Robert Baird

It’s been a tough half year or so for Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips.

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."

It’s appropriate that I’d be listening to Irma Thomas’ new R&B record, Simply Grand when I heard that Jerry Wexler had died.

Stereophile's answer to Poppin' Fresh talks with Dr. John backstage at June's HE 2006 show in Los Angeles.

Mobile Fidelity reissues Heart Like A Wheel...

There it was again. Goosebumps. Even a grainy old out–of–synch YouTube video of a 1986 sound check at Maxwell's in Hoboken still evoked a shiver. At the risk of living in the rock 'n' roll past, The Replacements were one of the best bands, bar or otherwise, that I've ever had the pleasure of witnessing. Over the years I saw Westerberg, Mars and the Stinson Bros many, many times. I saw them when they were riotously drunk, careening from one tune to the next, never finishing any of them. I saw them once at an unbilled gig do not a note of their own music, preferring instead to rip through TV themes: Batman followed by Bewitched followed by The Flintstones... I saw them jacked up on God knows what, painting their shoes and whipping bologna from a deli tray all over their dressing room. Through it all, with the possible exception of when Bob Stinson was kicked out for getting a little too addictive, they had a ball. When it got serious near the end, around the time of Don’t Tell a Soul, it was for all intensive purposes, over. They were the best thing to come out of the once vaunted Minnesota scene—okay, after Prince—and whether they liked it or not, one of the originators of the whole "alt" rock thang.