With Sunday’s release of the long-awaited (by some, not all) Guns N’ Roses album, Chinese Democracy, Dr Pepper will make good on its promise of a free Dr Pepper for everyone in America. Starting at 12:01 a.m. on Sunday November 23rd, Dr Pepper, for 24 hours, will offer a coupon on its website for a free 20-oz. soda. Will getting a $1.50 soda for free make spending $10 to $15 on a CD from a Hughesian, irrelevant, washed-up rocker a little easier to take in these hard economic times? Probably not. You could always do what you were probably going to do anyway and just download the damn thing for free from a torrent site. But be careful; it seems Axl needs all the money you could possibly give him and he may have you arrested for that! I vote for taking the Dr Pepper $1.50 economic stimulus package and not even bothering with Chinese Democracy.

Look deep inside yourself.

Search your feelings.

Do you really even care about Guns N’ Roses anymore?

I didn’t think so.

UPDATE 12/2/08

From CNN.com

So many GN’R fans — and, no doubt, fans of free stuff in general — tried to get the coupon that they choked the site and it crashed. Disgruntled and downright ticked off, some blamed the band.

“When you go on the blogs and you read the responses from the fans, they associated Axl with this promotion … and blame him for the fact that they didn’t get their free soda,” said GN’R lawyer Laurie Soriano.

Really? Really? People are getting pissed off about not being able to get a free Dr Pepper? And Axl Rose is coming to their rescue? Maybe his attorney will have one of those class action lawsuit ads running on latenight basic cable next week. Maybe the economy is worse than we all thought. Maybe GN’R is slumming for any press they can get for this very lackluster album. Maybe people really love Dr Pepper that much.

What makes this all the more amusing is CNN’s fine writing. Really.

That’s when GN’R became GN’RN’L. Soriano fired off a letter to Dr P. No one is LOL.

Our Copy Editor was miffed at Rick Reilly yesterday for his eloquent prose (”xanaxed ferret” is already taken as a band name), but I think Kareen Wynter at CNN is giving him a run for his money.

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This just in from Brett Steele, manager of the Bay area’s Mojo Gurus, about the band signing with the Canadian label True North:

True North Records and The Mojo Gurus announce the signing of a multi-album deal. The first album, entitled “Let’s Get Lit With…The Mojo Gurus,” will be released in March, 2009 with tour dates in the US and Canada to follow. Said Geoff Kulawick, True North’s President, “We are very excited to have The Mojo Gurus join the True North roster. The band is fantastic and will certainly fit in well with the True North brand.”

The Mojo Gurus released their debut disc in 1999 to great critical acclaim. The bands video “Tiger Lily” received heavy rotation on Canadian music video channel Much Music. That release was quickly followed by “Drinkin’ TNT and Smokin’ Dynamite” which along with their powerhouse live performances helped the band build an impressive following around the world. The Gurus third release “Hot Damn!” enjoyed a four-month success story on FM radio that included over one-hundred-nineteen FM stations playing “Hot Damn!” including sixty-five CMJ reporting “core” stations.

The success of “Hot Damn!” led to the band signing with Empire Musicwerks and recording a new CD entitled “Shakin’ In The Barn.” The bands hard work ethic continued to pay dividends when after a NYC showcase they were handpicked by Grammy Award winning producer Jack Douglas (John Lennon, Aerosmith, NY Dolls) to be his next recording project. On “Shakin’ In The Barn” Douglas captured all the energy from the band’s amazing live performances. “Shakin’ In The Barn” was distributed by Universal Records and spent six months on the national roots rock/alt-country charts.

Defying all labels the Gurus new album “Let’s Get Lit With. The Mojo Gurus” combines southern rock, old school country, rhythm and blues, surf rock and even a little bit of soul. Produced by the band and Jody Gray the album was mastered in LA by Stephen Marsh (Jeff Beck, Muddy Waters).

