I have on good authority that this song was played at something called the “Jihadi Bar,” a place where CIA interrogators working at a Black Site went to unwind. That and other secrets of undisclosed torture prisons are found within my interview with ex-interrogator Glenn Carle for Danger Room.

Much like at Guantanamo, detainees at this specific Black Site — I don’t know this for sure, but will irresponsibly speculate based on certain clues that it was in Afghanistan but not at Bagram — had heavy metal blasted at loud volumes, constantly, to torture them. Alas, Carle couldn’t tell me if one of the songs he heard there was “Bodies” by Drowning Pool, a staple on the torturers’ mixtape of the 00s.

More on Spencer Ackerman’s Blog

Eyre Peninsula’s Matt Waller has added another tip to the ‘don’t get eaten’ handbook with his discovery that Great White’s are much less aggressive when listening to AC/DC: particularly ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’.

A South Australian charter boat operator has made a fascinating discovery whilst conducting research into what kinds of music affect the behaviour of Great White Sharks.

More on ABC News

A man’s testes are many things to many people. They are objects of affection to be delicately caressed, vulnerable targets for an enemy’s swift boot, or bulging fashion statements in designer briefs. These throbbing organs generate a man’s ultimate purpose — they fuel aggression, propel the pleasure principle, and bestow a masculine pronoun. If his aim is true, future generations will revere his potent orbs as the very wellspring of Life itself.

AC/DC’s greatest frontman, Bon Scott, was extremely proud of his balls. He wore high-waisted skinny jeans to accentuate their curvature, and described them to his wife-to-be as “two hard-boiled eggs and a sausage.” He even wrote a song about them, tastefully entitled, “Big Balls.”

That’s just how Australians are, mate. It isn’t hard to find a bourbon-swilling brawler ready to prove his pair in the land down under. How fitting, then, that after drinking himself to death on February 19, 1980, Bon Scott would be exalted as the patron saint of Australia. He was their true-to-life working class hero, dead at 33.

It was a rough road to glorification. Bon bounced from job to job and band to band for over a decade before fulfilling his destiny in AC/DC. His work ethic was relentless. Never afraid to get his hands dirty, he scraped by laboring on fishing boats, driving tractors, and loading trucks at a fertilizer plant. But his struggle wasn’t just about grit and grime.

Though Bon’s first gigs were behind the drums with the bluesy Spektors, he soon found himself getting dolled up for the utterly unoriginal pop band, The Valentines. Those groovy years from ’66 to ’70 found Scott wearing Shakespearean bangs, poofy sleeves, and ball-shriveling bell-bottoms, all while singing backup to covers of “She Said” and “Build Me Up Buttercup.” Getting girly seems to be a rite of passage for hyper-masculine rockers. I guess it’s a long way to the top if you want to rock n’ roll.

Read More about Bon Scott and other Rock Star Martyrs at RockStarMartyr.net.

Canadian radio stations have been warned to censor the 1985 Dire Straits hit “Money for Nothing,” after a complaint that the lyrics of the Grammy Award-winning song were derogatory to gay men.

A St. John’s, Newfoundland, station should have edited the song to remove the word “faggot” because it violates Canada’s human rights standards, according to ruling this week by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.

A unnamed listener to OZ FM in the Atlantic Coast province complained to the industry watchdog last year after hearing the song, which features Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler and fellow rock star Sting.

The council said it realized Dire Straits uses the word sarcastically, and its use might have been acceptable in 1985 when the best-selling “Brothers in Arms” album was released, but said it was now inappropriate…

[continues at Reuters]

The New York Times‘ lead music critic Jon Pareles has written an excellent account of the three-day festival, which you can read here, but I thought fans of Moog music might enjoy the liner notes written in 1999 by Bob for the first (and only) disinformation CD, Best Of Moog: Electronic Pop Hits From The 60’s & 70’s:

We began making electronic music instruments in 1964 and began calling them “synthesizers” in 1967. Back then, most of our customers were experimental composers in universities and conservatories. Their music was “at the fringe”, to say the least. Meanwhile, out in the mainstream of our musical culture, record producers and performing musicians tended to think of the Moog Synthesizer as an instrument that could make funny sounds, but you couldn’t make “real music” with it.

But not all musicians were so shortsighted. Moog’s second synthesizer customer ever was Eric Siday, a New York composer who specialized in radio and television commercials. Siday’s “five-second compositions”, which he performed on his Moog Synthesizer, were heard by millions of listeners and viewers across the land. During the same period, in midtown Manhattan, Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley were working out the moves to produce music directly on multi-track tape, using conventionally recorded sounds along with their Moog Synthesizer. And, just a few blocks away, Dick Hyman was applying his formidable keyboard skills to his brand new Moog synth. Hyman’s record “MOOG”, and Perrey/Kingsley’s record “The In Sound from Way Out” were two of the earliest albums that demonstrated that, yes, you could indeed make “real music” with a Moog Synthesizer.

Meanwhile, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were enjoying enormous popularity, the Grateful Dead were rising fast, and listeners everywhere were developing a taste for new sounds. By the end of 1968, Columbia Records had introduced a whole series of experimental and electronic music. They called the series “M.O.O.T.”, for “Music Of Our Time.” Included in that series was Switched-on Bach, a recording of the music of J. S. Bach, realized by W. Carlos entirely on the Moog Synthesizer. Switched-on Bach went on to become one of the largest-selling classical albums of all time.

