Somebody at the AP is too big of a Snoop Dogg fan

An Associated Press report in the Sports Briefing column on Wednesday about a guilty plea to a felony drug dealing charge by Emanuel Mayben, a former Binghamton University men’s basketball player, misstated the given name of the team’s coach, who was suspended last season. He is Kevin Broadus, not Calvin. (Go to Article)

Kevin Broadus ≠ Calvin Broadus

Dirty Orchjectors, and Chuck Biscuits update

Dirty Projectors has become the umpteenth touted, smart, beloved, but not huge-selling alt band to do the indie-orchestral thing, playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Feb. 27.

It was probably inevitable. They follow Death Cab for Cutie, M83, Grizzly Bear, the Decemberists, Belle & Sebasitan, Air and Bright Eyes, all at the L.A. Phil; Joanna Newsom and, again, Grizzly Bear, both with the Brooklyn Phil; and Ben Folds with the Boston Pops. UPDATE: Even as I typed, Grizzly Bear was doing yet another orchestral gig, in London.

I didn’t expect when I got up this morning that I would be giving thanks to Henry Rollins. But thanks, Henry, for never singing “T.V. Party” with the Boston Phil at Tanglewood.

In other sorta Rollins-related news, it appears all but certain that Chuck Biscuits is alive and that his death was a hoax. Read more about it, if you’re not already too disgusted and offended by the whole thing.

Chuck Biscuits, RIP?

Very sad news, just in from The Daily Swarm:

Legendary hard rock drummer Chuck Biscuits, whose lengthy résumé included stints in such flagship underground acts as Black Flag and Social Distortion, died Saturday after a prolonged battle with throat cancer. He was 44… Chuck Biscuits was probably best known to the general populous for his work with Danzig. Beginning in 1988, Chuck played on that group’s first four albums, which are often hailed as Danzig’s best (thanks in no small part to Chuck’s powerful drumming style).

UPDATE: It's unclear whether this is actually true. James Greene Jr., the writer who first reported this, based on emails from someone claiming to be Chuck's wife, says that he has been contacted by family members, who deny it, but in an email to me he said he's still trying to verify it.

Johnston clarification: Not really Frogger

Seth Schiesel reviews Hi, How Are You, the new iPhone video game based to some degree on Daniel Johnston iconography. Earlier coverage portrayed it as “a kind of psycho-religious version of Frogger,” but Schiesel sets the record straight:

Frogger is about dodging objects in motion and jumping from one moving platform to another. Hi, How Are You is about tilting the iPhone itself to direct a little cartoonlike figure along pathways suspended in space without falling off. (You can also put your finger on a virtual joystick on the iPhone screen instead of using the motion-sensitive tilt controls.)

So in its game play Hi, How Are You is very similar to Sega’s eight-year-old Super Monkey Ball franchise, a parallel that becomes obvious partway through, when you transition from controlling a bouncing cube with eyes to controlling a rolling ball with eyes.

OK!

Museum of propaganda: WWII anniversary

Today is the 70th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Poland, which happened in the early hours of Sept. 1, 1939; two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany, and World War II began.

To mark the occasion, the website of Life magazine has put together 37 “intense” propaganda posters, all from the European theater. (None from Japan; come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Japanese war propaganda posters, though maybe I’m just blanking.) Most are American, but there are also plenty of German and Soviet posters, and some Finnish, Dutch and Italian ones I’ve not seen.

The images are all credited to Getty, and I’m disappointed that their perennial problem — “rounding off” dates, as some angry newspaper photo editors I know have discovered — has not been fixed. So an image from 1943 is dated Jan. 01, 1943; another from 1942 is Jan. 01, 1942, etc. It’s a serious problem in any case, but it’s especially ridiculous with a World War II survey by Life.

Also, Life: the “sexy or sleazy” thing? Sleazy.

WFUV update

I spoke too soon when I announced that last week would be my final broadcast with the WFUV Music Review, where I’ve been reviewing records every Tuesday morning for two years. (Archived links below right.)

