"Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story" REVIEWED IN THE WASHINGTON POST

Reviewing Bono’s memoir for the Washington Post was a big deal for me. U2 was my first favorite band, and I remain, as I say in the piece, “wearily devout.” It’s been a few years (but only two albums) since the Paper of Record let me rank their albums! (I’d like a word with circa-2009 me about some of my decisions.)

I didn’t find space to point out that the only two living world leaders for whom The Fly has anything less than an admiring word are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Or to point out that two episodes from the author’s career — though I would not call them successes — go unmentioned entirely: U2’s 9/11 memorial performance at the 2002 Super Bowl halftime show, and Bono and The Edge’s ill-fated foray (with Julie Taymor!) into musical theatre with the Broadway flop Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Though it you want to know about that exercise, I can recommend Glen Berger’s Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History.

Anyway. My review of Bono’s memoir is here. Am I boogin’ ya I doon’t mean to boog ya.

"Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir" Reviewed in The Washington Post

Rolling Stone’s first issue, from December 1967.

Turns out you can’t say “starfucker” in the Paper of Record, even if you spell it “starf***er.” So I subbed in “starstruck to the point of myopia.”

There’s lots else I could say about Rolling Stone co-founder and longtime editor Jann S. Wenner’s new memoir Like a Rolling Stone, but the Washington Post kept me to 1,000 word or so. It was a genuine honor to write about this very superficial and self-serving book by a man who created a magazine I loved.

Cheer is the Mind-killer (Side B) Cometh

In this second half of my XVIth senses-shattering installment in the apparently unkillable Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series, I attempts penance for appropriating the podfeed of A Degree Absolute! to give listeners an album they never asked for, U2-style, by roping in my co-host Glen & our theme song singer-arranger Casey in for some festive preamble before we get to the damn tape. I beg your forbearance.

Cheer is the Mind-killer (Side A) Cometh

My 2021 holiday mixtape, Cheer Is the Mind-Killer, has arrived. It’s the sixteenth installment in what has become a venerable holiday tradition that invariably makes me feel unhinged in the final couple of months of each year. Sixteen! They grow up so fast. The Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable compilation series, most installments of which remain available to stream via the Christmas Mixtapes drop-down menu at the top of the page, is now as licensed to drive as any Cory. In the chronology of the EON Productions James Bond film series, it is Licence-d (sic) to Kill.

Side B TK!

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE! episode nineteen — Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling (the band, the filmmakers, the supertalented PRISONER superfans)

I have always thought The Prisoner is a show with a particular appeal to creative people, and I love to be proven right. 

Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling is a Prisoner-inspired punk duo comprised of filmmakers/musicians/writers/creators/etc. Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein. When we saw their video for "Arrival" — a meticulous, two-years-in-the making recreation of The Prisoner's opening title sequence — we knew we had to meet them. From this wildly ambitious and improbably successful short film, they graduated to making features, as they tell us in a conversation that reaches far beyond The Prisoner to address the joys and the confines of fandom.

Plus, I learned a new word.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Our Favorite Concert Films

The Live in New York City film released in 2001 is drawn primarily from this tour-ending July 2000 Madison Square Garden concert, later released (in audio only) in its entirety through Springsteen’s live archive in 2017.

On Feb. 29, 2020, nine days after I had knee surgery, I bolted my despised immobilizer to my left leg and crutched down the 9:30 Club to see the Drive-By Truckers . I’d seen this beloved band play this beloved venue on many, many prior occasions, including on New Year’s Eve at the end of 2011, but never before with only three working limbs at my disposal. The club reserved a couple of barstools for me so I could keep my leg elevated and I had a fine time, not knowing that a global pandemic would extend what I’d expected would be four to six weeks of post-op confinement to 13 months and counting.

We haven’t been able to go to concerts in a year now. So I was glad when the Pop Culture Happy Hour crew invited me to join my longtime pal Stephen Thompson and my new-time pals Cyrena Touros and LaTesha Harris to talk about some of our favorite concert films. (Music documentaries were excluded from consideration.) While there are a dozen or so such films to which I have returned time and again, the indefensible police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd last year and the subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations those tragedies gave rise to made the 20-year-old film documenting the tour where Bruce Springsteen pissed off the NYPD with his then-brand-new song “American Skin (41 Shots)” — inspired by the NYPD killing of unarmed delivery man Amadou Diallo in 1999 — once again sadly timely. So I decided to talk about Live in New York City, the film shot during the final two concerts of Bruuuuuuuuuuce’s 1999-2000 reunion tour with The E Street Band — their first time out on the road together in 11 years — which concludes with that haunting, magnificent song.

The reconstituted E Street Band has now been playing together longer than its original incarnation did (circa 1974-88) but in 1999 it was not at all clear that this reunion would be permanent. Bruce had dismissed the E Street Band several years before I was old enough to be going to rock shows. The reunion was a big deal. I saw five shows on that tour. One of them, for which I begged a ride to Philly from a colleague I barely knew and then paid a scalper $240 for a nosebleed ticket, was finally released in sublime quality through the Springsteen’s live archive last summer. It only took 21 years.

I looked up the proper unit of measurement to describe how much Bruuuuuuuuuuce sweats during the performance captured in Live in New York City. Turns out it’s Wilburys. He loses five Wilburys of fluid during the show.

Thanks as always to ace producers Jessica Reedy and Candce Lim for having me on.

Talking Yuletunes on All Things Considered

I didn’t put quite as much muscle behind promoting my yulemix this year as I have in years past, but I was very glad to get an invitation to talk to All Things Considered’s Ailsa Chang about some of the selections featured on my 2020 compilation, Four Seasons Total Greetings. The show suggested I choose three new-for-2020 recordings and one of the surprising deep cuts I uncovered in the prior year, which is how I got to talk about The Shades’ recorded-in-1966-but-eerily-topical “Prancer’s Got Some Red Spots” and also sneak a little bit of Canadian country singer Hank Snow’s “Christmas Wants” in at the outro.

We recorded this conversation in mid-December, and there was enough dire news in the days after that that I assumed this piece would be axed. It was my old boyhood pal Chip Goines who notified me, via Twitter, that the piece was airing on Christmas Eve, just as I was loading up to drive to my parents’ house in Virginia (after two weeks in quarantine) for the holiday. The bar for Christmas miracles has rarely been lower, but I’ll take it. God bless us, everyone!

Hark! "FOUR SEASONS TOTAL GREETINGS," my XVth fabulous #yulemix, hath arrived to delight your senses. One of them, anyway!

It’s the most puzzling tiiiiiiiiiiiiime of the year.

One knee operation, one global pandemic, three No Time to Die release dates, and one harrowing but un-fradulent presidential election later, your favorite foul-weather friend has returned to soundtrack (verb) your regrettably antisocial holidaze with another lovingly curated set of yulejams, yulehyms, and yulbrenners. Golly! HARK your herald angels and DECK whatever halls you’ve got, because this multidenominaltional multitrack is the funkiest yulestew in the multiverse. It’s got more hooks than Jan Hooks and more riffs than Ron Rifkin. Masked singers only, please.

Side B TK, OK?

ctklimek · FOUR SEASONS TOTAL GREETINGS—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XV [Side A]

Just in time to save Christmas, it's the long-awaited second side of my 2020 yulemix! It's the perfectly imperfect soundtrack to your somber, shelter-in-place holiday.