James Baumann reviews releases by The Mendoza Line, The Clash, The Thrills and Maplewood. Michael Lynch reviews Various Artists: 1-2-3-4!: Beat Beat Beat Volume 4. If you are a first time visitor, visit our About Us page. Click here for back issues.

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SMiLiNG at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago

by Mike Bennett

As the applause sustained throughout the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, I looked at the people around me. I saw some misty eyes, and a few people with tears rolling down their cheeks. Brian Wilson and his excellent band had completed their performance of SMiLE. While I wasn't in tears, seeing the work done live was unlike anything I had ever seen, or, more importantly, anything I've ever heard. The audience was divided, roughly 50-50, into those who were alive when Wilson first began working on SMiLE and those who are relatively young enough to still belong to an attractive...

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My Unpublished Rolling Stones Book

by Michael Lynch

Ten years ago, at the tender age of twenty-four, I began an interesting and ambitious project. In those days before the Internet (or, rather, those days before I had the Internet) I decided to make an attempt to put my years of collecting rock and roll trivia to good use. Inspired by my recent acquisition of a home computer, as well as my love of writing and, specifically, my love for showing off what I know, I came up with the idea of writing a book about The Rolling Stones...when I was finally finished (and in the world of editing one's own work, "finished" merely means "stopped before going crazy") I shopped it around to a few publishers, only to have the project fall on deaf eyes, so to speak.

If you enjoy this, write to Fufkin and say so, and maybe, just maybe, I'll bring out the other chapters over time.

That said, enjoy this peek into my unpublished work...

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This Is Rebel Music: The Harvey Kubernik InnerView: Part Two

with Gary Pig Gold

This Is Rebel Music: The Harvey Kubernik InnerViews by Harvey Kubernik (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM; 233 pages, hardcover)

This extraordinary assemblage of interviews by journalist and record producer Harvey Kubernik is, as Brian Wilson's blurb on the back cover says, "inside stuff." It's deep stuff, too. Note I used the word "assemblage." To call this a collection of interviews would convey no sense of what's going on in this book. This Is Rebel Music is a spiritual design," writes Kubernik in his Preface, "and it's reminiscent of Tibetan monks making a mandala out of sand." There is, indeed, something numinous in this book's construction, the unexpected ways in which the interviewees connect and bounce off each other, the way themes and characters reappear throughout. This is Rebel Music operates on a number of levels. By turns a meditation on music, poetry, memory, drugs and spirituality, it's also very much a love song to L.A., Kubernik's home turf. -- David Biasotti, Ugly Things Magazine, September-October 2004

For the literal flipside of our long and winding conversation with my all-time favorite under-assistant west coast promotional man, the one the only Harvey Kubernik now reveals some of the true stories and personalities behind key chapters of his utterly remarkable This Is Rebel Music book, available right now from the University of New Mexico Press.

So let's dive straight in...

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Brian Wilson Tosses Us a Carrot: My Thoughts on SMiLE at 1:45 a.m.

by Kurt Sampsel

Okay, I'm going to admit right here, up front, that I have not heard or purchased Brian Wilson's much-anticipated (to put it mildly) SMiLE. Now that we've got that out of the way, we can proceed.

First of all, I should tell you that I am a recent Beach Boys convert. Yes, I'm sorry to say that there was a time-even less than a year ago-when I, too, regarded the Beach Boys only as poppy hitmakers who provided a good soundtrack to the summer season. I was once one of the unwashed who believe The Beach Boys can be summed up with a handful of orange-and-yellow-swirl Capitol 45's. But it's not true.

I bought Pet Sounds and started to recover...

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The World is Round: Radio, Schmadio: Part One

by Alan Haber

About 10 years ago, I was on a panel at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I think the topic at hand was new radio technologies, and, probably, I was promoting the at-the-time most gee-whizbang fledgling radio technology there was, known as the Radio Data System, or simply RDS. RDS was a hot button for the Electronic Industries Association's Consumer Electronics Group, where I was a communications guy. RDS was one of my technologies, meaning I was assigned to promote it to consumers through my dealings with the press.

In consumer electronics years, 10 years...

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So You Want To Be Reviewed? Please Read This...

by Mike Bennett

One thing I don't have to worry about is having something to listen to. We here at Fufkin.com receive a high volume of CDs on a regular basis. Every month, I try to get through about 30 CDs, in addition to the ones that I ultimately review. Now I don't mean that I listen full through to all 30, as often it becomes readily apparent that something just doesn't grab me. But I do at least track through a few songs.

Having done so for the past few years, I definitely have some advice to give. First and foremost, be patient. If you're soliciting a CD blindly, realize that...

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Further Observations of a Jangly Music Fan

by Eric Sorensen

With less than a month to go before the end (unless we find ourselves re-counting votes in Florida again) of a bitter, polarizing election, it's nice to have pop music as a respite from all the political rhetoric of 2004. I'll keep my commentary apolitical and suggest that fufkin site visitors read the other columns this month - in celebration of the long overdue release of Brian Wilson's Smile album on CD. It's also worthy to note that Sir Paul McCartney and Neil Young will be performing at one another's fund-raising concerts this fall. Today's music...

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So Much Music....So Little Time

by Kevin Mathews

Retro is in!

Popland is performing at a corporate function in the middle of October and our paymasters have requested that we sing a couple of cover versions of "oldies but goodies." Now, how sad is it when one of the songs considered appropriate for selection is "Don't Dream It's Over" and the songwriter in question is a contemporary? Has it already been more than two decades since Neil Finn and co lit up the charts with their distinctive 60s-derived charm? Well, from the weathered faces of Neil and brother Tim revealed on the cover of the Finn Brothers' latest release - Everyone is Here - it certainly

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Additional Writers Needed

We are looking for additional writers with significant working knowledge of at least one genre of music, past or present.

E-mail us for more information. Take out the no_spam so that all you are left with is fufkin.com. Spider programs harvest our address and the spam is unbelievable.

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