Robert Baird

First the sad. An old friend, harp player and all around sweetheart, Gary Primich passed away, suddenly as they say, in Austin on Sunday night. He was only 49. Although he'd had a solo career for some time, Gary was once a member of a smokin' Austin bar band called The Mannish Boys.

To those who say the Bush Administration hasn't added anything meaningful to American society I say pshaw. He and Cheney have turned lying into an artform. Not lying exactly but a finer, more refined version of not telling the truth. It's still completely self-serving and wrong but now, if you have little or no education and/or sense of any kind, and you’re easily scared, these pronouncements sound vaguely plausible. It's all about the spin. The truth, in that view, is now relative. Everything is shaded and prismatic. Move several steps to the left and everything seems to look different. Looks like the truth. Sounds like the truth. There's a victory to be had in Iraq! Is it any wonder that we've become a more polarized society under the great decider.

ELP

As Christmas approaches, the reissues have begun to trickle in. Today's bounty was Emerson, Lake and Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery or what the notes call "Prog Rock's masterpiece."

For good measure alone, Critics, particularly the cranky ones like I've recently become, all deserve a well–placed boot up the arse once in awhile and so, much to my delight I too loved much of The Simpsons movie I prematurely sniffed at last week on this forum. I even get to add this delicious addendum: The critics are wrong! It's pretty wonderful. Many great bits. Much self-deprecation. Maggie emerging as a full–blown character. Okay, okay: I was wrong.

Insider music biz stuff should in most cases stay that way because normal folk, what I like to call "civilians," don't care about who said what to whom in the bowels of some label HQ in Burbank or Manhattan. There's also something pitifully self-indulgent and exclusionary and ultimately pathetic about people who are in the know about the music biz and live to tell you about it.

Now that we're perched upon the precipice of the Simpson Movie opening—at least a decade too late—I, by chance, I caught the Hullabalooza episode with the Smashing Pumpkins this week, the one where Homer becomes part of the "pageant of the transmundane," by being shot in the stomach with a cannonball.

Here's a number to contemplate: 52% of recorded music sales at Sony/BMG are now via downloads.