We’re here to screw you!

Some of you may remember that two summers ago I waged a bitter war against Georgia Natural Gas by not paying my bill. Admittedly, this was originally out of a mixture of laziness and stupidity, but once my gas was cut off, they got me really mad.

I’m having to go through some of the very same horse shit with our new gas account at the new apartment and it makes me want to strangle someone. It’s just me and the cat at the house, so this presents a problem. I don’t blame him and I can’t strangle myself for any time at all before I pass out.

They charge you $4.95 for the privelege of paying over the phone. There is an option to have them direct draft your checking account, but you have to apply for it, and I don’t trust those bloodthirsty Natural Gas people with my account number. No way, no how.

Last time they pissed me off I just didn’t pay and I took cold showers all summer, but now I live with my girlfriend and I already promised her there wouldn’t be any of that sort of shit.

So I just paid $4.95 for the privelege of paying my bill, fuck you very much Georgia Natural Gas.

Tonight I took my girlfriend to see one of her favorite bands, the Tragically Hip. It was a great show and we both enjoyed it.

Gordon Downie, the lead singer, jumped around like a fool and whispered and shouted and the band crashed on. It was great. The only pisser of it all was the super drunk girl next to us.

Her hair was haphazard, and her expression was that of someone who has just gotten out of bed and is having confusing words yelled at them. Her mouth hung open. She was trying to dance, but was really just flopping around and running into everyone. It really became annoying about the third time she elbowed me in the ribs. Eventually she fucked off a bit to our right and began sagging onto some other fella.

He looked pissed, but I enjoyed seeing her annoy someone else.

During the quiet parts of the songs she would clap drunkenly, and her hands would go pat pat pat when they slapped lazily at one another.

I wished she would shut up.

Last night after rehearsal Sam and I drove up to Athens to catch Angie Aparo and his new band at the 40 watt club. It was different, seeing Angie with a big rock band behind him, but it was cool. I quite enjoyed it, and I got him to sign a shirt for my girlfriend.

Athens exists mainly to surround the University of Georgia, as far as I can tell, and I was really amazed when I was there. What a privelege it must be to go to a huge college with a whole town attached to it that’s built entirely for you, the student.

Of course I have been there before, but still. It was wierd.

The wierdest thing about the show was Angie’s superfans. The superfans are the ones who drive from hundreds of miles away to see you play and immediately go home and type up a big report on your forums about what shirt you were wearing and what face you made after the third song.

I am far too lowly to have a superfan hanging around, of course, but it still kinda creeps me out a bit.

I watched Angie take people’s held-out cell phones and speak to best friends and roommates and whoever else was on the other end. He handles it all with aplomb, naturally, after all the time he’s been doing this.

It would worry me a lot of someone’s whole world were my next performance.
That’s a lot of responsibility to not suck, and I make no guaruntees.

Rock without rules! Except what to play, say, or think!

There’s a new radio station in Atlanta called DaveFM. Their deal is that they are playing all kinds of mixed up shit no matter what genre it’s supposedly from. It’s cool, and not only that, the idea is working. Everyone in town is talking about it and listening to it, but there are deeper forces at work here, people.

It all started with the two warring song-licensing houses, ASCAP and BMI, as I understand it.

The record companies back in the day had a stranglehold on radio, and when I say back in the day I mean the fifties. BMI-licensed songs were doing much better on the charts, so ASCAP got jealous and whined to Orrin Hatch that BMI was paying the radio stations to play their songs, and thus doing better on the charts. Hatch decided they might just have something there, and looked it.

The result of this inquiry was that in 1960 Alan Freed got convicted of accepting $2500 to play a song on the radio. That snazzy American Bandstand fellow Dick Clark was also in hot water over accepting payola, but he had a better legal strategy and got off with a slap on the wrist. Alan Freed was fired, his career dissolved, and he died 5 years later, a bitter, broken man. How’s that for keeping things upbeat, internet friends?