For us, 1969 was the year of “The Moog Record”. The popularity of Switched-on Bach, plus other synthesizer records that had been released, captured the attention of the mainstream record producers. We received dozens of orders for large synthesizers. At one point, we had a nine-month order backlog. The “Moog Records” began to hit the street: Moog Groove; Moog Plays the Beatles; Moog Power; Country Moog; and on and on. Our small factory was *very* busy. We were invited to stage a synthesizer concert in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which was attended by some four thousand listeners. We were commissioned to build four programmable performance synthesizers for Gershon Kingsley’s First Moog Quartet. And of course, our company made it onto the pages of several national news magazines.

Most of the cuts on this CD come from the short but exciting period from 1968 to 1970. They’re from selected “Moog Records” of the late sixties. They’re part of the white-hot musical-cultural revolution that characterized the period. At the time they were released, they were strikingly novel. Today, we’re accustomed to hearing synthesizers, so the cuts sometimes tend to sound, well, quaint. But they’re all authentic late ’60’s, pure and simple. I hope you enjoy them.

— Bob Moog

Inside the dust jacket of his new book, Keith Richards has left an inscription:

“This is the Life. Believe it or not, I haven’t forgotten any of it. Thanks and praises, Keith Richards.”

Perhaps the most highly-anticipated rock autobiography ever, Life is the most detailed account we have yet of the legendary guitarist/songwriter.

Richards has lived his life in public since his early 20s and he’s always lived it in the full-glare of the media — bad publicity be damned. That said, this book is not a confessional reassessment in which a public figure offers explanations — or excuses — for past sins. Richards greatest music and worst behavior are a matter of public record and Life doesn’t offer a new version of events so much as it delivers his version, and it’s full of crazy wisdom, smirking sarcasm, raspy rambles, heart and soul.

While other volumes — like Victor Bockris’ excellent Keith — have revealed the man through the eyes of friends, family and Rolling Stones insiders, it’s Life’s first-person candor that sets it apart. Not only does Richards give us the straight-dope on Keith, he also illuminates the rise of rock ‘n’ roll and the ’60’s counter-culture from inside the eye of the hurricane. Life is also about the creative life of one of rock’s most important guitarists and songwriters, and the book’s rich detail is at least partly due to a life lived on the look-out for the next song, the next riff.

Read the full review at Joe Nolan’s Insomnia.

Silly scientists, Ozzy’s still alive because he’s a werewolf. We’ve known this since the ’80s. Elizabeth Scott writes on Sky News:

Scientists are to map Ozzy Osbourne’s genetic code in a bid to find out how he is still alive after decades of drug and alcohol abuse.

The former Black Sabbath frontman is only one of a few people in the world to have his full genome analysed. It is hoped the results from the £27,000 test, which takes three months, will provide information on how drugs are absorbed in the body.

Ozzy, 61, has lived a life that would presumably kill any ordinary person. Even the singer himself cannot understand how he has survived this long, recently describing himself as a “medical miracle” after going on a “bender” for “40 years.”

Photo: Kevin Burkett (CC)

Read More: Sky News

Black Flag – “Damaged” (SST)
Side A: COMIN’ AT YA – THE NEOLITHIC GELATINOUS THINK
Side B: SIZZLED THAT NEO-ORTHODOXY RIGHT INTO MY UH, AAAH… WHAT THE HELL!

Led Zeppelin – III (Atlantic)
Side A: blank
Side B: Do what thou wilt

Was Jimi Hendrix’s ambidexterity the secret to his talent? This is the question explored in a new paper by psychologist Stephen Christman (via TwentyFourBit), who argues that Hendrix’s versatility informed not just his guitar-playing – but his lyrics too.

According to Christman, who is based at the University of Toledo, Hendrix was not strictly left-handed. Although he played his right-handed guitar upside down, and used his left hand to throw, comb his hair and hold cigarettes, Hendrix wrote, ate and held the telephone with his right hand. He was, Christman argues, “mixed-right-handed”. And this “mixed”-ness, signaling better interaction between the left and right hemispheres of the guitarist’s brain, suffused every part of his music.

Hendrix’s special ability, Christman wrote, “enabled him to integrate the actions of his left and right hands while playing guitar, to integrate the lyrics and melodies of his songs, and perhaps even to integrate the older blues and R&B traditions with the emerging folk, rock, and psychedelic sounds of the 60s”. Certainly the guitarist’s technical virtuosity is clear. Christman points to Hendrix’s technique on songs like Still Raining, Still Dreaming, “where Hendrix uses his right hand to play an intricate series of bends and slides, while his left hand, in between plucking the strings, uses the pickup selector to switch back and forth between the treble and bass pickups”.

Read More in the Guardian

The homes and schools close to Dolphins Stadium are receiving “sex offender advisory” postcards this week warning residents to watch out for The Who’s Pete Townshend, who’ll be performing at halftime of Super Bowl XLIV.

By next week, 1,500 homes will have received the postcard, sent by the Brevard County-based Protect Our Children. The non-profit acts as a community watchdog when it comes to sex offenders and sends similar cards to Melbourne residents where known pedophiles live.

Townshend, 63, was arrested in England in a 2003 roundup of alleged pedophiles accused of cruising online sites for photos of child sex. Townshend said he was just doing research for a book at the time. He wasn’t convicted of anything but was placed on that country’s list of sexual offenders for five years.

Thanks for spreading some Disinformation Fuse TV!

Many rock purists and music snobs (myself included) often lament the quality of most modern pop/rock music. “Music these days is so trite and derivative,” they say. “It’s just been downhill since the 60’s and 70’s. Those were the days.”

A few years ago, Rolling Stone magazine added fuel to the music snobbery fire with its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list. Anyone casually paging through the list would notice that the bulk of the list was comprised of songs from the 60’s and 70’s, just like the music snobs always say.

I, however, wasn’t content with the casual analysis. So I punched the list into Excel, crunched some numbers, and found an interesting parallel between the decline of rock music quality and, of all things, the decline in US oil discovery and production: