Tales of True Adventure for Rugged Men Not Unlike Yourself
Memphis, y’all! More importantly, the P&H!
You Look Like is a roasting competition between four comedians. They go head-to-head in two rounds of insults which must all start with “You look like…” The winning comic takes home the You Look Like crown and the losers must face the Mirror of Shame. Who will win this week’s roast battle?
UPDATED: What the hell, here’s another one. The second round is a keeper.
Yeah, we were told that Elvis wasn’t discovered as such at all! He was just some freaky-looking kid always making a nuisance of himself around Sun Studios and nobody wanted to know him. Like here’s this guy who dyed his fuckin’ eyebrows and dressed in black pimp clothes—and this was the ‘50s in the South, you’ve got to remember—and Sam Phillips and all the session guys thought he was some disgusting little faggot!
However Elvis did have this one piece of luck. His mother, right, had a really bad weight problem and the doctor prescribed her this enormous supply of diet pills which just happened to be… these pills were just pure benzedrine, right, which is a very potent form of speed.
And all those Sun guys just lived on speed, man. So when Phillips found out that Elvis could get bottles of these things, he let him hang around. So, like, here was Elvis every week bringing huge bottles of these pills to the guys at Sun until, as he was the studio’s main source of supply for speed, Phillips was more or less obliged to let him cut a record.
So like, rock ‘n’ roll was born simply because Elvis Presley was Sun Records’ number one speed dealer.
Lux Interior
Whichever one of you bastards sent this, I appreciate it.
Pretty cool deep dive into the guitars Alex owned and played during the Big Star period can be found HERE. Some nice images as well.
A friend texted me late Saturday morning with two extra tickets to the KISS show at the FedEx Forum. Uh … yes, please!
Way back in 1977, 8-year-old me wanted to see them at the Midsouth Coliseum (on December 9, to be exact), but my mom waited too late to get tickets. The only seats left were behind the stage. *sad trombone*
My next shot was at The Pyramid on April 25, 2000, with Ace and Peter returning from exile for the band’s first farewell tour. A friend told me not to worry, he knew somebody who could get us free tickets. Predictably, no tickets – free or otherwise – were forthcoming, and the show sold out. *sad trombone*
Anyway, this show was a lot of fun! Here’s the set list.
Detroit Rock City
Shout It Out Loud
Deuce
Say Yeah
Heaven’s on Fire
War Machine
Lick It Up (with “Won’t Get Fooled Again” snippet)
Calling Dr. Love
100,000 Years (with drum solo)
God of Thunder (with bass solo)
Cold Gin (with guitar solo)
Psycho Circus
I Love It Loud
Let Me Go, Rock ‘N’ Roll
Love Gun (Paul on stage over crowd)
I Was Made for Lovin’ You (Paul on stage over crowd)
Black Diamond
Encore:
Beth (Eric Singer on piano)
Do You Love Me
Rock and Roll All Nite (Tommy and Gene over crowd)
Me, this weekend.
George “The Geeker In Your Speaker” Klein – disc jockey, radio host, and li’l buddy to E, aged 83 years.
Fascinating and sad.
According to the Oxford American …
The house in the photograph belonged to a man named Tom “T. C.” Boring, a dentist born and raised in Greenwood, whom Eggleston has described as the best friend he ever had in the world. He was the scion of a well-respected Delta family, a sharp and promising Southern archetype who glided his way through the University of Mississippi, Loyola University, and the Navy before coming home to Greenwood and gradually, ungracefully losing his mind.
Full article here. As always, enjoy or don’t.
I picked up something a little different after finishing John Dies At The End. Jernigan is David Yates’s 1991 debut novel about a brilliant loser. Check out this uplifting description …
Well conceived and well written, this book examines the tragedy of a man whose life epitomizes failure on every level. A victim of circumstances, Peter Jernigan is now emotionally crippled and psychologically impoverished. His already distorted personal relationships, skewed further by a dependency on alcohol, sweep him forward, with horrifying swiftness, into a nightmarish cycle of failure, loss, and spiritual death. Bright but unsuccessful, Jernigan drifts through a bleak life that only becomes worse. He has lost his father and wife in successive accidents and now must deal with the adolescent traumas of his only son. His encounter with the divorced mother of his son’s girlfriend promises to lighten his life but instead complicates it even further. A disturbing first novel, Jernigan will cause readers, especially men, to shake their complacency and perhaps reevaluate their own circumstances.
What’s not to love?
Oh! My copy of There Was A Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of BIG STAR showed up yesterday, too. And of course, I jumped right in.
One surprising thing I’ve learned so far is that Chris Bell’s family lived in a house across the street from the one I grew up in. I missed them by about ten years, but still, what are the odds?!
Today on the Please Kill Me blargh, Bruce Eaton, author of Big Star’s Radio City (33 1/3 series) chats up Rich Tupica, author of There Was A Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of BIG STAR, the recent Chris Bell biography.
Check it out here!
Just as an aside, when social media first made me aware of the Chris Bell book, I didn’t make any plans to read it. The whole thing seemed rather sketchy, a paperback written by an author I wasn’t familiar with, published by HoZac Records. I wasn’t a huge fan of that cover (it’s growing on me), and besides, it was $40.00! For a paperback! When it sold out, I figured that was that.
But since then, all I’ve seen are glowing reviews. So when I read the PKM piece this morning, I checked the HoZac site for a status update. Second printing is shipping now, and I’ve got a birthday coming up.
After FIVE solid years of painstaking research and hard work, Rich Tupica’s epic tome on the deep end of the BIG STAR story is ready. At 400+ pages, There Was A Light is stocked with a wealth of previously-unseen color photos, personal ephemera from the Bell family’s archive, as well as everything Ardent Studios could jam in, it’s nothing short of breathtaking stuff! Starting with intense coverage of Bell’s childhood bands and continuing deep into his post-Big Star solo work, this book delves into the details beyond the documentary, distilling countless hours of minutiae into a riveting oral history of one of rock’n’roll’s most beloved cult bands, and a trip through Memphis underground music history like no other.
Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
I look like a monkey
And snobby rock books ain’t free