Mr Hatch, the chairman of the committee responsible for looking into payola, called Dick Clark “A fine young man”, and a fine young man he remains today!

The upshot of all this is that payola is illegal. Payola is the practice of accepting money to play a song on the radio. It is totally illegal, but it’s also totally going on at virtually every radio station in every city in the US. Why? Because there is supply and demand and that’s how capitalism works!

The result of this system, many people believe, is that radio sucks ass. Have you ever noticed that the songs on the radio are a joke, with some exceptions? Of course now and again someone with good songs actually gets on the radio, but for the most part, as we all know, it’s the same old shit over and over again.

Now, however, the Internet has appeared on the scene. Yes, the once civilized Round Table which consisted of super upper class white guys in expensive suits is now figeting nervously at the arrival of the Internet in striped spandex, a fishnet sleeveless shirt, and a purple feather boa. In the imaginary words of a Record Executive, as I have imagined them, “Holy fucking dog shit!”

The internet lets people download songs for FREE! The internet lets people circumvent our draconian system of distribution of music, thus short-changing us of our millions of dollars! These cries and more have likely erupted from the plush-carpeted halls at record companies and big radio headquarters. So, what are our friends the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), which is comprised of the representatives of Record companies, going to do?

Liti-fucking-gate! The same thing they always do! The only problem is that there’s no corporate entity to file suit against. In the good old days, if a guy crossed you, you just sued the shit out of him and whoever had the better legal team would put the other guy out of business. Since that nasty fuck the Internet came along, the RIAA has only little Suzy the high school girl with a copy of Napster to demonize. Bad Suzy! Bad bad! Wait, hold up.. we’ll sue Napster!

So they sue Napster, and win a great victory for blah blah blah. Everyone knows you can still download any mp3 you want from any of an assload of p2p file sharing programs like eDonkley and KaZaa and whatever else, so I won’t even go into it. Point is, there’s no easy way to get rid of MP3′s and the variety they bring about, so the only thing to do from the record company’s standpoint is sell them and try to make a buck, which explains iTunes.

The problem that the RIAA has, but seems to be fiercely ignoring, is that it just doesn’t have anything good to offer. Radio and big-label music, largely, is crap. Normally this is okay, because Americans love crap, but this crap is expensive. A CD costs damned near $20 and you get a few pictures and the song lyrics which the artist didn’t write. Hooray! That is a bargain for me!

Until now the record companies and radio folks have been able to get by on selling us tightly-packaged crap because that’s all there was, but that dirty old Internet with its semen-stained spandex pants has taught the younger of us that we require variety! This is one thing that radio, until now, hasn’t been able to do for us because of their format system, one of the many draconian holdovers from a bygone era of artist- and comsumer-fucking on the part of the RIAA and big radio.

And so now, there’s DaveFM, the category-free rock station.

So, I’m glad to see DaveFM out there and doing well because it means that Clearchannel and the RIAA has a lot to worry about, and they know it.

Here’s an excellent article about the whole deal from Salon, if you’d care to read it.

Last night I took my lovely girlfriend out to Steak and Shake, because she requires food to generate energy for her muscles and whatnot. When we got there, I took out a pen and began drawing on the paper placemat.

Our waitress noticed me drawing and asked if I’d like a crayon and a kids placemat, which has games and places to draw and such on it. I said sure.

She brought two to the table, one for each of us. The placemant was folded into the hat. There was, contrary to what the waitress said, no crayon. I wanted that crayon and she didn’t bring it to me, and I was a grown man on a sunday night and I had no crayon.

Words can hardly express my emotions.

Luckily I carry a pen with me everywhere I go, so I drew with that. Then I started fucking with the paper hat and my girlfriend said ” Oh my god, you are not going to put that on.”

Then I was a grown man in need of a shave on a sunday night in Atlanta Georgia wearing a paper hat in an all-night burger joint, but I still had no crayon.

If I were a Peanuts cartoon drawn by Charles Schultz, there would have been a black scribble above my head.