Adam Lambert gave American Idol every inch of his love tonight on American Idol. Actually, I have no idea what I mean by that, but it seemed like the appropriate thing to say for Rock Week. After a bout with swine flu, following my bacon-eating tour of southern Arizona, I have been off writing duty for the week, but here is a quick American Idol update.

American Idol front-runner and Blue Blood fave Adam Lambert kicked off the show performing a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”. At first, I was not as impressed as I usually am with his performances. When the Studio 57 chick started her judge’s critique by calling Adam Lambert a “rock god”, it clicked for me what the problem was. Partly, Adam Lambert has set his own high score so high for rock numbers after doing such a rocking good job with a classic like Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”. But it is more that I found myself, while I watched, comparing him to . . . well . . . Robert Plant, rather than the other American Idol contestants.

This points up a problematic career point for all creative people. When you first start getting good at something creative — singing, dancing, photography, writing, sewing plush dolls, putting rivets on leather jackets, whatever — you get a lot of positive feedback. Unfortunately, when people start to really feel that you are good enough to be a real professional, you start getting judged in a whole new way with a whole lotta different standard. A show like American Idol is fascinating partially because it bridges some of the road between amateur and pro, unknown and star.

So anyway, Kara “Studio 57″ DioGuardi, called Adam Lambert a “rock god” before he has won Idol, much less had a long and influential rock career. A few charting iTunes songs and capturing America’s attention for a few hot weeks may arguably make a rock star, at least for a while, but not a rock god. Puh-lease. Talk like Kara DioGuardi’s is exactly why many Adam Lambert boosters assume they do not need to vote for him any more. Then again, Kara DioGuardi also told the Lenscrafter-endorsed Danny Gokey that he might have done better performing early Aerosmith . . . when he performed “Dream On” which is off of Aerosmith’s effing debut album. How early did she want?

For Rock Week on American Idol, each of the remaining four contestants — Adam Lambert, Kris Allen, Allison Iraheta, and Danny Gokey — each performed a solo song and then a duet as part of a pair. Adam Lambert and Allison Iraheta did a really kickass performance of Foghat’s “Slow Ride”. They fed off of each other’s good energy and looked like they were having fun in a way which made it fun to watch them.

Allison Iraheta said Adam Lambert had hooked her up with his hairdresser this week and her hair looked even more fantastic than usual and her hair usually looks pretty great. In her pre-performance interview with Ryan Seacrest, they give props to Adam’s hair girl Zabria, but I can’t seem to find a Hollywood hairdresser named Zabria on the interwebs, so I might be spelling it wrong. Hair girl has great people to work on there, to be sure, but she’s crazy talented, so I’d love to know the details on who she is.

At any rate, Allison Iraheta and Adam Lambert looked fabulous performing “Slow Ride” and I liked Adam Lambert’s outfit change for “Slow Ride” better than what he was rockin’ for “Whole Lotta Love”. In particular, he was wearing some gray and black striped pants which were very entertaining (and sexy) if one happened to watch The Mighty Boosh on Adult Swim (where “The Chokes” episode is still streaming free) this week and see Dan Brown’s Bollo the gorilla helping Noel Fielding’s Vince Noir zip his super tight skinny stage pants.

Earlier this week, on his Twitter, Slash, of GNR and Velvet Revolver fame, who mentored said “Those AI kids can sing their asses off, especially Adam.” This week, Blue Blood top crush of 2006 Anderson Cooper told Jay Leno that he thinks Adam Lambert is the best singer on American Idol right now. Because most folks watching (or making book on) American Idol are so sure Adam Lambert is going to win, I think a lot of people didn’t bother to vote for Adam Lambert last week, so he ended up in the bottom three, although he escaped elimination. Hopefully, Adam Lambert will get the votes to win it all because he deserves it.

