If you listen on CBC Radio One on Saturdays you’re in for a surprise: Yours Truly will be appearing on the Brent Bambury’s show Go! tomorrow. There’ll be musical merriment of all sorts. Go! broadcasts live at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, 11:00 in Newfoundland.

I caught Dragonette at the launch party for MSN.ca a couple of weeks ago and was pretty impressed. I’m fond of their synth-pop-cut-with-guitars sound and am going to have to get my hands on their new album.

I took some shots of their performance; you can either check out this Flickr photoset or watch the slideshow below:

At the Mesh Conference held earlier this year, I was asked at the last minute to play an opening number for the big panel discussion on using social media for marketing. I decided to get cheeky and played AC/DC’s Big Balls, since having them is a quality that you need to really use social media and social networking to advantage. As I played, Kaz Ehara shot these photos:

Photos by Kaz Ehara.
Click the photos to see them on their Flickr pages.

For those of you unfamiliar with the song, here it is, synced to clips from Spongebob Squarepants:

Here’s a flowchart for Bonnie Tyler’s eighties classic, Total Eclipse of the Heart:

In case you’re not familiar with the song, here’s the video.

Most “Have you seen this cat?” posters don’t make me smile, but this one does…

The anime-girl outfits that the YouTube user “hjfreaks” wears may be a little off-putting, but if the bass tracks on these video are really of him playing, he’s pretty good:

Sometimes a guy wants to take a break from blistering bass runs and just dance:

Not the fast food chains, but the amusing hip-hop number by the oddly-named duo “Das Racist”:

I’m with this commenter: someone needs to record the Canadian version:

I’m at the Swiss Chalet!
I’m at the Harvey’s!
I’m at the combination Swiss Chalet and Harvey’s!

The Toronto Garbage Strike of 2009 may be over (as might be David Miller’s reign come election time next year) and garbage collection is resuming today, but that’s no reason not have a song about it. The Toronto Star posted a story today about The Toronto Garbage Song (a.k.a. Flush Your Garbage), which was written and posted to YouTube by Ian Kelk.

This isn’t the first strike song to gain exposure through the internet. London Underground is still my favourite. It’s a reworking of The Jam’s Going Underground by British comedy singing duo Amateur Transplants (Adam Kay and Suman Biswas).

Here’s a homemade video that someone made for the song – be warned, it’s a little sweary:

If the taste I gave you of the 10th Annual Gathering of the Juggalos yesterday left you hungry for more, I’ve got good news. There’s a full 14-minute infomercial that covers the upcoming event in greater detail:

Paste magazine goes into a little more details about the infomercial in their article Thirty Reasons Why the Insane Clown Posse’s Gathering of the Juggalos Infomercial is the Greatest YouTube Clip Ever.

Every now and again, I get an email or a phone call from someone doing a story on technical evangelism, community-building or some other Tipping Point-y matter. I’m always happy to answer their questions, and they usually take my answers seriously until they ask me for examples of people, organizations or groups that have been successful at community building. When I mention Insane Clown Posse, they think I’m pulling their leg.

If you take a couple of guys who started out holding wrestling matches in their back yards, put them in clown make-up, have them rap while backed by a metal band, all the while giving a GWAR-like performance, you get the rap-and-wrestling act Insane Clown Posse. They know how to put on a good show (yup, I’ve been to one), and they know how to reach out to their fans, who are referred to as Juggalos (which comes from the name of one of their numbers, The Juggla). Juggalos are a very loyal and tightly-knit group, which comes from their being outside the mainstream. They appear in droves at Insane Clown Posse’s shows, host gatherings for other Juggalos and evangelize Insane Clown Posse to people who don’t listen to them. They are true believers, the sort of audience that any band, author, performer or even brand would kill to have.

(Okay, I’ll admit it. In my collection of mix CD’s and my MP3 collection, you’ll find mixed CDs and playlists for long car trips, and in those playlists, you’ll find a selection of Insane Clown Posse songs. There’s something about a combination of carnival barker-style hip-hop combined with circus music, wailing guitars and shotgun blasts that I find enjoyable when behind the wheel. There. I said it. Commence your mockery.)

