Gregg passed out in a plate of spaghetti, and they got divorced.
10. Despite the success of 1986's "I'm No Angel" and the 1989 reformation and tour of the Allman Brothers Band, Gregg hit his most rock bottom of drinking, until he gave a poor speech when being elected to the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame, and decided to quit drinking for good.

10 Things You Should Know About the Ramones, At Bare Minimum

I was never a super huge Ramones fan, although I did play their End of the Century LP pretty routinely as a kid. There's no denying that much of their material sounds very three-chord samey. The good news is that those samey songs are so darn catchy.

Rolling Stone Magazine recently has a cover feature by my favorite contemporary rock biographer, Mikal Gilmore. Here are the most interesting things the article told us about one of New York's finest, up there with the likes of the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, The Strokes, Television, De La Soul, Gumball, Steely Dan, Kiss, Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, Simon and Garfunkel, Madonna, Talking Heads, and Vampire Weekend.

1. All four original members are dead, and guitarist Johnny Ramone rarely ever talked with singer Joey Ramone over the course of the band's 22-year history.
2. Joey was diagnosed as schizophrenic in his teens and told he would be a vegetable, but he claims rock totally saved him. Cool.
3. Their name originated from Paul McCartney, who used to call himself Paul Ramon when checking into hotels to keep from being detected.
4. The reason they sounded so poppy was because they were way more influenced by bands like the Beach Boys and Bay City Rollers than other punkers like the Stooges and MC5.
5. Phil Spector produced End of the Century, insisting that the band stay at his mansion during the  sessions, and once pulling a gun on Dee Dee Ramone for attempting to leave.
6. Johnny's dying wish was that someone would de-Spectorize End of the Century.
7. Johnny took Joey's girlfriend away and married her.
8. Rolling Stone named the Ramones' 1976 self-titled album the best punk record ever.
9. Joey suffered from OCD and, already suffering from lymphoma, had to go retrace his steps one night and in the process fell and broke his hip. That caused his cancer treatments to be cancelled temporarily and it basically killed him at age 49 in 2001. Marky Ramone was the only band mate to come visit him at the hospital.
10. In 2002, Dee Dee died of a heroin overdose and in 2004, Johnny died of prostate cancer. Tommy died in 2015, also of cancer.

Cleveland Conference Week Begins With Rock Hall City

"In my waxed up hair and my painted shoes," in the words of The Replacements, who remain a major glaring omission from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and whom I proudly sported on my shirt, I was ready for my Labor Day visit to the museum here near my Westin hotel in Cleveland.

I knew the three-hour opening-night reception at Content Marketing World, the conference I'm here to attend (featuring John Cleese, Nick Offerman, and Barenaked Ladies, I might add), would not be enough time to tour what is pretty much my ultimate museum. And I was right. I spent six hours there, mostly on the bottom floor and also watching films about American Bandstand, the Hall's inductees, and how "video killed the radio star."

The tour begins with odds and ends like Joan Jett's first car (a sweet black Jaguar), the Fender bass of Mike Mills of R.E.M., and Alex Van Halen's ridiculous mega-bass drums.

I think I realized that music from the Midwest might actually be my favorite rock geography. I stood in awe viewing a collage of Replacements flyers, a contract to play CBGB's under the band name Gary and the Boners, a bill for damages they caused at a 1985 UC-Davis gig, and penned lyrics to "Bastards of Young" and "Here Comes a Regular."

The reason a case could be made for the Midwest (despite my obvious bias, being from St. Louis): along with the Mats in this exhibit are Soul Asylum, Husker Du, the Jayhawks, Prince, Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, Son Volt, Violent Femmes, Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins, Cheap Trick, Afghan Whigs, and Guided By Voices (criminally absent from even having a piece in the museum unlike all these bands that are not inducted but at least represented).

The facility gives plenty of space to Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles.

Run D.M.C.'s Adidas, Madonna's trend-setting jewelry, the school-boy suit of AC/DC's Angus Young, Elvis' military jacket, Stevie Wonder's sunglasses, Joey Ramone's leather jacket, Kurt Cobain's guitar, a piece of Pink Floyd's Wall, and Michael Jackson's glove are just some of the iconic artifacts not to be missed.

Also, I found the note from Charles Manson to Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner offering interview material in exchange for a jailhouse subscription to be charming.

If you love rock music as much as I do, buy yourself a ticket to Cleveland. I can't believe the place has been open here on the shore of Lake Erie since 1986 and this was my maiden landing.

Best Magazine Reads: Freddie Mercury Was the Messenger of the Gods

Although I've never been a massive Queen fan, catchy songs like "Killer Queen," "You're My Best Friend," and "Under Pressure" are undeniably high in the rock cannon.

And when writer Mikal Gilmore has an article in Rolling Stone, I know it's going to be loaded with nuggets about the debauchery of whichever classic-rock act he's researched. Here's what I learned recently about Queen:

1. I knew Freddie Mercury grew up in Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa because I visited the Freddie Mercury gift shop there while on honeymoon in 2005. But I didn't recall his real name growing up there was Farrokh Bulsara, or that he went by the nickname of "Bucky" because of his teeth, a topic he was sensitive about his whole life. Teachers, instead, began affectionately calling him Freddie and he embraced it.

2. With British Colonial rule ending in 1964, riots broke out in Zanzibar and Mercury's family moved to England right at the time it began swinging with the Beatles and Rolling Stones.

3. The name Mercury was a reference to the Roman messenger of the gods.

4. It took Mercury a long time to realize he was gay. He always thought he liked women. Even till the end of his life, he referred to Mary Austin, his personal secretary and advisor, as his common-law wife.

5. Queen stopped touring the U.S. after 1982 because its audiences were the least accepting of Mercury's flamboyant stage persona. As guitarist Brian May said, there was always some other place that loved them a lot more than America and could let them be themselves.

6. Mercury's feelings were hurt when nobody from the band was invited to participate in Bob Geldolf's "Do They It's Christmastime?" But Geldolf invited them to play Live Aid London in 1985 and the band stole the show.

7. One day after Mercury finally announced to the world that he had AIDS, he died at age 45. Aretha Franklin sang at his funeral and he was cremated. Mary Austin placed his ashes in a location that has never been announced.

Best Magazine Reads: Top 13 Factoids from Rolling Stone's KISS Cover Story

      KISS Double Platinum was the first CD I ever bought. It contains all the essential KISS tunes you need. Going much beyond that into deep album cuts and the band kind of loses its charm. That said, the band's top 15 to 20 songs is as good as any power pop or hair metal bands' top tunes. 

      The other side of KISS is the mythology, and Rolling Stone Magazine recently captured that extremely well in its lengthy cover feature. Here are my 13 favorite take aways:

1. Bassist Gene Simmons’ freakishly long tongue, he swears, is not “grafted in from some unlucky cow” but is indeed real.
2. Simmons and frontman Paul Stanley have always been ambitious and not self-destructive, while original drummer and “Beth” songwriter Peter Criss was fired in 1980 for his drug use and guitarist Ace Frehley quit soon thereafter to follow his cocaine, tranquillizer, and booze affectations.
3. The four KISS characters are Demon, Starchild, Spaceman, and Catman.
4. Simmons once managed Liza Minnelli’s acting career.
5. Stanley, not Simmons, is the true mastermind behind the band and has kept it functioning as a corporation for all these years.
6. Paul Stanley was born Stanley Eisen to a dysfunctional family. He was deaf in his right ear, with only a stump there, which caused a kindergarten bully to call him “Stanley the One-Eared Monster.” It was later reconstructed out of cartilage from his rib cage.
7. KISS started as a band called Wicked Lester. They quit that band because it wasn’t hooky enough. It needed to be more like Raspberries, Small Faces, and Big Star.
8. Paul Frehley was nicknamed “Ace” because there couldn’t be two Pauls in the band and that was what his friends called him due to his prowess with women.
9. Peter Criss was a young Italian Godfather type who claimed to have a huge penis.
10. Frehley designed the band’s logo.
11. Simmons’ mother was in a Nazi concentration camp.
12. Simmons had sex with nearly 5,000 women – “not all of them had two legs.” He never had a serious relationship until 1978, when he dated Cher and then later Diana Ross.
13. Criss once drank a bottle of perfume in a limo after he discovered it had alcohol in it. He also shot one of Simmon’s big-screen TVs with a .38 revolver “after learning his girlfriend had slept with an actor shown on the screen.”

Best Magazine Reads: 10 Groovy Tidbits About “How the Beatles Took America”

Rolling Stone’s January 16 cover story by the always-fabulous rock storyteller Mikal Gilmore amazingly offered plenty of perspective to the vents f late 1963/early 1964 that one would think we already long-ago knew about The Beatles.  