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“Whole Lotta Love” lyrics by Led Zeppelin (and possibly some blues guys they did a legal settlement with), made famous by Led Zeppelin and covered by a lot of folks:

You need coolin’, baby, I’m not foolin’
I’m gonna send ya back to schoolin’
Way down inside, a-honey, you need it
I’m gonna give you my love
I’m gonna give you my love, oh

Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love

You’ve been learnin’
And baby, I been learnin’
All them good times
Baby, baby, I’ve been discernin’-a
A-way, way down inside
A-honey, you need-a
I’m gonna give you my love, ah
I’m gonna give you my love, ah

Oh, whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
I don’t want more

You’ve got to bleed on me, yeah
Ah, ah, ah, ah
Ah, ah, ah, ah, ha, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah
ah, ah, ah, ah, ha, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah
No, no, no, no, ah
Love, love, low-ow-ow-ow-ove
Oh, babe, oh

You been coolin’
And baby, I’ve been droolin’
All the good times, baby, I’ve been misusin’-a/Oh
A-way, way down inside
I’m gonna give ya my love/Ah
I’m gonna give ya every inch of my love/Ah
I’m gonna give you my love/Ah
Yes, alright, let’s go/Ah

Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love

Way down inside/ Way down inside
Way downinside, woman, you/woman
woman, you/you need it
need/Love

My, my, my, my
My, my, my, my/Ahh
Oh, shake for me, girl
I wanna be your backdoor man-a
Hey, oh, hey, oh/Ahh
Hey, oh, oooh
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Hoo-ma, ma, hey
Keep a-coolin’, baby
A-keep a-coolin’, baby
A-keep a-coolin’, baby
Uh, keep a-coolin’, baby, wuh, way-hoh, oo-ohh

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“Slow Ride” lyrics by Dave Peverett, originally performed by Dave Peverett as lead singer and guitarist of Foghat and covered by a lot of folks:

Slow ride, take it easy
Slow ride, take it easy
Slow ride, take it easy
Slow ride, take it easy.

I’m in the mood, the rhythm is right,
Move to the music, we can roll all night.
Oooh, oooh, slow ride – oooh, oooh …

Slow ride, take it easy – Slow ride, take it easy
Slow down, go down, got to get your lovin’ one more time
Hold me, roll me, slow ridin’ woman you’re so fine

Woo!

I’m in the mood, the rhythm is right,
Move to the music yea, we can roll all night, yea.
Oooh, oooh …

Slow ride, take it easy – Slow ride, take it easy
Slow down, go down, got to get your lovin’ one more time
Hold me, roll me, slow ridin’ woman you’re so fine

Slow ride, easy, slow ride, sleazy – Slow ride, easy, slow ride, sleazy

Slow down, go down, got to get your lovin’ one more time
Hold me, roll me, slow ridin’ woman you’re so fine

Slow ride, take it easy – slow ride, take it easy
Slow down, go down – Slow down, go down

Oh come on baby, take a slow ride with me,
Come on baby, take a slow ride.
Oh feels good, mmmm, feels so good, I like it yea,
I feel good, oh I feel alright!

You know the rhythm is right
You know the rhythm is right
We gotta rock all night
We gotta rock all night
You know the rhythm is right, yeah, we gotta rock all night,
You know the rhythm is right, we gotta rock all night.
Whoa, c’mon now
Woo, Yea, Woo, Whoa!

Elevate me mama – Elevate me mama – Elevate me mama – Elevate me mama.
Oww!
Woo!

Slow ride! Yea!

So reality television shows have this creepy format thing where they bring back a season’s cast for a six month reunion. Like being on a reality show was tantamount to going to college or something and the whole class needs to get back together to reminisce and see how everybody turned out.

Admittedly, my family is kinda not into things like reunions or even graduations, so the last graduation I went to was when I finished sixth grade. I somewhat regretted not going to my own college reunion this spring when Barack Obama turned out to be the keynote speaker. So maybe I just don’t get the reunion thing, but I’m still in touch with a lot of people I went to school with. On purpose. Because I like and enjoy them. Because I shared enjoyable and life-forming experiences with them.

College does not seem much like reality TV, but VH1 did recently do a show called Charm School where rock manager extraordinaire and TV personality Sharon Osbourne and seminal nightclub impresario and TV personality Riki Rachtman were the deans. I guess the idea was to teach some manners to chicks who previously tried to date Flavor Flav or Bret Michaels or somebody like them.

