Recently in Mike McGuirk Category

We'd be remiss in our blitz of John Mayer coverage if we didn't make some mention of the dude's well-documented but truly astonishing list of ex- and current girlfriends. A quick Goog'  of "john mayer girlfriend" yields a veritable trinity of major league "J" babes: Jennifer Aniston, Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Love Hewitt right off the bat. Those are some high-level exes, both looks- and celebrity-wise, and even folks who are not fans of his music have to marvel at Mayer's exploits. You have to figure he's got something to offer in addition to his prodigious songwriting and subtly excellent guitarwork.

As the story goes, Mayer's first hit single, "Your Body Is a Wonderland" was written for then-girlfriend Hewitt. What we want to know is, what songs did he write for Cameron Diaz, Minka Kelly, Hank Williams, Jr.'s daughter Holly, etc.? Well, months of diligent research have paid off, and here we present Mayer's most memorable mates and his songs that we think sum up those relationships.

Andy Pettitte: The Cher of notable post-season pitchers. Explanation to follow.

The 2009 baseball post-season is well under way, and watching the Yankees, Angels, Phillies and Dodgers duke it out got our gears turning: if Cole Hamels or Andy Pettitte were a band, which band would he be? Said gears continued turning, and now we have this list of past post-season pitching greats and goats along with their counterparts in the music world -- take that, Joe Buck! Don't really understand this premise? Hate baseball? Not to worry, because we've added appropriate (or approximately appropriate, in some cases) playlists to go along with each entry. Enjoy!

Dickie Peterson (that awesome-looking dude in the center here (and yes, the guy on the left looks pretty awesome, too)), who succumbed to liver cancer on October 12, 2009, was the original bass player and vocalist of incalculably influential San Francisco superblues power trio Blue Cheer. In the late '60s, Peterson, Leigh Stephens (guitar) and first drummer Eric Albronda represented about the most extreme rock music around, as far as double-tracked guitar freakouts, dog-exploding volumes and all-out heaviness were concerned. The overfuzz of his bass and long haired yahoo screaming on hit single "Summertime Blues" simply defined acid rock, not to mention the rest of Blue Cheer's skull-rattling 1968 debut, Vincebus Eruptum (they're all good but do not miss last song "Second Time Around"). Released that same year, follow-up Outsideinside was murky and deliberate -- a menacing flipside to the sunny hippie rock of the times. Even today you can hear unmistakable traces of Outsideinside's trudging riffology in basically all the music that came out of Seattle in the early '90s, and all over the sludgemetal of modern day New Orleans. From here, Blue Cheer's history becomes convoluted as guitarists and drummers come and go, with long hiatuses throughout the '70s and '80s. Recently, however, Peterson had successfully reformed the band and recorded What Doesn't Kill You in 2007.

Southern rock often gets a bad rap among folks whose "learnin' shed" isn't a car on blocks in the front yard. This is largely due to the fact that classic rock radio tends to play only the most hillbilliest of Skynyrd songs ("Sweet Home Alabama," "Gimme Three Steps"), and it's just impossible for a normal person to see the unfortunate choice of a Confederate flag as part of a band's aesthetic and not feel weird.

But there's more to Southern rock than the endless boogie of Molly Hatchet. The music has its roots in ancient blues, deep soul and even the earliest rock 'n' roll music (see Elvis' Sun Sessions). For one thing, two of the genre's main progenitors, Greg and Duane Allman, basically grew up in Muscle Shoals studio, playing with Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Clarence Carter and others. And Southern rock itself has evolved over the years and remains vital today.

The genre can easily be broken down to three eras, and what we've done here is offer a little primer on Southern rock with the major players of each of its periods in playlist form. This is not the last word on Southern rock, so if you have "Whiskey Rock-A-Roller" tattooed on your forehead, don't flip out that there's no Wet Willie. This here is meant to be a starter kit for newcomers and some good songs for the acolytes.

