Say Goodbye to Your Guitar Heroes

I have bad news. Seriously bad news. Not something small and insignificant like "the toast burned a little" or "your liver has failed", but seriously, heart-wrenchingly awful news. The sort of news that inspires you to toss your newspaper out the front door, shouting "I'll never read the news again!", prompting your neighbor to shout, "It's four o'clock in the fucking morning asshole. My damn kids are trying to sleep! And who the hell reads a paper these days anyway? Why can't you get your news from the internet like a normal human being?", prompting you to throw a garden implement through your neighbor's front window (you may have had a scotch or two this evening), prompting him to come out on the lawn in his underwear waving a handgun, prompting you to, the following day, raise the height of your fence, in protest, to well above the height for which it's legally zoned, prompting numerous complaints from the Homeowner's Association, despite the fact that Mrs. Lurdle down the street painted her house bright pink, for Christ's sake, and not one of them bothered to say a thing about it. It's that kind of news.

And here it is: Musicians have been lying to you.

Take a deep breath. I realize this is a lot to absorb. But you've got to face facts. It's not your fault. They duped all of us. I know I wanted to believe Sammy Hagar when he said "I can't drive 55", but in the end you've got to accept that there's no possible way that he ever managed to parallel park at a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. It simply doesn't make any sense. And so, it is with a heavy heart (it's not lazy, it has a glandular disorder, thank you very much), that I expose some of the darkest manipulations of the music that we once so revered, in a segment we title: Top Ten Lies Perpetrated By The Music Industry

10) "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" - Poison

Sure, on the surface it seems to be a well observed metaphor about the nature of joy and sorrow and the inevitable co-mingling of the two, but underneath it's nothing more than a filthy unrepentant lie. Common knowledge is that the name "Poison" was chosen after the band saw "Spinal Tap", but close insiders revealed (after several weeks of torture in an underground prison camp outside Dayton, OH) that the name was actually chosen to scare off anxiety-ridden botanists, any one of whom, had they ever mustered up the guts to listen to the song, would have pointed out in a nerdy, self-righteous tone, that the Rosa "Zephirine Drouhin", though prone to black spot, rust, and assorted types of mildew, is thoroughly thornless. They then would have smiled smugly and gotten back to the business of botany, which primarily consists of not getting laid for decades at a time.


9) "Everybody's Working For the Weekend" - Loverboy

You play it on the jukebox every Saturday night while you're bussing tables at Denny's, but in your heart you have to know that it's just not true. I mean, if everybody's working, why the hell are there so many people in Denny's at 2:30 am wearing club clothes wrinkled up in that special way that says "I just got lucky in a bar bathroom with some guy who I'm pretty sure had a speaking role on Law and Order last season". No, the accurate statement is that you, yourself, are working for the weekend while more successful people are out enjoying themselves. You think the members of Loverboy are working for the weekend? No, they're sitting poolside with a martini getting a hand job from your girlfriend who's "visiting her sick aunt in Pawtucket".

8) "The Love You Take is Equal To The Love You Make" - The Beatles

A nice sentiment, but federal income tax laws dictate that you really only get to keep about two-thirds of the love you make, despite the fact that you spend a good portion of your life slaving away making it while some lazy assholes sit around popping out countless children and shooting heroin and occasionally getting their act together long enough to go down to the welfare office and claim their chunk of of your hard-earned love. Fucking socialist bullshit.

All records of lies 7-3 were tragically lost due to irreversible water damage after Garth Brooks' #1 country hit "The River" overflowed its banks and flooded my home office.

2) "Everything's Gonna Be Alright" - Bob Marley

I don't care how stoned you are, you've got to realize that this is a load of crap.

1) "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" - The Beatles

The Beatles make a second appearance on our countdown, and it's no surprise. We could deconstruct countless Beatles songs and examine their falsehoods (Back in the USSR? It doesn't even exist anymore you duplicitous bastards!), but this song at least gave us a testable hypothesis. And though, it ranks #1 on our countdown, the results were a bit mixed. They were heavily influenced by my attempts to hold hands with Paul McCartney. Initial tries at rushing him with outstretched hands resulted in my arms, head, and genital region being held by Paul's bodyguards as they tossed me out into the street. I tried a subtler tactic of politely explaining my position at the top of my lungs, stating "HEY PAUL!!!! OVER HERE!!! REMEMBER IN 1963 WHEN YOU INDICATED A DESIRE TO BLACHEGGGEAACH*" (*This last part of the statement represents the approximate point at which Paul sprayed me with the mace). So Paul was definitely a liar. Ringo, however, not only held my hand willingly, but also invited me back to his place for oral sex. So at this point it was a tie. The final decision on the veracity of this music came down to John and George, and while they both finally consented to holding my hand, I can't help but think that if they really wanted to, I wouldn't have had to dig through six feet of dirt and pry open their coffins with a crowbar.

This blog is brought to you by the letter "J", which I rolled up and smoked half of prior to writing this nonsense.