Black Sabbath, Beards, The Flaming Lips etc So after my last experiment in streamofconciousness blogging, I figured I'd sit down tonight with anuvva glass of the cheap red and artificially replicate a semi-successful formula. I don't know how many of you are Black Sabbath fans, I just bought a cheap-ass Best Of CD at the weekend & I gotta say while half a dozen or so cuts are righteous downer blues fug most of it is pure bunk, especially as it's a double set arranged chronologically and they didn't record a thing I wanna hear ever again after about 1974, I sorta bought it 'cos I know Mr Coyne from der Flaming Lips is a monster Sabbath freak & they do War Pigs live yadda yadda 'cos it's, y'know just as relevent today yadda yadda & seein' as Wayne's near as dammit the hippest cat on this or any other planet, (I mean, just check out the cat's beard, just his beard is better than most bands entire back catologue - see also Macca circa Let It Be, whose beard alone justifies The Beatles as der greatest, beards are very important, Jim Morrison had a groovy beard too, which is why hipsters hatin' on The Doors need forget obsessin' 'bout the whole Bonzo Dionysis Lizard King thing and give the guy a break) so I figured they've gotta have summfin', which most certainly do, just not as much as I woulda hoped, but I guess if you were some Romilar cough syrup glugging street punk kid from Nowhere USA in 1970 who, y'know, likes Led Zep 1, but is pissed 'cos it doesn't really bug his folks as much as he'd like, even when he's playin' it real loud at 3am, these buncha satan worshippin' black magik Hammer Horror dirge churnin' muvvas musta seemed like the greatest thing in the whole world, way better at least than Alice Cooper which is just Barnum Pantomine Circus freakery and not really the real deal at all, so it makes sense that Wayne digs 'em so much 'cos he was a Romilar cough syrup glugging street punk one time too, even if now he's like a benign, Father Christmas style The Man 8 out of 10 Indie Kids Would Choose To Be Their Dad, anyhoo, Black Sabbath recorded, y'know, some stomping tunes, The Wizard is a harmonica crazed monster...like the mighty MC5, I sorta dig the the idea of Black Sabbath ("Ladies and Gentlefreaks! Come have your heads stomped by the world's evilest scuzz shovelling horror-show B-Movie super heavy goat sacrificin', bat chompin' friends of Satan rock and roll 3D gore-o-vision shlock merchants!") more than that actual band, and ain't nothing wrong with that. Rock music is bunk, but the idea of it is potent as hell.  ¶ 1:21 PM