They asked me to stay on for a couple more weeks, and I can’t say no to people who have been so good to me, so now my final show will actually be next week. Tomorrow I’ll be reviewing Deer Tick’s Born on Flag Day, and next Tuesday I bow out with Wye Oak’s The Knot. And then that’ll be it. Really.

Thanks, honeycomb!

The Wikignomes have made the fix that I requested about the Pixies’ date of origin.

I’m almost afraid to look again at the Pixies entries and find yet more mistakes. But I’m glad the change was made, and made so fast, and I hope it sticks.

Please correct Pixies entries on Wikipedia

Two weeks ago Wikipedia ran an Article of the Day on David Lovering, which alerted me to a big error that appears to have reproduced itself across every Pixies-related page on Wikipedia (and therefore all over the Internet). I would like to request that these pages be corrected to reflect the following:

The Pixies began in 1986, not 1985.

How do we know this?

• It’s a long-established fact, documented in hundreds of articles written while the band was active. To research my book, Doolittle, and because I have been an avid Pixies fan since 1989, I have collected a significant archive of press clippings and other paperwork; some of this was provided to me by the band. The record overwhelmingly shows that the band was founded in early 1986, when Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Black Francis, a.k.a. Frank Black) and Joey Santiago dropped out of UMass Amherst and moved to Boston.


• The band members confirm it. After seeing the error on Wikipedia, I wrote to Charles and Joey, and both told me that the band was indeed founded in 1986, not 1985. The band’s former manager, who had been with them from before Come On Pilgrim up to the reunion tour, also confirmed it to me. Here is what Joey wrote in an email:

  Hey Ben,
  We started in 1986. We both graduated High School in 83.
  Charles and I dropped out after our first semester as juniors from UMass.
  I know it was winter because I remember pissing in the snow when we drove into Boston very late at night. So we most likely moved to Boston in January of 86.

  It’s not clear precisely when Lovering and Kim Deal joined, but numerous contemporary sources say the lineup was complete by about July 1986, and the band started playing out shortly thereafter.


• It lines up with historical events. One of the best known stories of the early days is that Charles started the band with money his father gave him to see Halley’s Comet in New Zealand. Halley’s Comet, which passes near Earth every 75 to 76 years, was last visible in early 1986. 
  
  Also, it is well established that in March 1987, when the Pixies recorded “The Purple Tape” — a set of 17 songs, which would be edited down to 8 for their first record, Come On Pilgrim — the full band had not been together terribly long. Early articles put it at roughly six months, suggesting an origin of mid-’86.
  
  Let’s look again at Charles and Joey’s time in school: Both graduated high school in 1983, and completed their freshman (fall ’83-spring ’84) and sophomore (fall ’84-spring ’85) years at UMass, then dropped out after the first semester of their junior year (fall ’85). That brings us to early 1986.


• There’s no reliable source for 1985. The Pixies-related pages on Wikipedia cite the same source for calling 1985 their origin: Josh Frank and Caryn Ganz’s oral history, Fool the World. (In fact, even other sources cited to support the this claim actually say 1986, such as the Allmusic biography.) But that book has many errors and contradictions. Part of this may be due to the fact that, as an oral history, it relies on people’s memories, which can be faulty; people also lie. Regardless, there’s no excuse for not checking basic facts.
  
  In Fool the World, Deal says she got married at age 24 and then moved to Boston, and at one point states: “I got to Boston in January ’85.” But she also says: “So what year did I get married? Eighty-fuckin’ four, ’85 maybe?” Deal was born on June 10, 1961, so in January 1985 she was only 23. Most likely she got married in 1985 and moved to Boston in early 1986. 
  
  Other interviews in the Fool the World contradict Deal about the 1985 claim. For example, John Murphy, her ex-husband (on early Pixies releases, Deal was credited as “Mrs. John Murphy”), remembers that early rehearsals took place the year the Red Sox lost the world series. That was 1986. (They played the Mets, of course.)

Why am I asking someone else to make the correction? Two reasons. First, as the author of a book on the Pixies, I do not want my motives to be misunderstood. I have nothing against Fool the World, which is a very interesting read; it’s just not a reliable source of facts. Second, I want to make sure this is all on the record for anyone to question or dispute, because I fear that — Wikipedia being what it is — if I simply correct the entries without explanation someone would just change them back 10 seconds later. 

