Blog Posts by Chris Willman

April 20 is Record Store Day, one of those holidays where you need to take extra care because of all the erratic drivers out on the road. It's not that they've been drinking--it's that they're crazily driving from indie record store to indie record store, trying to find that very, very limited edition that the other outlets are already out of or never got in.

For the eighth annual Record Store Day, more than 350 exclusive releases are hitting stores for the first (and, in some cases, only) time. Most are on vinyl, which should make the occasion a banner day for turntable sales. Plenty are CD issues, though, which should satiate music fans who still can't fathom the practicality of the 45-rpm revival. Lest you think that an actual 78-rpm record is the weirdest instant rarity being released, you can thank thank MGMT for being forward/backward-thinking enough to put out a cassette-only release.

It's a well-known fact that the act of humming helps alleviate the effects of severe summer heat. And if you swallow that, you may also believe it when we assure that there was an entirely scientific basis for this ranking of the 50 greatest summer songs of all time!

Before you protest, know that we left out tunes that have "summer" in the title but are really more about the spiritual dog days of winter (like Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer") or only mention the season as part of a random succession of lines (like Frank Sinatra's "I Like New York in June"). No, we were looking for songs that really get at the spirit of summer, in all its sweat and sexiness and solstice hope. Soak up the sun with us, won't you?

1. "SUMMER IN THE CITY" The Lovin' Spoonful

The agony and the ecstasy! The genius of this No. 1 smash from 1966 is how it captures the best and worst of summer—demarcated, among the working class in some sweaty towns, by the moment the sun goes down.

2. "SCHOOL'S OUT" Alice

Luke Bryan wins Entertainer of the Year [photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images]There were exactly two big shockeroos at the 48th annual Academy of Country Music Awards. Luke Bryan pulled an upset by winning Entertainer of the Year. And, almost as shockingly, Eric Church performed without wearing a ballcap or aviator shades.

Other than that, the ACMs stayed pretty much true to form: lots of pop/country star collaborations among the performance slots, and, when it finally came time to give out a few awards, a tendency to spread the love around rather than overly reward any single performer.

Besides winning the top award, Bryan didn’t win a single other award on-camera, being pushed aside for Jason Aldean in the Male Vocalist category and Church for Album of the Year. (Bryan did win one additional award off-camera, for joining Aldean on a song that won for vocal event of the year.) That puts him squarely in the tradition of past Entertainer of the Year winners like Taylor Swift and Kenny Chesney, who tended to get the top honor without usually scoring in any of the

Luke Bryan wins Entertainer of the Year [photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images]If you like cross-genre duets and hate watching people actually get awards (the first one wasn't given out till 50 minutes in), you may have loved the 48th annual Academy of Country Music Awards. Or maybe you didn't, since some of the collaborations misfired, because of either audio problems or lack of star chemistry. Below are five of the show's buzziest moments:

[PHOTOS: the 2013 ACM Awards' red carpet]

Luke Bryan seems even more surprised than the rest of us by his upset for Entertainer of the Year. Would it be Taylor Swift making it a three-peat, or co-host Blake Shelton repeating his win at November’s CMA Awards? Try neither. Bryan dropped to his knees and seemed teary and speechless--and literally took 15 seconds to physically compose himself before he began his acceptance speech--but finally got it together enough to thank "everybody that I’ve opened up for. I just started headlining! Jason Aldean, Kenny, all the people I’ve watched from the side of the stage and tried to become

Julian LennonWatching not just the Beatles but the Beatles' children grow older is one surefire way to be astonished at the quick passage of time. Julian Lennon, the most famous Beatlekid of them all, turns 50 on April 8, which would be cause enough for gasps or sighs, for those of us with a "where did the years go?" mindset. It's all the more breathtaking when you consider that "little" Julian has now lived a decade longer than John did.

If you can't trust people in the music business, who can you trust? But not all of them have been Honest Abes over the years. Some have pulled playful one-time pranks, others obfuscations or outright hoaxes that have gone on for years. Fans can't be trusted with the truth, either, as attested to by any number of undying urban legends. It's all fodder for an April Fool's Day look at some of rock's greatest lies:

The New York Times gets punked on a grunge "lexicon." On Nov. 15, 1992, the Times weighed in on the phenomenon that had crossed over from Seattle to the entire nation with an article by Rick Marin titled "Grunge: A Success Story." Unfortunately, Marin made the mistake of trusting an employee at Sub Pop Records to provide him with a list of grunge slang, which ran as a sidebar to the main story. Amazingly, it is still online on the Times' website, with no correction or other notation that the paper of record had the flannel shirt pulled over its eyes. Among the insider

Phil RamonePhil Ramone, who died Saturday at the age of 79, was a marquee producer if ever there were one--even though a term like that would make him bristle. "It's not about having my time-honored stamp on their work," he said, humbly, to Billboard in 1996. "I'm not Tiffany or Cartier." Producers, he told Billboard, should stay "way in the back. If our names were on the front cover, it'd be different, but...the audience doesn’t care. I don’t think they go to the Phil Ramone section in Tower Records."

But Billy Joel did put Ramone's picture on the cover--albeit the back cover--alongside his longtime group. “I always thought of Phil Ramone as the most talented guy in my band,” said Joel in a statement Saturday. “He was the guy that no one ever, ever saw onstage. He was with me as long as any of the musicians I ever played with--longer than most. So much of my music was shaped by him and brought to fruition by him.” In earlier years, Joel had called Ramone "my George Martin," correlating him to the producer sometimes referred to as the Fifth Beatle.

Steven Tyler turns 65 on March 26, and you know what that means: It's already been about 30 years since critics first started saying it was unseemly for a man of his age to still be baring his chest. Fortunately, we all seem to have gotten over that a decade or two ago and happily resigned ourselves to the fact that he'll still be walking that way well into the Social Security years.

"We call them the wonder years because we wonder what happened to them," Tyler once said about Aerosmith's salad days. Let's take the occasion of his 65th to remember some of the Aerosmith singer's craziest moments:

Tyler skinny-dips on the American Idol set. The TV show was filming an episode in Las Vegas in the space used by the show La Reve, which features underwater dancers. Their setup was surrounded by a sort of moat. "I'm a water guy," said Tyler, "and I just wanted a good excuse to take my clothes off in front of J.Lo. I wanted her to see what she was missing."

Tyler auditions for a Led Zeppelin