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Britney Spears, who has totally regained her hottie status, is back, and playing the St. Pete Times Forum on March 8. Here’s the info:

(TAMPA, FL) – Britney Spears will bring her highly anticipated The Circus Starring Britney Spears 2009 Tour to the St. Pete Times Forum in Tampa, FL on Sunday, March 8.  The 27-city North American trek, her first arena tour in five years, follows hot on the heels of Spears’ long-awaited sixth studio album, Circus. Emmy Award-winning choreographer and director, Wade Robson, is helming the incredible tour production, which also features special guests The Pussycat Dolls.

Tickets will go on sale Monday, December 8^th at 10:00am and can be purchased at the McDonald’s Box Office at the St. Pete Times Forum box office and all Ticketmaster locations, via Ticketmaster charge-by-phone at 1-800-745-3000, Ticketmaster Express at 866-448-7849 (automated only self service line) or online at Ticketmaster.com. Tickets are subject to applicable service charges and event time and date are subject to change.

Britney Spears is one of the top-selling artists of the last decade, and to date she has sold in excess of 62 million albums worldwide. On October 15, Spears’ new single, “Womanizer,” made a record-breaking jump to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and garnered first-week download sales of 286,000. This marked the biggest opening-week tally by a female artist since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking digital downloads in 2003.  “Womanizer” is Spears’ ninth #1 single on the Hot 100 since her 1999 debut …Baby One More Time.

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After several days of family togetherness and gorging on Thanksgiving leftovers, Saturday evening at New World Brewery was a welcome respite brought to us by THX Mgmt.  The show featured a diverse group of Florida bands: Beardsley,  Incredible Crisis, Zillionaire, and Sunbears! I got there a bit late after being distracted playing trucks with my friend’s three year old so I missed Beardsley… but I did manage to capture the rest of the bands.

Incredible Crisis

This was my first time seeing this band and I look forward to seeing them again in the future.

Zillionaire

Zillionaire had an excellent, dynamic evening - I just wished their set was a bit longer!  If you don’t have your very own copy of “The Street Lights Have Been Turned Down” yet, shame on you.

Michael Waksman

Keith Ulrey

Heath Dupras

Bryan Bates

Sunbears!

I had heard that Sunbears! was a very visual experience in addition to being sugar pop (aka Flaming Lips lite). Jared and Jonathan delivered with a complete light show and a toast.

• Incredible Crisis Photos
• Zillionaire Photos
• Sunbears Photos
• Only Music Has The Answer - Live Music Photos

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The twin pianos — one black, one white — stationed in the St. Pete Forum conference room should’ve offered a pretty solid clue. But the rumor at the news conference was that the Forum was unveiling a Britney Spears tour date.

Instead, Tampa Bay Lightning owner Oren Koules stood at the podium just past 11 a.m. and announced that the venue would host Billy Joel and Elton John’s Face 2 Face Tour on Thurs., March 5, 7:30 p.m.

Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10 a.m. through Ticketmaster, livenation.com or the Forum box office. They range in price from $179 to $54.

The Joel/John touring collaboration, which dates back to 1994, has been called by Billboard magazine, “the most successful touring package of all time.”

This tour will follow the familiar pattern: The two titans will open shows with a series of duets on twin pianos, then each artist performs a set with his own band, after which the entire aggregation joins for a big encore.

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We interrupt your normally scheduled programming for a brief message from Creative Loafing’s Promotions Department.

Don’t forget to visit CL’s Fun and Free Stuff page. This (and next) week, we’re giving away tickets to see Of Montreal, Les Savy Fav, Wanted DVDs and more!

You can also join our music text message group “The Mixtape” for concert updates and other exclusive chances to win tickets, CDs, downloads and more - all you have to do is send the word MIXTAPE to 50618.

You may now resume reading, commenting, blogging, flickring or twittering.

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Pretty much any time a music critic of my, um, seasoning takes a stand against something trendy, he (she) runs the risk of being labeled an old fart. But I don’t think I’m succumbing to old-fartism when I say that the rampant use of Auto-Tune in today’s pop music is a scourge that I hope ends up in the dustbin of bad fads after a few more mouse clicks.

