Blog Posts by Billy Altman

Today they've announced that the musical entertainment during halftime at the 2009 Super Bowl will be none other than Bruce "Born in the U.S.A." Springsteen. And I guess I'm not the only one immediately thinking two things: First, that the NFL no doubt will put in the contract that "Born To Run" has got to be on the set list--and dedicated to Emmett Smith and Walter Payton. ("Backs like us, baby, we were born to run..") Second, are they ever going to book anyone even remotely "edgy" again? I mean, it's been a good four years since 2004 and Janet Jackson's infamous "Nipplega..," I mean, "wardrobe malfunction" at the, er, hands of Justin Timberlake. And since then we've had Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Prince, and Tom Petty. Not exactly a youth movement, is it? And no offense to "The Boss," but considering that his concerts don't even start to really heat up until, oh, about the middle of the second or third hour, it he really the best choice for a 15-minute slot in the middle of

News of the plane crash over the weekend that killed four people and severely injured former Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker and noted turntablist Adam Goldstein (aka DJ AM) serves as yet another sobering reminder that in the ever-unpredictable world of celebrity culture, fate can and often does play a significant hand.

This seems especially true when it comes to pop music, which over the decades has seen its fair share of unfortunate life-ending events specifically related to air travel. Some of the most famous have occurred "in the line of duty"--on the way to or from concerts, personal appearances, photo/video shoots, etc.--a fact  that not only has magnified the tragedies for fans but also has frozen in time the lives of these stars inside our collective memory banks.

For example, in just a few months--February 3, 1959, to be exact--it'll be the 50 th anniversary of what's generally considered the most well-known of all music-associated plane crashes: the Clear Lake Iowa accident

Visitors to Pearl Jam's official website this week are in for something of a surprise--at least those who think of the grunge-era origined hard rock band in purely Seattle-centric terms.

Over the weekend, Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder made available for download a live performance of a new song called "All The Way" that he debuted at a concert at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago in August. The song is about the Chicago Cubs, who on Saturday captured the National League Central Division title, and to whom Windy City native Vedder has pledged baseball allegiance to all his life--a lifetime in which neither he, nor anyone else under 100 years of age, has borne witness to a Chicago Cubs World Championship, seeing as how the Cubbies haven't won a World Series since (yes) 1908.

According to the notice on the group's home page, Vedder wrote the song "at the request of Ernie Banks," the Hall Of Fame infielder known far and wide as "Mr. Cub"--and who, at age 77, I guess will now also be

Norman Whitfield, who passed away yesterday at age 67 in Los Angeles after a long battle with diabetes, may not be a name immediately familiar to most music listeners. But I would venture a guess that virtually everyone reading this has at some point in their life heard Norman Whitfield's work--and well past the simple L.A. Times headline that accompanied his obituary: "Motown Songwriter And Producer Won Two Grammy Awards."

Yes, Norman Whitfield did win two Grammys--specifically as the co-author of the Temptations' "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" in 1972 and then as the composer/producer of the score for the 1976 film Car Wash. But that above-the-surface highlighting of Whitfield's accomplishments in music is kind of like noting the tip without the rest of the iceberg. Because when it comes to the evolution of R&B, soul, and urban music in the 1960s and '70s, you couldn't wade through any waters, big or small, without hitting something that Norman Whitfield was involved in.

Motown founder

I'm sure that Britney Spears would agree that, philosophically speaking, when one door closes, another opens--and I don't just mean driver-side car doors, either. There is a certain symmetry to finding out that, on the high heels of her successful (as in no one got hurt) appearance on MTV's Video Music Awards show a little over a week ago, the release of Spears' new CD has just been bumped up to an "Xmas stocking stuffer purchase opp" date of December 2--which just happens to be Brit's birthday.

Now it probably should be noted that the new CD, entitled Circus, reportedly is not completely finished yet. And with the kind of track record Britney's had over the last few years, her label Jive Records must be pretty darned sure it'll be ready; either that or they've got a great insurance policy. In any event, Spears does seem to be in good, capable creative hands--or at the very least a good, capable small army of them. Working on the project are everyone from the Outsyders (who produced

The news that founding Pink Floyd member Richard Wright has passed away from cancer at age 65 will no doubt bring a barrage of stories detailing the assorted onstage/offstage twists and turns of the group's long career. And make no mistake: Over the years, the group's combination of both the bizarre and the bitter when it came to their internal affairs was as much a source of fascination to their legions of fans as their often brilliant music, which have generated enough album/CD sales that if laid end to end would probably stretch from the London architecture school where they first met in the early 1960s all the way to  that dark side of the moon and back again--and probably a few round trip's worth at that.

Trips, of course, of both the physical and mental variety, were what Pink Floyd's earliest recordings such as "Interstellar Overdrive" and "Astronomy Domine" were all about--especially in the day-gloed days before their original guiding force guitarist Syd Barrett went on a few

I'm not sure what's more bizarre: Billboard ranking Chubby Checker's "The Twist" as the most popular Top 100 chart single of the last 50 years--or Chubby Checker's comments about it.

Today, Billboard announced that Checker's 1960 recording of "The Twist" had landed at the top of a top 10all-time list in which numbers two, three, four, and five singles of the last half-century went to, respectively, Santana's "Smooth," Bobby Darin's "Mack The Knife," Leann Rimes's "How Can I Live," and Los Del Rio's "Macarena." In case you were wondering where, say, the Beatles, or Elvis, or Madonna, or Michael Jackson were on the list, well, the Beatles did come in at number eight with "Hey Jude" (behind Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" and Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life," and ahead of fellow top-tenners Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" and Toni Braxton's "Un-break My Heart").

Quite a strange list, to be sure. And no sooner did Billboard make the announcement than the industry "bible" was

Well, the 25th MTV Video Music Awards are now history--and like just about everyone who got up to receive one of those coveted (and boy, do we use that term loosely) "moonman" statuettes, I think anyone out there who actually watched the entire two-plus-hours of the video network's annual backslap to itself should first and foremost thank god. For surviving the ordeal, that is. And I don't just mean Kanye West's singing, either.

You'd have thought that for a real timemarking anniversary like a 25th, MTV might have spent at least a minute or two retrospecting some VMA history. Yet, there really wasn't much in that respect--besides, that is, the pre-show half-hour look back at some of Britney Spears' most (and boy, do we use this term loosely) "amazing" VMA moments. (Striptease, check; python, check; Madonna makeout, check; pathetic "Gimme More" performance from '07, no check: If that wasn't the biggest tipoff that the rigged voting was going her way this year, nothing was.)

No, as