One of my most embarrassing Hollywood moments, when I first moved out to Los Angeles, Forrest Black and I went over to visit sexy bassist Megan Maddox, when she was in, I think, Tairrie B’s My Ruin and possibly Taime Downe’s The Newlydeads as well, to shoot her for Tattoo Savage. A couple of other people, who I knew from Los Angeles nights on the town, were also hanging out there, and we all had the misfortune of watching Sheryl Crow do a GNR cover. So we’re all cringing and I tell some anecdote about how Guns n’ Roses changed my life. I cringed a lot more later when I finally put it together that Riki from the club was Riki Rachtman from Headbangers Ball who got the gig via Axl Rose and had a fuck of a lot more claim than yours truly on GNR being life-changing.

To return to reality television programming, still in progress, the second season of the Bret Michaels Rock of Love extravaganza definitely helped turn me off of reality TV. Aside from the way they made it painfully apparent that Bret Michaels is a sucky prize, the dude chose some generic liar chick over beautiful Tattoo Savage covergirl Daisy de La Hoya. Apparently, Bret Michaels just couldn’t get over the fact that Charles Edward from Seraphim Shock is Daisy’s ex and they still spend time together. I’ve shot Charles and he certainly is, circa 2008, a lot hotter than Bret. The Poison frontman apparently felt so threatened by a good-looking gothic guy that the show couldn’t even mention Seraphim Shock. Whatever. Although Daisy seemed to actually have inexplicably warm feelings for Bret, she demonstrably can do better, because she already has.

The reunion show for Rock of Love 2, gamely moderated by Riki Rachtman, was pretty much a horror show. A chick named Heather, who I guess competed on the first Rock of Love and advised on the second one, punched poor Daisy de La Hoya and it was my opinion that VH1, not only allowed it to happen, but was hoping it would. I felt terrible for Daisy, but, in Heather’s defense, Bret Michaels actually let Heather get his name tattooed to her throat in the first season. And then did not pick her. I think it is very bad manners to give someone the go-ahead to get a tattoo of your name if you know you are going to spurn their affections on national television.

So, although I watched none of the seasons of Charm School, I noticed that a number of people have been chortling about how the recent Charm School reunion trumped the Rock of Love reunion for catfight fetish. To make a long story moderately less long, some two-face, mean, drunk, ditzy blonde from one of the VH1 programs, made a crack about another contestant’s child. Sharon Osbourne told her that was not cool. So the drunk ditz, apparently named Megan Hauserman, made some rude cracks about Sharon Osbourne’s family and Ozzy Osbourne in specific. At this point, Sharon Osbourne demonstrated just one of the many many reasons why she is qualified to school these girls. Without a hair out of place, and without appearing to sweat or shake, Sharon Osbourne threw this red drink all over the rude bleach blonde and, although it is hard to make out in the tape above, apparently also pulled out clumps of her hair and scratched her and twisted her arm badly enough that VH1 rushed rude ditzy girl to the hospital. Normally, I disapprove of violence in disagreements, but I do think a lot of people have no sense that some things are sacred. I think that, to someone like this Megan Hauserman, nothing is sacred, so she may truly have no concept that going after someone’s son or husband is crossing a line, put there by civilization, for good reason. Those who choose to be uncivilized in that way to someone as tough and elegant as Sharon Osbourne should consider themselves lucky when they only end up clowned, with ruined hair and makeup, and an arm in a sling.

I walked by the Rock of Love 3 bus on Hollywood Boulevard this Saturday night, walking home from Pinkberry. Living in Los Angeles is surreal.

The Sisters of Mercy will be playing The Music Box at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008. Read on to find out how you can win tickets courtesy of GoldenVoice and Blue Blood.

In the same way perhaps that Guns n’ Roses is essentially Axl Rose at this point, Sisters of Mercy is essentially Andrew Eldritch. Having different collaborators on different Sisters albums gave different ones slightly different feels, but I personally enjoy the music on all of them. I even liked Vision Thing when all my unsavory pals derisively referred to it as the “Sisters Metal Album”. (I maintained that the Egyptian iconography on the cover made it totally gothic, but whatever.)