One of the ways Insane Clown Posse reach out to the Juggalos is through the Annual Gathering of the Juggalos, a big camping event with a carnival atmosphere. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Gathering of the Juggalos, and they’re doing it up in grand style. Check out the promo video for this year’s Gathering:

I have to admit that I’m intrigued by:

• The wrestling: I have to admit that I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff.
• The music acts: Ice Cube, Vanilla Ice and GWAR, all on the same ticket?! I’d like to see that.
• The comedy acts: What’s Pauly Shore doing there? Jimmy Walker, “J.J.” from Good Times? And Rowdy Roddy Piper, former wrestler and star of the eighties cult classic film, They Live?
• Hey, helicopter rides!

I’ve already booked a trip for the weekend of the Gathering of the Juggalos, and even if I hadn’t, it would be impossible to sell this idea to The Missus. I did mention it to my friend Pete Forde, and it piqued his interest. Were I single, I think I could’ve convinced him and a couple of other people to make a road trip down to wherever Cave-In-Rock, Illinois (population 346) is and spend a weekend in the mosh post drenched in Faygo.

What happens when you take Sesame Street video and Slayer audio and mash them up? Pure metal goodness!

If you’re a fan of the Violent Femmes (and if you remember rotary-dial phones), you’re going to recognize the reference in this piece of retro-themed art by so0meone going by the name “9 0 0 0”:

There’s more stuff like this in 9 0 0 0’s Flickr photoset titled Plan 9.001.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil was the one documentary I really wanted to catch at last year’s Hot Docs film festival. If you watched Canada’s MuchMusic station in the 1980s and its heavy metal segment, The Pepsi Power Hour (hosted by the mullet-sporting JD Roberts, who later became CNN’s silver-haired John Roberts), you might have some dim memories of Anvil and their hits Metal on Metal and 666. It was pretty cheese-a-riffic Canadian metal; when I was a DJ at Crazy Go Nuts University’s Clark Hall Pub, I used tracks from promo CDs of Anvil’s Strength of Steel and Annihilator’s Alice in Hell to get people to leave the pub after the lights had gone on so we could mop the floor.

(Okay, I’ll admit that I sort of liked their hit Metal on Metal.)

Anvil might have remained a footnote in metal history had it not been for a teenage roadie named Sacha Gervasi, who helped lug around gear for the band in the 1980s. Gervasi would later go on to become a screenwriter for movies such as Spielberg’s The Terminal. When Gervasi heard that Anvil were doing a big tour in 2005 and had landed the headline spot at the Monsters of Transylvania Festival, he asked their frontman, “Lips” Kudlow if he could film a documentary of them. “Lips” said yes, and a real-life This is Spinal Tap “rockumentary” ensued.

Every review of Anvil! The Story of Anvil points out that a lot of the mishaps experienced by the fictitious band Spinal Tap actually happen to Anvil, a real-life band. There’s the lifelong “David St.Hubbins/Nigel Tufnel-esque” friendship between the two founders of the band. The guitar player’s fiancee can’t speak English and mismanages the band into disaster. There’s a concert scene where the camera starts with a tight shot of a crowd near the stage and then zooms out to reveals that the band is playing to an audience of 200 in an arena that holds 10,000. The band memebers make ends meet through their day jobs: telemarketing and serving school lunches. There’s even a stranger-than-fiction scene where the owner of a club in the Czech Republic tries to pay the band in goulash rather than cash.

It’s funny, yet heartbreaking at the same time, because while Spinal Tap’s over-the-top problems were make-believe, the guys in Anvil were experiencing them in real life.

Here’s the UK trailer for the movie:

It looks as though Anvil will finally get their break. The movie is getting a lot of praise, people are actually coming to see their shows, and a number of their songs will soon be available as downloads for the Rock Band videogame.

I’m definitely catching the movie once it hits the theatres here.