The Pixies are one of the most important bands of the last 25 years, and a fact as critical as the year they began must be correct. If entries on the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin had such a detail wrong, it would be fixed faster than you can say “catalog sales.”

Oh, and one more thing. Joey had a special request:

Btw, if you are going to correct that can you also add that my birthday is June 10 not the 11th?

(Yup, same birthday as Kim and Kelley.)

Wikipedia article of the day of the day: David Lovering

Now, this is very neat, and I’m glad to be cited a lot in it, which means that for a day my name is on the splash page of the most popular — if not exactly most reliable — reference resource on the Internet. (I share space with news updates on the ongoing subprime mortagage crisis, the collapse of the ruling coalition of Ukraine, and the crash of Aeroflot 821!)

But there is one very irritating aspect about this and every other Pixies-related entry on Wikipedia. I am checking myself to be absolutely sure about the facts before I call out a major error. But if this does indeed check out, I will post here and maybe do something on Wikipedia too.

Stay tuned.

Headline/press release/correction trifecta: Britney NOT playing lesbian killer stripper

“Britney Rep: Singer Not Playing Killer Lesbian Stripper In Film”

A rep for Brit denied the reports, telling Access Hollywood, “Though she definitely intends to explore acting roles down the road, right now she’s concentrating on recording her next album.”

Somewhat of a surprise, since it wasn’t just the London scandal-sheet tabs that reported it: so did the Daily Telegraph, a respectable broadsheet, and even the LA Times. (None were sourced, of course.)

(Via, via.)

Stew on success

Sometimes it’s good to be wrong. Four months ago in an interview with Stew about Passing Strange, which had just transferred to Broadway, I commented that because of low opening attendance, positive reviews would be necessary to fill seats. “Otherwise,” I said, “it won’t last long.” Stew wrote me a friendly note saying that it was common for arty-type shows to have slow openings but that it was picking up steam.

I’m happy to say that Passing Strange did better than I expected. It was nominated for seven Tony Awards and won one, for best book of a musical. And though it is closing next Sunday, it will have had a respectable run of 20 previews and 165 regular performances; as of last week, it had grossed nearly $4.6 million. (If the final two weeks stick to its post-Tonys pattern, it will close with just over $5 million — meaning it will have broken even, something by no means guaranteed on Broadway.) And that’s not counting the Spike Lee movie.

In my interview, Stew talked about the challenge of playing a serious, rock-based, non-superstar show to the blue-hair crowd, and promised that he would not compromise. (“When you come up here, man, you have to either stick to your guns or turn around and put on the Vaseline.”) And he did it, despite, as he said on his blog recently, his realization that he is “NOT a Broadway baby”:

This Broadway challenge, this chapter now coming to an end, while I accepted it a little hesitantly I’ll admit, is one I would not trade for anything. We accepted it and met it on our own terms. There is no artistic accomplishment in my life that I am more proud of than Passing Strange. Heidi and Annie would say the same. We brought a piece of work to Broadway that I know gave certain people a kind of hope that maybe there could be more to Broadway than shiny buttons, an uplifting first act closer, and a happy ending...

The most important thing I learned, for the purposes of understanding how I feel right now, is that I am NOT a Broadway baby. I was born to do many things but I was not born to be here. So I am indeed going to be happy to have my life back. Heidi and I have many projects that require our attention and we are excited and eager to get to them. And I want to spend real time with my loved ones, both here and in Berlin where I live. And I want to book a gig at some really out of the way dive in some deep, dark corner of New York Town and make a hellishly melodic, soulful noise all night long.

I still have my nits, but if you haven’t seen the show yet, you must. You have one week.

Mariah’s asterisk

This has been pointed out before, but recent conversations suggest that it still needs to be said.

A few weeks ago Mariah Carey scored her 18th No. 1 on the Billboard chart with the song “Touch My Body,” and it was reported widely that she had thus surpassed Elvis Presley as the artist with the second-most career No. 1 hits. (The Beatles remain in the lead, with 20.)