1. Manager Brian Epstein, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney made a bet on the plane over the ocean that “the Beatles would take America by storm," while Ringo Starr and George Harrison – who had visited his sister in Benton, Illinois in 1963 – said “they don’t know us, it’s going to be hard.”
2. The group stepped in at a time when rock n’ roll seemed to be dead. Buddy Holly had died, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry were blacklisted, Elvis had joined the Army, and rock DJ Alan Freed had been kicked off the radio.
3. By the end of 1963, The Beatles had five singles in the UK, three hit number one, and debut LP Please Please Me had been number one for 30 weeks, only to be replaced by With the Beatles.
4. Capitol Records in America had representatives who were not impressed. Newsweek, Time, and CBS Morning News all blasted the band without really knowing much of anything about them and before America had heard them. But a scathing commentary by CBS happened to air the same day that John F. Kennedy later got shot, and it was quickly forgotten. In England, With the Beatles was also being released on that busy November 22.
5. Gilmore makes a compelling argument that The Beatles stepped into the dark void left by Kennedy’s assassination to offer America another hope of youth and happiness.
6. Capitol soon had to give in and planned to release “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as a single in mid-January 1964 and would retitle With the Beatles as Meet the Beatles! When a 15-year-old girl from Silver Spring, Maryland saw a rebroadcast of the earlier CBS show, she requested that a local radio station play the song. The station got ahold of a British copy and aired it, and soon other U.S. station’s were getting mass requests. Capitol had to bump up the single’s release to December 26. By February 1, it was number one in America.
7. Bob Dylan heard it while driving in California and said he knew this was no teeny-bopper phase and that The Beatles were for real.
8. Two nights after landing in New York, Lennon’s microphone barely worked on The Ed Sullivan Show, so he and Harrison played to the audience while McCartney winked and smiled at the camera, perhaps making America initially think he was the sole lead singer of the band.
9. Their next show in America was in a boxing-arena-like setup at the Washington Coliseum in D.C. (which I pass not far from Union Station when riding the Metro’s Red Line to work). The band played with much more punk abandon than they had on the Sullivan show, with Starr in particular playing in a way (heavy on the cymbals) that helped the others keep beat through the torrents of crowd noise.
10. The exhaustion was starting to set in by the summer of 1964, when both the movie and LP of A Hard Day’s Night were released. Starr missed the first 10 dates of the tour due to tonsillitis, and his fill-in, Jimmy Nicol, said McCartney secretly disliked the crowds and focused on blonde women, Lennon drank so much his head swelled and he sweated profusely, and Harrison joined them all in having sex and partying every night.

Best Magazine Reads: 8 Reasons Why I Love Jon Hamm/Don Draper

I was reading a recent edition of Rolling Stone, and the cover story was on Jon Hamm, who, as Don Draper on Mad Men, is probably my favorite actor in a TV drama ever.

It was a pretty good article that probably could have been more revealing of its famously mysterious subject, but the article did at least capture much of what I consider the "8 reasons why I love Jon Hamm/Don Draper:"

1. Like me, he's a huge St. Louis Cardinals fan. Like me, he wears their team hat quite a bit. And unlike me, he was a power-hitting catcher growing up in St. Louis. I was a hitting-for-average first baseman growing up in St. Louis.

2. He plays fantasy football. Major props there. Not to mention that he's a former all-state linebacker.

3. He loves Budweiser (meh, I can only tolerate it BECAUSE I'm from St. Louis, but I'd much prefer a craft) and Wilco (now we're talking ... one of my favorite bands).

4. All the actors want to please Hamm on the Mad Men set because he's "like the dad" and "they really don't want to let him down."

5. He worked for 10 years in L.A. before getting his big break, at one point even earning a living as a set dresser on soft-core porn movies.

6. People see Don Draper and they see glamour and authority, apparently a lot of people see their fathers. But I agree with Elizabeth Moss, who plays Peggy Olsen, in that Draper is almost impossible to not stare at and be in awe of.

7. He likes Jeff Bridges as an actor. You have to like that. I mean, Bridges is the Big Lebowski.

8. Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield calls Mad Men the "greatest TV drama of all time, and it's not even close. Mad Men is to TV what The Godfather was to the movies."

I would have to second Sheffield's opinion.

Best Magazine Reads: Awesome Things I Learned (or Relearned) From the Jimmy Page Rolling Stone Interview

1. Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died in 1980 in guitarist Jimmy Page's house, strangled on his own vomit, after drinking 40 vodka shots. This was the end of the band, except for a couple of reunion shows, obviously minus one of rock's very best all-time drummers.

2. Page played guitar on The Who's "I Can't Explain," which is tied for my favorite Who song with "Pictures of Lily."

3. Page never met or saw Jimi Hendrix perform, but he wished he had.

4. The Who's spastically wonderful drummer Keith Moon (perhaps rock's greatest skins man alongside Bonham and the ever-underrated Ringo Starr) was the one who actually came up with the name Led Zeppelin.

5. Page says what makes a great guitar riff is one that's hypnotic because it must be played and heard over and over again.

6. Rolling Stone routinely panned Led Zeppelin's albums.

7. Page downplays his debauchery as slightly overstated by the press and biographers. Regardless, I still love this classic tour photo of him swigging Jack Daniel's.

8. Bonus: My five favorite Zep songs, at least today, are: "Tangerine" from III, "Over the Hills and Far Away" from Houses of the Holy, "Going to California" from IV, "Kashmir" from Physical Graffiti, and "All My Love" from In Through the Out Door.


Read the whole interview here.