My friend Jeanne has been emailing me nostalgic photos recently and this made me think of of an amusing related anecdote. Uncomfortable with the goth label, Sisters of Mercy has tended to tour with potentially incongruous acts. So Jeanne and I were at some stadium show. I don’t recall all the acts on the bill, but the arena was probably the New Haven Coliseum or the Hardford Civic Center. This was pre-internet, so she and I were really enjoying the people watching and deconstructing the different tribes which had come out for the various bands playing. And looking for cute boys. So Jeanne spots this totally hot guy with dark hair and pale skin, a type we both favored, and she grabs me to point him out (I’m the forward one), only the guy disappears into some door and we can’t figure out quite where.

Eventually Jeanne figured out that she had been scoping out Sisters frontman Andrew Eldritch. Apparently he had managed to walk around the arena hallways unrecognized, simply by not wearing his trademark sunglasses. Absolutely classic when one can be incognito by taking the sunglasses off.

I’m sure Andrew Eldritch is a difficult man to like in real life, so probably for the best. Sometimes you have to love the art and not the artist. Now I realize that Andrew Eldritch has repudiated the goth label, along with his former music label, bands who wanted to support him, and a laundry list of former bandmates. I find it really tragic that things went this way for someone who could create such consistently brilliant music and intriguing lyrics. I know genius is often tortured and alienated. I have days when I feel stabby too, but I try not to interact too much if I’m feeling like lashing out at everything around me; that feeling is nature’s way of saying to take the day off. I admit that I didn’t create art for years because a junior high art teacher was mean to me, but, in my defense, I was in junior high at the time. The Sisters of Mercy haven’t had a proper new album in years because Andrew Eldritch was on strike because he didn’t like his record label and hasn’t landed with a new one since breaking up with East West.

Word is, however, that you can hear new Sisters material at a live show, so I’d expect to hear some new music in the mix at The Sisters of Mercy show at The Music Box at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008. If you want to win a pair of free tickets, either post in this thread or message privately here or on MySpace or VF. Your post or message should include a personal anecdote about Sisters of Mercy, such as the one I told about me and my friend Jeanne, or your thoughts about the band or one of their songs. Basically, talk about something related to Sisters of Mercy and the most entertaining anecdotes or insights win free pairs of tickets to the Hollywood show.

My pal editrix Abby Ehmann always knows where the good party is. (Often she is the one throwing it.) A few years back, the Blue Blood crew exhibited at the late lamented BondCon event in Las Vegas. (BondCon was purchased by the fine folks at Kink, so hopefully they will relaunch it.) The BondCon show was held overlapping the same time as the Adult Entertainment Expo, which Forrest Black and I have occasionally attended over the years to do press coverage on happenings in the adult video world. Immediately prior to these two shows was the Internext show, which SpookyCash sent us to. (SpookyCash is far and away the leading affiliate program in its niche and facilitates people with popular sites being able to make some dough promoting naughty sites from Blue Blood and friends.)

So anyway, after a couple weeks in Vegas, I was all tuckered out, but Abby Ehmann told me that Paul Nathan was hosting a suite party and I really needed to go. This coming weekend, on Saturday August 30 and Sunday August 31, Paul Nathan will be emceeing Perry Mann’s Strippers & Hustlers Ball in Las Vegas. Perry Mann has been throwing the Exotic Erotic Ball in San Francisco for nearly three decades now and this month his crew is headed for Vegas. The weekend’s festivities include performances from Scooter & Lavelle, Drummer KC, D’Amato, all-female Motley Crue cover band Girls Girls Girls, Gen XX (a sort of stripped down electronica version of The Genitorturers), and Gilby Clarke. (Everyone always mentions that Gilby Clarke was in Guns n’ Roses, but I played his Kill for Thrills Commercial Suicide CD endlessly when it came out and recommend picking that up to all.) Of course, a Strippers & Hustlers Ball would not be complete without stripping competitions, so they will be having those too. This may be tricky as Vegas venues can be bitchy about nudity, but I’m sure they’ve got a plan to make it hot no matter what. The Ball web site claims they are planning the “world’s largest girl-on-girl pillow fight” just for the occasion. So you’ll be seeing one for the record books, if you head out to Vegas for Labor Day Weekend.