For no reasons other than I love the band and my stumbling across this list, here are the names of the bands who’ve opened for Queen:

• After The Fire
• Airrace
• Al Stewart
• The Alarm
• Alvin Lee & Ten Years After
• Ambach Circus
• Andy Fairweather-Low
• Angel Child (Änglabarn)
• April Wine
• Argent
• The B-52s
• The Bangles
• Belouis Some
• Big Country
• Billy Squier
• The Blasters
• Bloodrock
• Bob Seger & Silver Bullet Band
• Bow Wow Wow
• Brownsville Station
• Bullitt
• Cate Brothers
• Cheap Trick
• Chris Rea
• Cold Chisel
• The Commodores
• Craaft
• Dakota
• Eduardo Dusek
• Erasmo Carlos
• The Exploited
• Foghat
• Fountainhead
• Frankie Miller’s Full House
• Fruupp
• Full Frontal Nudity
• Gary Moore
• General Public
• The Go-Go’s
• Head East
• Heart
• Hustler
• INXS
• Iron Maiden
• Joan Jett And The BlackHearts
• Kansas
• Kayak
• Kid Abelha and Os Aboboras Selvagens
• Kiki Dee
• Lancelot
• Level 42
• Lucifer
• Lulu Santos
• Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Mahagony Rush
• Manfred Mann
• Marillion
• Molly Hatchet
• Mr. Big
• The Narcs
• Ney Matogrosso
• Nutz
• The Outlaws
• Pepeu Gomes and Baby Consuelo
• Ray Burton Band
• Red Baron
• R.E.O. Speedwagon
• Rory Gallagher
• The Royal Dragoon Guards
• Sea Level
• Seger
• Solution
• Sport of Kings
• Status Quo
• Steve Hillage
• Straight 8
• Storm
• Styx
• Supercharge
• Taste
• Teardrop Explodes 
• Thin Lizzy
• Tombstone
• Treat
• Voyager
• Whitesnake
• Yesterday And Today
• Zas
• Zeno
• ZiZi Labor

If you’re looking for a name for your heavy metal band, you might find the chart below helpful:

Click the chart to see it at full size.
Found via The Triumph of Bullshit.

In an earlier article, Branford Marsalis’ Take on Students Today, I posted a video in which jazz.funk sax man Branford Marsalis talked about his music students. His first lines in the interview are:

What I’ve learned from my students is that students today are completely full of shit.

That is what I’ve learned from my students. Much like the generation before them, the only thing they are really interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are.

I mentioned that the interview comes from a documentary titled Before the Music Dies,  a documentary film in which filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen “traveled the country, hoping to understand why mainstream music seems so packaged and repetitive, and whether corporations really had the power to silence musical innovation.”

A reader named “Tomas” said in a comment to the article that Before the Music Dies was posted in its entirety on Google Video. You can watch it in the little video window above, or at a larger size on its Google Video page. If you really care about music, whether as someone who plays it or simply enjoys it, watch it; you’ll find it’s two hours well-spent.

You can also buy the video on DVD for US$14.99 or download it for as little as US$2.99 from the Before the Music Dies site.

I think it’s rather sporting of them:

The Vatican’s newspaper has finally forgiven John Lennon for declaring that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, calling the remark a "boast" by a young man grappling with sudden fame.

"The remark by John Lennon, which triggered deep indignation mainly in the United States, after many years sounds only like a ‘boast’ by a young working-class Englishman faced with unexpected success, after growing up in the legend of Elvis and rock and roll," Vatican daily Osservatore Romano said.

The article, marking the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ The White Album, went on to praise the pop band.

"The fact remains that 38 years after breaking up, the songs of the Lennon-McCartney brand have shown an extraordinary resistance to the passage of time, becoming a source of inspiration for more than one generation of pop musicians," it said.

There’s still no word on whether or not Paul McCartney will be forgiven for a lot of his post-Wings stuff, especially the phoned-in Wonderful Christmastime. Some things are just too big.

Before November 3rd passes, I must make it known, that today, November 3rd, 2008, is the tenth anniversary of the release of Britney Spears’ single Baby One More Time. I wonder if Ms. Spears wishes she could take a time machine back to those more innocent days and re-do some of her life choices.

Here’s the video for the original:

Click the picture to see the video.

Here’s the version by Travis:

…and here I am, performing it at Hemingway’s at Jay Schneider’s birthday party: