Chuck Klosterman: Idea Stealer

In the newest Onion AV Club (dated September 8, 2009), pop culture essayist Chuck Klosterman celebrates the release of remastered Beatles albums on CD by reviewing the band's entire oeuvre. He operates under the premise that they were a commercially-unsuccessful, barely-known band.

Sound familiar? If you've been reading 3 Minutes, 49 Seconds for awhile, it should. Last year, I reviewed every single Beatles album, pretending as though they were an obscure, unpopular band I'd recently unearthed. Here are some links:

Please Please Me (1963), With The Beatles (1963), A Hard Day's Night (1964), Beatles For Sale (1964), Help! (1965), Past Masters 1 (1990), Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966), Sgt.Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), Magical Mystery Tour (1967), The Beatles (1968), Yellow Submarine (1969), Abbey Road (1969), Let It Be (1970),
Past Masters 2 (1990)

I don't claim to be as funny as Klosterman, and I love his bit about the Rolling Stones, but I DID have the idea first. You can compare for yourself. Klosterman's reviews are here.

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Honoring the Legacy of REO Speedwagon

I suppose I should have known the saga of REO Speedwagon couldn't end with a whimper. Before I get into the latest developments, here's a brief review of what's happened so far: In September 2024 came the announcement that the band was effectively breaking up at the end of the year. Apparently, frontman Kevin Cronin ruled that bassist Bruce Hall was no longer fit to continue touring following back surgery in summer 2024. Hall felt otherwise. Here we learned that REO had essentially become a three-way partnership between Cronin, Hall, and Doughty (who retired from touring in January 2023) following the departure of original members Alan Gratzer and Gary Richrath in 1988. Doughty sided with Hall, so Cronin was outvoted 2-1. No Bruce Hall, no REO Speedwagon. In December 2024 Cronin revealed he would continue performing REO Speedwagon songs with the two musicians who replaced Doughty and Hall, as well as Brian Hitt and Dave Amato (who replaced Gratzer and Richrath), with the on...

The Unlikely Musical Life of Tom Kelly

You may not know the name Tom Kelly, but I guarantee that you've sung along to songs he wrote. Born in West Lafayette, Indiana in 1952, Tom moved to Effingham, Illinois when he was 11 years old, just in time to witness the Beatles' debut on Ed Sullivan. Bit by the rock music bug, he joined a local band called the Trifaris, singing and playing bass. His family moved back to Indiana in '66. When Tom finished high school, he decided to go to college in Illinois, but his choice was made based on extracurricular factors, not academic ones. "I started at Eastern [Illinois University] because there was a band,” he told the Effingham Daily News in 2011, “Then I transferred to Southern [Illinois University] because there was another band.” Champaign, Illinois Continuing his college hopping, Tom headed closer to home to attend Purdue, and there he had a group called The Gaping Huggers, comprised of former fellow Trifari JC Marshall on drums, and University of Illino...

Billy Joel: Cold Spring Harbor (1971)

We started at the end, and now we finish at the beginning. Billy Joel's first solo album has a reputation as a sort of curiousity in his catalog. For one, it was quite hard to find for a long while, as it was initually released on a small label called Family Productions and was very spottily distributed. Another bit of intrigue was that the album was initially mastered at the wrong speed, with the main effect being Billy's vocals - which were already much higher-pitched than what we'd become used to - being pitched up to near Alvin and the Chipmunks levels. In 1983, with Billy at the height of his commerical success, the album was remixed, and given some overdubs and edits. That stands today as the "offical" version, though neither the fans nor Billy himself are happy with it. So I suppose a caveat to this entire review is that Cold Spring Harbor is not the album it was intended to be. That said, I'm going to attempt to take it at face value, using the widel...

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