I’ve written about the aforementioned Paul Nathan-hosted Vegas suite party before, so I won’t do a full report. There was one anecdote which comes up a lot socially, but which I did not tell in print previously. The very talented and always impressively-costumed (and fully-functional) Tara Emory was at the party, dressed as a cheerleader. Tara can do the entertaining party trick of pissing through a hard-on into her own mouth. Naturally, I took a number of snapshots of this. As Tara was sitting on the posh bathroom counter in front of a mirror to perform said party trick, the images show brief flashes of me and my pals Bradical and Scar 13 reflected in the mirror. Looking carefully, one notices that Bradical has his hands on his face like McCauley Culkin in Home Alone. Not that anyone has teased him about this. Well, maybe a little.

I had not previously ever thought of Labor Day as a really big holiday, just a fashion season demarcation. It seems like a ton of people are taking trips for it this year though. If you are in Las Vegas for Labor Day Weekend, you just might need to dress like a stripper or hustler and get yourself over to The Orleans Arena in Las Vegas. The event hotline for Perry Mann’s Strippers & Hustlers Ball is the extremely awesome (702)-804-STRIP. I appreciate it when someone even takes care of the details down to their phone number.

And don’t forget to stop wearing white shoes by next week. Don’t want to be gauche.

I first came across Guns n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction when I was a teenage metal DJ on the radio in Connecticut.

A little background explanation: I got into doing this gig partly because I’d gone to high school overseas and the American overseas high schools I attended were woefully behind the times when it came to music. Like really behind. I used AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters when I ran for class president. (I won. I mean, of course I did; there were AC/DC and Rush lyrics in my campaign posters.) I was shocked when I found out that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, the big slow dance number where I went to ninth grade, came out more than a decade earlier than I would have guessed on a multiple choice test. So I arrived at college with more of an Aerosmith taste in music than the average student at a competitive, left-wing, East Coast school normally would have. Although I loved bands like Janes Addiction and The Dead Milkmen and The Cure and The Violent Femmes as soon as I was exposed to them, I held onto the hard rock thing because you never forget your first musical loves. Oddly, although my classmates identified as free-thinking liberal individuals, they seemed to hold the view that bands like Motley Crue and Dokken were for lower class stupid people. My annoyance at this classist hypocritical bigotry is probably the reason I became a metal DJ. I was frustrated that my classmates could be so close-minded about something like music. I enjoyed hard rock in my personal musical mix and I wasn’t about to fake like I didn’t just to impress people I went to school with. To bring home the part where I was not hiding it, I ended up playing it on the radio. Never let it be said that I do things by halves.

Before Appetite for Destruction came out in the stores, it was naturally released to radio stations. One of my listeners called up to request the track “Paradise City” and I took a look and we had this album with an appalling Robert Williams painting of a girl up against a wall with her panties down. Only the requested track had lyrics about wanting to go down to Paradise City where the girls were pretty. Ooh, artistic emotional conflict! I was intrigued and had to listen to the whole thing. Appetite for Destruction changed my life. There was plenty of music which had moved me before this. I was a DJ, after all, but this was something new and different and deeper. If not for Guns n’ Roses and William Gibson and Jay McInerney, I would probably be an attorney or a management consultant for McKinsey or some place like that right now.

Last week, something happened which might have made me break my self-imposed rule never to download music. A blog called Antiquiet leaked nine tracks from the long-awaited Guns n’ Roses Chinese Democracy album. On June 6, Antiquiet editor and media expert Kevin Skwerl wrote an article Crying Chinese Democracy where he said he thought Geffen should just release the freaking album already. He said that he stole Appetite for Destruction from his mom’s record collection when he was eleven-years-old and has been waiting literally half his life for Chinese Democracy to come out. His definition of terms is hilarious:

The phrase is now more universally defined as the new Guns N’ Roses album than as the actual political movement in China that inspired the titling. And over the years, the phrase has developed a second meaning: It can also be used as an adjective, to describe something eternally “in the works,” promised countless times, yet never, ever, ever delivered. As in, “that raise I need is fucking chinese democracy,” or “that big break your boyfriend’s shitty band swears is going to happen is totally chinese democracy, tell him to get a fucking job.”