Cue media/blogger freakout, as haters hated, disputers disputed and contrarians got contrary. What did it mean that cheesy and tasteless Mariah had eclipsed cheesy and tasteless saintly marvel Elvis in this important milestone? Forget soldiers dying on their seventh tours of Afghanistan. Truly this is our civilization’s darkest moment!

There’s just one problem with the debate: the chart interpretation is not entirely correct. Mariah has passed Elvis only by a technicality; an important one, but a technicality nonetheless.

Elvis also has 18 No. 1 songs — but only 17 No. 1 singles. In 1956, “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog” were two sides of a double-A sided single, and both songs went to No. 1. (Originally it was a regular one-sided single; it says something about Elvis’s confidence as chart hegemon in those days that he was willing to throw “Hound Dog” away as a B-side.)

It’s perfectly true that 18 Elvis songs went to No. 1, but the baseball-stats aspect here demands that apples be compared to apples and singles to singles. If both sides of a single go to No. 1, then that single counts only once, because strictly speaking a single is a piece of plastic, not a song. (Or, in more contemporary marketing terms, a single is one SKU, no matter how many charting songs are on it, and the Billboard Hot 100 tracks single SKUs.)

So for Mariah to truly surpass Elvis, or at least to erase her asterisk, she has to score one more No. 1. Her current single is “Bye Bye.” (A StarGate song.)

Billboard deserves a certain amount of blame for this confusion. Its initial story did not make the song/single distinction clear, and also did not take note of “Don’t Be Cruel/“Hound Dog.” That is partly due to a chart authority conflict, as Billboard’s data guru Geoff Mayfield made note of in his weekly column:

COUNTING ELVIS: Mariah Carey now has more Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s than any solo artist in the rock era, yet earnest Elvis Presley fans and some Billboard chart books insist the King also had 18 toppers. Why the discrepancy?

Joel Whitburn, author of Record Research’s line of Billboard chart tomes, counts the double-sided single “Don’t Be Cruel”/“Hound Dog” as two No. 1s, but Billboard’s charts department and the magazine’s ranking trivia expert, Fred Bronson, assert those two songs comprise but one single, and thus a singular No. 1 shared by the two songs.

The first 10 of Presley’s 17 No. 1s preceded the August 1958 launch of the Billboard Hot 100. From his first topper, “Heartbreak Hotel” in 1956, through “Hard Headed Woman” in June 1958, his chart history began on Billboard’s Best Sellers in Stores list.

A welcome correction: More record stores

Well, not exactly a correction. But since my story on Friday about the gradual disappearance of record stores in New York — at least 80 have closed in Manhattan and Brooklyn since 2003, and several more are now on the brink — I’ve been contacted about some that I hadn’t included.

As the map with the story noted, there are around 70 stores now open in Manhattan. I arrived at this number through both my own research — which involved tracking down on foot and bike a long list of addresses compiled through means too tedious to mention — and information from the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, which maintains an extensive database of stores nationwide. Joel Oberstein, the president, helpfully crunched numbers for me and sent several pages of listings from Almighty HQ.

The map could legibly cover only from 59th Street to Delancey Street. That left out J&R World and a bunch of stores uptown, among them a number of important Latin outlets. We included one Best Buy, one Barnes & Noble and one Borders to have those chains accounted for, but otherwise didn’t include the big boxes — partly because, much to my irritation, I couldn’t confirm on deadline exactly which carried CDs and which didn’t.

But I’m delighted to report that in the last couple of days I’ve learned of two more independent shops. One is Deadly Dragon, a reggae store on Forsyth Street. (Vivien Goldman had actually mentioned to me another reggae outfit besides Jammyland, but I misunderstood and didn’t realize it was retail.) The inventory on their website is impressive, and they also promote live events.

The other is Malachi Records, on Fulton Street downtown, which says it opened in November. Not much else on their website, but this blog says the store specializes in “hard-to-find LP’s, 45’, 12”, and CD’s. Musizik from Abba Zappa, Funk, Soul, Jazz, Latin, and movie soundtracks.” The pictures show a pretty standard Village-style vinyl mix of rock and punk standards (Ramones, VU), snob catalog (“Vincebus Eruptum”!), bubblegum guilty pleasures (Donny Osmond) and those soundtracks (“Barbarella”!). But it looks good.

