Would You Eat Them In A Box? Would You Eat Them With a Fox?

Back in early March, we tipped you to a project called Dylan Hears A Who, which wedded the verse of Dr. Seuss to a dead-on imitation of Highway 61-era Bob Dylan, to amazing effect. It was a lovingly realized tribute to both artists, if not a skillful parody with something to say about the similarities between them. Now Salon profiles what happened when the folks at Dr. Seuss Enterprises got wind of things. Let's just say they weren't flattered. The site is now "retired" permanently -- which is an awful shame because it was brilliant in every detail, right down to the album art and liner notes. For those of you who missed out, I can't resist sharing one of the seven tracks.

MP3: Dylan Hears A Who - "Green Eggs And Ham"

Odds and Sods

NPR has last Wednesday night's performance by The Good, The Bad & The Queen, at the 9:30 Club in D.C., available to stream or download. Excellent stuff from one of my favorite records so far this year.




RollingStone.com has posted (far too few) audio excerpts from the wonderfully freewheeling interview that Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills gave at the magazine's offices last Monday afternoon, hours before R.E.M.'s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I especially enjoyed hearing about the squalid conditions the band was living in when Rolling Stone named Murmur the best album of 1983, over Michael Jackson's Thriller.


A huge, slip-cased coffee table book that details "EVERYTHING related to the Beatles recording sessions, including beautiful, almost-pornographic photos of every mixing board, mic, tape deck, etc. ever used in a Beatles session," and costs over a hundred bucks? Yes, please! (tip from DJ Cayenne at BGB)


Need a cheat sheet on release dates for upcoming CDs, music DVDs and even books about music? Pause & Play has you covered.

Wrapped Up In Books - A TTT Contest

Our new friends at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, in association with our old friends at Criminal Records in Little 5 Points, are putting on a great literary/music event next Wednesday night, March 14, and to promote it, they've generously given us a prize pack to give away. First, the goods on the event:

At 7:00 that evening, authors John Sheppard and Evan Mandery will discuss music, celebrity and pop culture, as well as playing some illustrative tunes from their iPods, at Aurora Coffee in L5P. Shepperd is the author of Small Town Punk, the funny, semi-autobiographical story of kids trapped and bored in a landscape of Walmarts and Pizza Huts, but buoyed by their love of old-school punk rock. (More info is here.) Mandery's new book is Dreaming of Gwen Stefani, a comic novel that explores the dark side of celebrity obsession. Then, as soon as the literary portion of the evening concludes, proceedings will move next door to Criminal Records, where soulful Scottish singer-songwriter (dig the alliteration, lit geeks!) Paolo Nutini will give an in-store performance. It should be a great, esoteric evening of book and culture chat, coffee and music. The phrase "free wine" has also been tossed around.

Now the contest: Wordsmiths has given us a set of these books to give away, and you don't need to attend the event or even live in Atlanta to be eligible to win (although you do need to live somewhere in the U.S. -- the TTT treasury can't handle international shipping just yet). In a comment below, just answer one question: What's your favorite book-related or literature-themed song? "Paperback Writer" by The Beatles? "Everyday I Write The Book" by Elvis Costello? C'mon, there must be hundreds of 'em -- let's see some creativity out there. We'll toss all the entries in a hat and draw a winner out at random the morning after the event (so next Thursday the 15th). Be sure to give us your e-mail address with your comment (no one will see it but us) -- if you win, we'll need to contact you and arrange to get you the goods.

Finally, if you want to double your chances of winning, our main man DJ Cayenne at Baby Got Books has a set of books to give away as well.

MP3: Belle & Sebastian - "Wrapped Up In Books"

A Million Miles Away

My high school buddy Frank Reiss has owned and operated A Cappella Books, the wonderful indie book store in Atlanta's Little 5 Points neighborhood, for going on 18 years. More recently, Frank has also founded a little publishing company, Everthemore Books, that specializes (thus far) in books about music. He first re-printed beautiful paperback editions of two music titles that (for reasons I can't begin to understand) had been out-of-print for a number of years, Paul Hemphill's The Nashville Sound and Rodger Lyle Brown's Party Out Of Bounds: The B-52s, R.E.M. and The Kids Who Rocked Athens, Georgia. Both of these books are highly recommended, and when the Hemphill book was published in 1970, the Chicago Sun-Times called it “the best book ever written about country music.”

This week, Everthemore -- under a new imprint called For Now -- releases its first original title, As Far As You Can Get Without A Passport, the initial volume of memoirs by singer-songwriter Peter Case. If you're not familiar with Case, he was a huge figure in the West Coast music scene in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, and a founding member of two influential bands, punk outfit The Nerves (their "Hangin' On The Telephone" was later and more famously covered by Blondie) and power-popsters The Plimsouls (who hit big with the classic "A Million Miles Away" in 1983). He's since toured and recorded as a solo artist, with a smaller but devoted following, and for much of the last 30 years has basically lived the life of a folk troubadour.

Case is also, as this book makes clear, one hell of a prose writer. I attended a preview event at A Cappella in the fall of last year and was blown away by the excerpt he read that night, a vivid, richly detailed and frequently moving account of his early days as a "busking" sidewalk musician in San Francisco. He's had a fascinating life, has encountered lots of real-life characters along the way (both famous and obscure), and is a genuinely gifted storyteller.

You can pick up copies of any of these books at the A Cappella store in L5P or at the Everthemore page on its website. If you're smart, you'll do just that.