In any case, my original point was that the Beatles were as much thugs as the Stones were, if not more so based on growing up in Liverpool and cutting their teeth in Germany. I think that's a good thing, btw. Except Paul, of course. He was always a bit of a nancy.

No, they only paid their artists 1/2 cent per record sold and credited Alan Freed and their musical paper supplier (Russ Frato) for co-writing songs that they had nothing to do with.

The Beatles were a clear case of suicide. I'm no Allen Klein fan, but he was at worst an enabler. I will go out on a limb and assert that Allen Klein looks pretty good compared to the Chess brothers or anyone else who was recording African-American artists at the time.

There are a lot of great stories about how the Beatles and the Stones found the "conflict" between them very funny and they played it up as good media while still hanging out together.

Damn straight.

If you like the Shins, it's worth a listen for sure. A lot of the same sounds, but Dangermouse gives it a kind of Gnarls Barkley feel, so it's less punchy than most Shins music.

It was on some "best of" lists and it got pretty good reviews, FWIW. "The Mall and the Misery" is one track that I still have on regular rotation.

You mean like Elvis Costello? Wilco? OK, there are two members left, but many bands have many personnel changes and still make great music. The creative core (in this case, Mercer) is still there and the level of talent remaining in that core will determine if the album is good or not, not if the glockenspiel player…

If it's good music, why does it have to pass some sort of validity test on how it was created?

I just flashed back to him doing "Welcome to My Nightmare" on the Muppet Show!

"You're hot to take all we've got/Not a dry seat in the house"

Ah, OK. I only saw the original broadcast. My family were huge Muppet Show fans. I loved the smoking drummer in her backing band!

Didn't Debbie Harry do at least one of her numbers ("One Way or Another", IIRC), with a muppet new wave band, not DTatEM?

Watching him try to keep up at El Bulli was the shit. He's self-effacing about it so no one gave him too much shit, but I was thinking I could do about as well.

Ya'll crazy.

Actually, I'd also vote for "Live at the Witch Trials", "Perverted by Language", or "The Infotainment Scan". So many to choose from.

If we're attaching Fall songs to this clip, there's only one choice: "Idiot Joy Showland".

That's because your main entitle is not yourself, buddy.

Insane and yet inane. Quite an achievement.

But they all had to leave to make it. So that tells you something right there.