Blog Posts by Daniel Kreps

Barry Feinstein, the photographer of some of the most iconic album covers in rock history, has passed away of natural causes at the age of 80, Rolling Stone reports. According to his official website, Feinstein designed over 500 album covers. He's also remembered for his countless photographs of a young Bob Dylan, including the pictures that became the covers for The Times They Are A-Changin' and No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Feinstein's camera also created the images that appear on the front of the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet, George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, Janis Joplin's Pearl, and many more albums that are essential to every music fan's collection.

Feinstein's covers weren't as flashy as other designers of that era, like Pink Floyd's collabration with Hipgnosis. Instead, he had an innate ability to capture artists at their coolest moments. Celebrate Feinstein's work with this collection of his best covers, and check out his gallery of music royalty at his official site:

The comedy of errors that is Guns N' Roses' Latin American tour reached a hilarious new high (or low, depending on how you look at it) when Axl Rose fell hard mid-song during a Mexico City concert. The singer was traipsing around the stage during "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" when, after singing the "Knock, knock" of the chorus, he lost his footing and toppled over. However, the impact wasn't enough to knock that ridiculous cowboy hat off his head, and Axl only missed a few notes before regaining his composure. The always-classy GN'R fans responded to the fall by laughing out loud and hurling projectiles at the downed singer.

If this was the Rose of the 1990s, he would've stormed off the stage and this concert would've been over the second after he stumbled, but this mellower (most of the time) Axl merely shook off the stagehands and continued singing. Axl's folly joins The Amp Hall of Fame of Stage Falls, joining Jimmy Buffett, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Scott Weiland, Christina Aguilera,

Adam Levine watches way too much television. In August, the Maroon 5 singer caused an uproar when he criticized MTV, and yesterday he engaged in a battle of tweets with Fox News after the channel played a Maroon 5 song. "Dear Fox News, don't play our music on your evil f------ channel ever again. Thank you," Levine wrote. It's unclear how Levine knew his band's music was on Fox News in the first place, and whether his tweet has to do with the channel's conservative political alignments or the fact that he's NBC property.

A pair of Fox News anchors, Red Eye hosts Greg Gutfeld and Andy Levy, took Levine's jab as diplomatically as possible by responding with their own salvo that criticized Maroon 5. "Dear @AdamLevine, don't make crappy f------ music ever again. Thank you," Levy tweeted. "Maroon 5's bio strangely fails to note the band was developed by the CIA as part of its enhanced interrogation techniques program." Gutfeld added, "Dear Adam, that's not music" before unfurling a spree

In the near future, if MC Hammer has his way, people won't be "Googling" when they punch their names into a search engine, they'll be "Hammering" themselves. The rapper/pastor/punchline/entrepreneur was at San Francisco's Web 2.0 Summit yesterday to introduce his new site WIREDoo, a "deep search" engine. For instance, InformationWeek writes that if someone searches a zip code, WIREDoo will show "the schools, homes, information on the community, shopping, crime rate," etc. By that logic, Hammering "parachute pants" will yield results like prices, designers, retailers, and a link to the "U Can't Touch This" video.

It's all too tech-y for The Amp, but InformationWeek calls the search engine "impressive," so maybe Hammer caught the attention of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who was in the audience. Hopefully for MC, WIREDoo (currently in pre-Beta mode) enjoys a longer lifetime than his previous endeavor DanceJam, a music talent site he launched in 2008 that's been dormant since last

Kanye West returned to his seldom-used Twitter yesterday to announce that all the talent he's recruited for his GOOD Music label will release a collaborative album in spring 2012. It's an extraordinary lineup, as West will hook up his GOOD cohorts Common, Cyhi Da Prince, Kid Cudi, Pusha T, Mos Def, and Big Sean for the album, which will serve as a follow-up to all those free GOOD Friday tracks Kanye gave out prior to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. (It also means that Kanye's next solo album is further down the pipeline than anticipated.) West's announcement comes just hours after his label agreed to a distribution deal with Island Def Jam. Maybe this means "Chain Heavy" will finally be released?

West has a sterling track record, but there would be more excitement surrounding Kanye's GOOD Music disc if these types of label group albums had a better history. Most of the time, these collections result in mostly forgettable music, although they serve as fantastic time capsules for

Guns N' Roses' eventful South American journey continued on to Paraguay, where Axl Rose was in much better spirits than the last time we saw him at an Argentinean airport. While angry Axl had no patience for fans before catching his flight, the singer found time to hang out and reminisce about the old days with GN'R devotees at the Hotel Sheraton Asuncion (via Daily Swarm). And what was the topic of conversation? Their backstage misadventures, like when his old buddy Slash would get so drunk, he'd piss himself then pass out.

Axl seems to relish in reliving the story, partly because he absolutely detests Slash these days, but also since after the guitarist drank himself to sleep, the chivalrous Rose would swoop in and steal his ladies. "It happened every time, all the time," Rose gloats. Axl also had some sound advice to impart with his fans: "If you drink a half a bottle of Jack Daniels, you'll find something to do. It might not be good, and you might wake up some place you don't

Here's the music video that angered the farmers of Ireland, Rihanna's "We Found Love." And it's easy to see why the Irish were angry when the singer came in contact with their crops: Rihanna spends the whole video in various states of undress, doing drugs, and dancing up a storm. It's as though she's using all her time on the tour bus rewatching Trainspotting, Go, and Requiem for a Dream on a constant loop. This "hopeless place" that Rihanna keeps singing about appears to be a rave, or the Electric Daisy Carnival, or some location where eyes dilate constantly, multi-colored pills are consumed like Skittles, and cigarettes burn down into rainbow ashes.

Still, it works: The song is a perfect soundtrack for this moving portrait of Europe's MDMA culture, from the quick edits to the bleached-out film stock to screen projections Rihanna often sings in front of. The fun ends for one scene, though, when Rihanna and her drug buddy, played by someone who looks exactly like Chris Brown, are

There have been a lot of oddball Beatles items to go to auction in the past few years, but here's one piece of memorabilia that makes the $14,000 purchase of John Lennon's toilet bowl seem normal: On November 5th, Omega Auctions will offer one of Lennon's teeth to the highest bidder. As the story goes, instead of putting the tooth under his pillow like a normal person, the Beatle gave it as a gift to his housekeeper Dot Jarlett in the late 1960s. "[Lennon] was in the kitchen and he had this tooth which he had wrapped in a piece of paper. 'He said, 'Dot will you dispose of this,' and then he said, 'Or, as your daughter's a Beatles fan, you can give to her as a souvenir," Dot's son Barry Jarlett said. "It is something that we felt was very personal and my mum actually gave it to my sister who has kept it safe."

Like all things Beatles-related items on the auction block, this tooth will no doubt find a buyer, but an estimated bid of £10,000 (about $15,800) is a tad extravagant. "This is