The gist of the rest of the article was that he’d personally worked at Universal and knew a fair number of music industry folks and that everyone he knows, who Axl Rose has allowed to hear Chinese Democracy, thinks the music is beyond excellent. In a very well-written feature he posited that the only way Geffen could ever make back their ridiculously huge investment in the new Guns n’ Roses record was if it turns out to be really good. Kevin Skwerl then brilliantly breaks down the sales aspect of GNR:

In an attempt to recoup some of their eight-figure investment after closing out Axl’s tab in 2004, Geffen put together a greatest hits compilation, with not a single new or previously unreleased track, or any promotional efforts by the band. It sold more than 1.8 million copies. It was the world’s ninth-highest selling album that year. But of course that album had one thing that Chinese Democracy probably won’t have: Welcome To The Jungle . . . Appetite For Destruction still sells 5,000 or 6,000 copies each week.

On June 18, Rolling Stone reported that the Antiquiet blog had posted an article We’ve Got Chinese Democracy, And It’s Worth The Wait. Antiquiet immediately had a bunch of comments from people saying how much they loved the Chinese Democracy tracks. Other sites which linked the downloads also got a bunch of positive comments about the music. Oddly, there was an undercurrent of Motley Crue vs GNR commenting, but the majority of the comments were people saying the music was great and they wanted the CD or legal downloads to come out. Apparently, someone from GNR management then phoned and asked Antiquiet editor Kevin Skwerl to remove the tracks, which he did. On June 24, Rolling Stone reported that FBI agents had come to Kevin Skwerl’s place of employment to chat with him about the situation, and he explained his actions saying that he thought posting the tracks was a legal gray area as the songs were potentially not the final mixes (WTF?) and that he had received the files from an anonymous source which he had since deleted at the request of GNR management.

Cynics question whether the brief leak was a deliberate publicity ploy to “get people talking.” Very few commenters who post about liking the music are people who are signing real names or known online nicks. It is possible that no tracks were ever posted and the whole thing is smoke and mirrors and fake sock puppet comments.

On the other hand, I just discovered Kevin Skwerl’s Antiquiet site and I’ve been really enjoying his writing and Johnny Firecloud’s all morning. They seem to disclose their biases and work backgrounds and it may be unfair to wonder about secret plots. I know it annoys me when people read something journalistic that I wrote and discount it as possibly having an agenda.

The problem is that all the astroturfing of recent years has left people very cynical. A lot of consumers thought they were being forward-thinking by using ad-blockers and claiming total resistance to traditional marketing. So the marketers adapted with fake grass-roots support and forced viral marketing. The record labels shunned rock journalism and attempted to replace it with articles written by publicists, who are bought and paid for out of artists’ future royalties. Add to all that that the record labels decided that the internet age meant they could and should stop servicing journalists and radio. Supposedly they just got sooooooooooo frightened that journalists and DJs would pirate the music and post it to torrents and file-sharing networks, but I think a lot of it was that they did not want to deal with an independent writer’s genuine opinion and they preferred corporate radio’s complete control where the DJ never gets to choose the song. So now we never know whether to trust what a journalist says. And we definitely know (or should know) never to trust what a supposedly random man on the street says. And the radio rarely offers up anything new that we want.

So people are still pining for a new effort from a band like GNR where at least they know they liked it for real the first time around. I know music industry people in LA who tell me lots of bands sounded like GNR in the late 80’s and the label just signed them all and buried them in order to prop up Axl Rose and co. Maybe I just have more visibility to how the sausage is made now than I did then. They say nobody wants to eat sausage, once they see how it is made. It seems to me that, if lots of groups of talented rockers could have been thrown together to make a Guns n’ Roses, then the record labels would already have done so and that manufactured rock just is not the same.

Maybe it is all a sham, but it moved me at the time it first came out. If not for Guns n’ Roses and William Gibson and Jay McInerney, I would probably be an attorney or a management consultant for McKinsey or some place like that right now. I should totally sue those guys.

Note to music industry: Seriously, guys, I don’t want to read a well-written blog and wonder if it is real, so can you please stop ruining all the cool pop culture which inspired me to take the road less traveled. Thanks.