Auto-Tune? You may know it by its previous incarnations as a Vocoder or Talkbox. It’s an audio processor developed by Antares Technologies that corrects vocal pitch, but its trademark effect is the robotic sound it can add to singing.

The main perpetrator of the scourge is T-Pain, a hack who sings, near as I can tell, everything through Auto-Tune. He’s been highly rewarded for this gimmickry with several hit albums and a bevy of guest vocal appearances on hip-hop singles. In fact, Diddy reportedly paid T-Pain a royalty to work Auto-Tune “magic” on his new recording.

If Auto-Tune was relegated to a well-compensated clown like T-Pain and a few hooks on hip-hop songs, no problem. But it’s spreading like Ebola. Kanye West uses the effect throughout his new disc 808s & Heartbreak, which means that he’s doing a fair amount of singing, which is not good. Britney Spears, Madonna, Justin Timberlake and other pop artists have used it, which suggests it’s getting more and more entrenched as mainstream practice.

I have to admit that computer-sounding vocals can be pleasing as a novelty, when done in small doses. Roger Troutman and his band Zapp used it extensively in the 1980s, and I still have love for “I Want to Be Your Man,” his No. 3 single from 1987. (By the way, Roger had to generate the sound via synthesizer with a tube-like thing in his mouth, just like Peter Frampton did on Comes Alive!.)

Check out Roger doing his pre-Pain thing here:

So … why does the proliferation of Auto-Tune make my ears beg to be stuffed with cotton? Well, it represents a bunch of things that gnaw at old farts like me: A follow-the-leader ethic in pop music that seems to be getting worse all the time, regardless of artistic consequences; a lack of imagination and musical savvy in favor of a computer program; non-singers (Kanye) or marginal singers (Britney) being rewarded for using a device that masks their lack of vocal talent. (When T-Pain performed “One More Drink” with Ludacris on Saturday Night Live, he sang without Auto-Tune. No surprise: His pitch was way off.)

I don’t think these concerns are reserved for hidebound veterans such as myself. You can be the streetest 20-year-old cat on the block and still find Auto-Tune artificial and offensive.

Here’s where I take solace. Although I wish I had the power to halt Auto-Tune use by mandatory decree, I’m damn sure it won’t be long before the folks who soak it in as part of their daily soundtrack will get entirely sick of it.

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After getting your band together, coming up with a name and writing a few songs, the first thing you need to do is make sure everyone is on the same page by defining your goals as a band. There are two main types of goals: Overall Band Goals and Tactical Goals.

Overall Band Goals

More times than not, it is a lack of common overall goal drives a band to a breakup. These goals don’t have to be realistic or based on any facts, but they need to be the same for all members. If the ship’s crew is pulling in different directions, you’ll never get anywhere. The overall goals need to be agreed upon by all band members. If someone disagrees, either they are not the right fit for your band or you need to revise the goal. Here are some examples of overall band goals:

• To make a living only playing and selling music
• To be signed to a label and be on tour for 6 months out of the year
• To play for fun and not for fame and profit

The good thing about these overall goals is that they can quash arguments and speed up lineup changes. Its a good idea to write the goal down and post it somewhere in your practice space where everyone can see it. Remind yourselves everyday as to why you are doing this and stay the course.

To meet these overall goals, you need to set tactical goals.

Tactical Goals

Tactical goals are sub-goals of your overall goal that drive the day-to-day operations of your band. The tactical goals need to be 1) measurable and 2) have a time limit. For example, good tactical goals would be:

• Within the next 6 months, we want to play a show every weekend to an increasing number of fans.
• Over the next 3 months, we want to sell 10 CDs per show and gather 10 new email addresses for our mailing list
• Make $500 per week in merch sales by February 2009
• Write a new song every month
  

After you define your tactical goals, define the steps you need to meet those goals and go get them done. Goal-setting is crucial if you want your band to work out in the long run.

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I’ve been thinking about gravity. I guess that’s to be expected when the person you love more than anything, the heart beat you’ve tied all of your tomorrows to, gets her private pilot’s license as my partner did this past week.

