By The Beachwood Douche Or Tool Affairs Desk

“At the moment, there is a great deal of debate over whether Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan is a douche or a tool for having fired or driven away the rest of his bandmates,” Mark Arenz writes at Ridiculopathy.
Let’s take a look.
DOUCHE: “bc is such a complete thief, liar, hypocrite and fraud, at least jc is basically admitting he’s sick of being all these things,” writes commenter numnuts at Aversion.
TOOL: “[Chamberlin] can’t ‘cash the check’ but had no problem cashing the check from the terrible Visa commercials using ‘Today’ and Hyundai commercials using whatever garbage song he and the bald jerk cooked up for an ad campaign for a luxury car. That’s the least sacred treatment you could give to your music. Chamberlin turns out to be as full of it as Corgan,” writes commenter Dan at Turn It Up.

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Posted on March 27, 2009

By Don Jacobson
If U.S. Highway 61, which runs from the Canadian border in northern Minnesota to New Orleans, is “the Blues Highway,” then U.S. Highway 67 – which in its heyday ran from Iowa to Mexico – is the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Highway.”
In rock ‘n’ roll terms, the crucial stretch of Highway 67 was the part in northeastern Arkansas that ran through such burgs as Batesville, Newport, Swifton, Trumann and Walnut Ridge. Not too far from Memphis, where the rockabilly explosion was centered from 1955 to 1959 or so, Highway 67 boasted a swath of funky roadhouses and disreputable dives that appealed to the earliest crop of rockers, who piled into their Chevies and worked their way up and down this strip, leaving booze-fueled, pill-popping, duck-assed mayhem in their wakes.
The reason I’m bringing all this up is that the Arkansas Legislature is on the verge of designating the stretch of the road through Jackson, Lawrence and Randolph counties as “Rock ‘n’ Roll Highway 67,” which, Rep. J.R. Rogers of Walnut Ridge hopes, will spur tourism. Its history is indeed rich and its legend got a big boost from Joaquin “Hip Hop” Phoenix’s turn as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, in the scenes where he and fellow Sun Records rockabilly killers, like the 1950s icons they were, were all piled into a car, speeding along in the country darkness at night, dreaming big dreams of where their powerful music will take them.
They were probably hoping it was out of Jackson County, Arkansas.

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Posted on March 15, 2009

By Scott Buckner

Cover songs are the ugly step-sister necessity of bar and wedding bands everywhere, yet they also seem to attract the already-famous who are happy to use covers to suck money from the music fan trough without actually putting forth much effort. This has been a staple of American music since the 78rpm vinyl disc was invented, allowing musicians and singers to copy, refresh, or completely remake some dusty zero into a current-day hero.
The 1960s was especially littered with the corpses of gone-nowhere originals like The Olympics’ “Good Lovin'” or The Top Notes’ “Twist and Shout” being turned into monster chart-toppers by bands like The Young Rascals, The Isley Brothers and The Beatles. Or if you were Carl Perkins, you were waking up pretty much every other weekend to find out someone was scabbing your rockabilly songs like “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Summertime Blues” into records that would eclipse your own.

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Posted on March 2, 2009