I’ll be happy to add more if they come in, though first I will post a list of shops I knew about but couldn’t include, and I’ll also try to post a list of closings. But don’t even get me started on Brooklyn, which it broke my heart not to include. Please believe me, people, I had to draw the line somewhere.

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UPDATES: A building list of Manhattan record stores, alive and dead; and map of same.

Thanks to JD for the tip on Malachi.

Headline hall of fame: ‘Nazi’ + ‘orgy’ + ‘Grand Prix’ = superdeliciousness

“Possible Nazi Theme of Grand Prix Boss’s Orgy Draws Calls to Quit”

The great thing about this unusually juicy headline in the Times today is that not only does it combine “Nazi” and “orgy” and “Grand Prix,” but its writer basically had no choice but to use precisely those words. I can only imagine the orgy of editorial flagellation that went on trying to soften this one. (“Orgy,” of course, is a perfect headline word because it is so short and vivid. “Bacchanal”? “Debauchery”? “Saturnalia”? No way.)

The story is about Max Mosley, capo of grand prix motor racing, who was caught “in a sadomasochistic orgy with five supposed prostitutes in a London sex ‘dungeon.’” This particular sadomasochistic dungeon orgy involved what appears to be either some utterly sick Nazi-themed role-playing or an enthusiastic re-enactment of a rejected “Sprockets” skit:

In a video the paper [the Murdoch-owned News of the World] posted on the Internet but later removed, two of the women wore black-and-white striped robes in the style of prisoners’ uniforms. The video showed Mr. Mosley counting in German — “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Fünf!” — as he used a leather strap to lash one of the women.

“She needs more of ze punishment!” he cried in German-accented English. One woman appeared to search his hair for lice while another called off items on an inspection list. Mr. Mosley, naked, was bound face-down and lashed more than 20 times.

Even better: according to the story, which was written by John F. Burns, one of the Times’s most serious and distinguished writers — two-time Pulitzer winner and current former Baghdad bureau chief — the man’s family has a dark association with fascism that extends all the way to Hitler:

Mr. Mosley, 67, is the younger son of Britain’s 1930s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, and the society beauty Diana Mitford, whose secret wedding in Berlin in October 1936 was held at the home of the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and included Hitler as a guest of honor.

The whole thing calls to mind Prince Harry’s unfortunate appearance at a costume party three years ago in a swastika armband:

Of course British aristocrats are not the only fools to get their kicks from whips and chains and cries of “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Fünf!” But there is something peculiarly British about bondage and S&M, so much so that it is sometimes called “the English vice.” Presumably that goes back to laced-up Victorian days. But the president of a sport synonymous with sex, privilege, wealth and danger? A man who has “presided over the expansion of Formula One racing into one of the world’s richest sports”? Are the whores of Cannes and Monaco just not kinky enough anymore?

The irony is that in the end the Times’s just-the-facts hed is much more lurid and enticing than the one that the News of the World editors surely drooled over their computers to write: “My Nazi orgy with F1 boss Max Mosley.”

It’s just got no sting to it.

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Update: Dude was vindicated!

‘The paper was incorrect’

CORRECTION

A recent report on cannibalistic underground dwellers misstated the species designation of the creatures. They are humanoid, not human.

•

EDITORS’ NOTE

An article in the Metro section recently reported on a troglodyte population who lure or coerce people into city sewers and then eat them. Based on police reports and eyewitness interviews, the article characterized the underground dwellers as human. A correction in this space, prompted by a public announcement about the creatures, noted that they are humanoid, not human. In the announcement, the creatures were identified fully as Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.

As readers have pointed out, by definition CHUDs cannot be cannibals if they are not human. (At best they could be called man-eating, which would render the acronym of their name MEHUD.) This New York newspaper should have noticed the contradiction and consulted with experts on man-eating humanoid underground dwellers before accepting the terrorists’ self-appointed name, and additionally should have given the humanoids an opportunity to comment. The paper regrets the error.