When I hear the name Lobo these days, I immediately think of DC Comics' violence-loving alien anti-hero who is happiest when he's pounding someone or some thing senseless. If only this Lobo was real and could've gotten his hands on the whiny, nasal Floridian singer-songwriter Lobo (born Roland Kent Lavoie) before the latter recorded the god-awful 1971 hit single "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo....
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I had the great fortune to catch seminal, industrial, satirical art-punks/techno-wavers Devo in the second of the rock band's two concerts at San Francisco's Regency this past weekend. In the process of being wildly entertained, I also had a rueful laugh or two at the expense of the celebrity death cults that spring up when the famous depart this mortal coil, as the Bard of Avon put it. Too soo...
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Dance. Dance. Dance.And not to any old beatEver notice how idea-free and lyrically simplistic most super-hot, fail-safe get-'em-moving dance tracks are? I mean, you can hardly help yourself from rump-shaking to C+C Music Factory's "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)," but seriously, it's just a series of short, obvious exhortations to a killer beat sequence.That's one of the reasons I r...
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The Day of the Dead has passed again - as usual, right after All Saints Day and Halloween. And today's the next day, a new day - a Toxic Tuesday. But I've still got death on my mind. Make that death-metal - the half-ass, lowbrow bastard son of punk-rock and heavy-metal, scourge of ear drums and brain pans everywhere, and grislier cousin of what's know variously as thrash-metal or speed-metal.Al...
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Could there be a more appropriately ghoulish time to release the posthumous Michael Jackson behind-the-scenes aborted-concert-tour film documentary "This Is It" than the week before Halloween? Um...no. (Maybe they should've titled it "That's That." Too soon? Just be glad I'm not making any "Wanna Be Endin' Somethin'" jokes.)Let's forget for a moment that the movie, haphazardly pieced together f...
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When it comes to the ear-torturing '70s hits of a certain mustachioed lounge-singer and his back-up babes, there are more than a few examples of full-on toxicity, befitting our infamous Tuesday theme. Thus, I am here to denigrate Tony Orlando & Dawn.My first instinct was to whale upon the addled, sing-songy tenement romance of "Knock Three Times." But that would be too easy. Instead, since we'r...
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Damn! I'm in love again...and her name is Alison Sudol. She's the winsome Pacific Northwest singer-songwriter-keyboardist who records and performs as A Fine Frenzy. (I'll say!) And though I paid little attention to her debut album, I was captured by "Blow Away" - the first track that I heard from her second collection of songs, Bomb in a Birdcage, released just last month."Blow Away" has the fe...
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One of my boyhood heroes - along with fictional superspy James Bond, writer-broadcaster-orator Jean Shepherd, and The Who's singer-songwriter-guitarist Pete Townshend - was a subversive but extremely popular TV kiddie show host, game-show regular and radio personality by the name of Soupy Sales. And alas, he has passed - the latest in an uncommonly long line of celebrity deaths that have been v...
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Okay. I'll admit that this isn't quite fair. They meant well. But, since I just got back to my usual haunts in San Francisco after an extended stay in Los Angeles, and since there have been recent unsavory revelations about the song's author and the record's producer, John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, I thought "What the hell!" Thus, in all it's hippy-dippy glory, I dub "San Francisco (Be...
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Musing about the fluxed-up entertainment industry in the wake of the digital revolution and excited about the advances here at MOG, I remembered an extremely loaded question asked by Cody B in a recent thread: "Do you think the internets are good for the art of music?"A couple of afternoons ago, I was lunching at an Indian restautant in Brentwood with a talented Los Angeles rock singer-songwrit...
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