Maybe I have the mind of a medieval peasant, but flying has always seemed vaguely blasphemous to me. Every time I board an airplane, I am haunted by some sort of inchoate guilt and a fear that I will not get away with it this time.

I’m not trying to defend my oddly theological attitude about the matter, but our language does indicate that this outlook might be a collective one. When a pilot flies or an athlete jumps some ungodly height or distance, we say they have “defied gravity.” Gravity is a force that reigns over us. It is a “law” in the most fascist of senses. There is no procedure for overturning or invalidating it. When we fly or jump, we don’t abolish the law of gravity; we merely defy it, the way an adolescent defies her parents only to find herself speedily exiled to the Siberia of her bedroom. “What goes up must come down,” we are fond of saying. Not even the onslaught of postmodernism (a philosophical force that, according to many, has obliterated God and reduced moral absolutes to mere preferences) has put a chink of equivocation in this cherished platitude. Gravity always wins.

This past Saturday morning, my partner took me flying. It was her first flight as a certified private pilot. We had ambitions to fly to Bartow for the traditional “$100 hamburger” at Bunky’s Barnstormin’ Restaurant (the burger is $4.75, but the cost of the plane rental and the gas earn it the nickname) but once we got across the bay and I caught the view of St. Pete from the rear window,  we decided to stay “in the pattern” (this is pilot speak for flying in circles) so I could take in the skyline for a while.

Did I mention it was a particularly glorious morning? We were out on the ramp “preflighting” the plane at sunrise. While my partner focused on ailerons, flaps and other mysteries, all I could think about were the cornfields on my grandma’s farm in Indiana. Everything was that same kind of yellow and soft. We taxied to the runway and the rancid but beautiful water of Tampa Bay turned from black to green as the sun climbed higher. We took off and, once I got up the nerve to look, my hometown, so ordinary and familiar to me, had become exotic and beautiful. The Trop, the Vinoy, the Bank of America tower, Coffeepot Bayou, Snell Isle, USF St. Pete all glistened (they really glistened!) in the early morning sunlight. All of sudden, St. Pete was an incredible place to live. 

Maybe it was my rekindled admiration for the city I call home or maybe we were just wicked hungry, but, upon landing, we decided to head to one of downtown’s treasures, the Dome Grille, for breakfast. After our feast of fried eggs, grits and enough coffee to power a New York City block, we took a leisurely stroll down to St. Pete’s Saturday Morning Market.  As I savored the feel of every footfall on the firm and familiar pavement, my partner, her head apparently still in the clouds, turned philosophical: “Wouldn’t it be cool if for 30 seconds every month gravity just stopped working?” She had been thinking about gravity too.

“That right there is evidence that there is no God,” I said, displaying my unrivaled gift for turning chicken salad into chicken spit. “If there is a God and we are created in his or hers or its or whatever’s likeness, then cool shit like that should happen all the time.”

“We did just spend an hour flying.” She smiled at me in this certain way she has that reminds me that I don’t know anything about anything. I felt even more compelled to carry the argument to its conclusion.

“Physics is your department, but I’m pretty sure that, while we were up there, gravity’s rules were still in effect.”

“I suppose,” she said, smiling even wider and taking hold of my hand. I would never tell her this, but I swear, for the next 30 seconds, I floated down Central Ave.

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Thanksgiving Weekend just didn’t provide enough do-nothing time for me so I decided to take this entire week off and have me a stay-cation. I’m going to re-alphabetize my CD collection, dust my apartment, finish a couple books, write haikus and whatever else I feel like doing. Which will surely include some light blogging. Here are the tunes going through my head:

Top 10: Vacation songs

1. Vacation, The Go-Go’s
2. Holiday Road, Lindsey Buckingham
3. Fish and Whistle, John Prine
4. Too Much of Nothing, Bob Dylan and the Band
5. It’s My Lazy Day, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard
6. Situation Vacant, The Kinks
7. Lazy Days, The Byrds
8. One Big Holiday, My Morning Jacket
9. Home Sweet Home, Breaux Freres
10. Another Sunny Day, Belle & Sebastian

The Go-Go’s — Vacation

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