1. No one was shouting “Eli, my man!” or “It’s Eli, he LOVES us!” (don’t get it?

1. I once read a news story about a biker-dude lottery winner who lived at home with his mom on Long Island and admitted to enjoying a "sponge shot"—after wiping down the bar at the end of the night, his favorite bartender would squeeze the funky liquid into a glass for our hero to down.

1. "Wow, what's with all those people onstage?" my companion asked as we stopped by the MySpace stage where a dirtbag choir was working hard (and in unison) to keep the butt-rock flame alive.

I am a self-proclaimed foodie. Love watching Bourdain, Top Chef, Jamie Oliver, and Alton Brown, and I savor great dining experiences much like I do gigs and festivals. One reason I keep coming back to Bonnaroo year after year is the BBQ at Prater's in nearby Morrison, Tenn., just a stone's throw from the festival site.

You won't recognize him at first, especially if, like me, your best Beck memories involve him on his knees, belting out Midnite Vultures' "Debra" like it's hipster karaoke night and he's drawn a James Brown tune.

We're usually stoked to see Billie Joe Armstrong, a perennial Spin fave, gracing the pages of the New York Times. After all, his Green Day side project, Foxboro Hot Tubs, is tearing up the Southwest right now.

On a long subway ride home last night from JFK Airport, I cued up one of my perennial faves for mass transit listening: the podcast of This American Life, the long-running NPR program hosted by Ira Glass (now in its second season as a television series on Showtime).

Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, the clever New Zealanders known as Flight of the Conchords, were owning a rambunctious crowd at NYC's Town Hall, running through a cheeky version of their song "Robots," in which the duo sing from the perspective of two robots who've recently eliminated the human race by using "poisonous gases" to "poison their asses." As the song concluded and the audience (w

There may be people who only attended the third session of the 2008 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, but as a wise man once observed about his questionably unclothed behavior on a famed bathroom floor, "It Wasn't Me." So the remains of Days 1 and 2 -- The French Fry Diet, crap sleep, SPF 45 caked on like Steven Tyler's mascara, temperatures reportedly reaching a singeing 112 degrees, fee

In a better universe, Prince would've been the original alternative rocker. Able to play virtually any instrument in virtually any style -- funk, soul, R&B, gospel, pop, rock, folk, psych, new-wave -- he was a multiracial, pansexual, politically minded, sacredly profane fashion freakazoid who posed in the shower wearing a trench coat and a "Rude Boy" button.