My money's on Al, or: THUNDERDOME

First, many sincere apologies to the dozen or so readers i have here who missed the blog last week. The new apartment i share with the gf isn't hooked up for internet yet, and thanks to a backlog of new-school-year orders, AT&T isn't getting to our house until Wednesday (the appointment was booked at the beginning of the month), so i'm dependent until then on my lady's laptop, which was with her in Arizona last week (my laptop mac mini doesn't have wireless; "why would i need wireless on something that's not a laptop?" i asked in 2005. 2005 me should be slapped).

Anyway, while i work on a bigger post for tomorrow, i have a listening exercise for you:

Here is the just-released new track from the "eagerly awaited" Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration, LULU:

The View by Lou Reed & Metallica

Now, i would like you to listen to "Caught in a Circle," perhaps the defining moment in the career of Oshkosh, WI guitar god Al Eide, from his early-90s gem Wild Fury:

Find more Al Eide songs at Myspace Music

Aside from obvious differences in production, i'm not seeing a whole lot of difference here.


Pictured: Wisconsin's Greatest Album Cover Ever

Al, all of us who giggled at you in Oshkosh in the 90s and early 2000s were merely trying to compensate for what we all really knew, deep down: that some day you would end up more culturally relevant than the rest of us. To say that Al Eide foreshadowing a collaboration between two once-important, now-hilarious artists makes him "culturally relevant" is perhaps a sad indictment of the rest of the Oshkosh scene from those days, but there it is. I mean, what counts for more--inspiring what is sure to be the musical laughing stock of 2011, or getting your band on a trial episode of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon? (Which, incidentally, i will always be insanely proud of the guys in The Willis for achieving, because holy shit.)