Be sure to listen to all the artist mentioned here with your Rhapsody subscription and listen to all all of your favorite high quality audio with your free trial Rhapsody membership.

Greetings weary Internet travelers! If you're reading this it means you've stumbled across Rhapsody's very special live-blogging of the 2009 VMAs. Yes, you read that right, live blogging, as in we watch the celebrity circus so you don't have to! So sit back, relax, put on some music -- ahem -- talk to your loved ones, and enjoy our blow-by-blow coverage this year's hullabaloo. Please to be meeting your correspondents:

Rachel Devitt: As Rhapsody's official Pop Editor, Ms. Devitt is up on the latest gossip, fashion, flubs and faux pauxs of the celebrity elite and not so elite.

Mike McGuirk: As Rhapsody's heavy rock, blues, comedy, new age and Thai-strip-club-music editor, Mr. McGuirk knows close to nothing about the MTV harem. This is gonna be great! On your marks, get set, blog!

Sometime around 8:00 P.M. Eastern...

Rachel: Hey Mike. Are you there?
Mike: hello Rachel, I'm here.
Rachel: How are you?
Mike: Ready to rock.
Rachel: Ha
Mike: I am. Just gotta get my nephew to turn off ESPN.
Rachel: Well, I am quite possibly the only person in Chicago watching this. Everyone else in town is watching the bears game.
Mike: What is this dance thing?
Rachel: America's Best Dance Crew. Anything with Mario Lopez has got to be good. I mean AC Slater. OK, I guess here we go for real.
Mike: I really can't wait to see how many awards eyehategod wins.
Rachel: And here's Green Day. Green Day just got asked what they're wearing. Haha.
Rachel: Oh such a dumb Michael Phelps pot joke. Hi, 5 months ago! Now we're going to some person named Justine. Who just said "tweet it up!" Oh no.
Mike: I wanna play a game where we do a shot every time they mention Twitter
Rachel: Too much twitter makes the baby go blind

Since forming in 1979, the Beastie Boys have gone from hardcore punk upstarts to smart-ass rappers to de facto arbiters of cool to the veteran rocks stars they are today. Initially dismissed by critics when Licensed to Ill came out in 1986, emcees Mike D, MCA and Ad-Rock shut everybody up with Paul's Boutique in 1989. To put things in perspective, when Paul's Boutique appeared, people simply didn't make jokes about '70s TV shows or refer to underground films the way the Beastie Boys did. From Check Your Head's Cheap Trick-sampling opener to the video for "Sabotage," these guys pretty much invented the kind of pop nostalgia that's such a pervasive part of our culture these days, whether it's Pineapple Express or the way your little brother dresses like he's auditioning for Diff'rent Strokes. And as if inventing an entire paradigm weren't enough, the Beastie Boys also had their own record label, their own magazine, their own clothing line -- they even had their very own Nathanial Hornblower, and we still don't even know what that is.

To celebrate their long-awaited arrival onto the digital shelves of Rhapsody -- meaning you can go stream all of their records right now -- we put together the following quiz. See just how much you know about the Beasties' long, proudly annoying, prone-to-genius career.

The start of summer's most all-consuming diversion -- the Major League Baseball season -- begins today. Stats, scores, fantasy league nerd-ery, broken records, broken homes and congressional investigations add up to a daily, time-honored time-waster. To celebrate the next seven months of minimizing your team's clubhouse page on ESPN.com every time your boss walks by, we present you with a playlist that avoids the usual boring baseball song cliches -- you won't find John Fogerty's "Centerfield" here. Instead, we clear the benches with this motley assortment of baseball related music.

Since these aren't your typical baseball songs, a little explanation is in order: Two songs, taken from the Georges Bizet opera Carmen, were used to great effect in the original Bad News Bears (which rules); "We Are Family" is the Sister Sledge song Willie Stargell and the Pittsburgh Pirates rode to a World Series title in 1979; pitchers Keith Foulke and Tom Gordon use "Mother" and "Flash" as their closer intros; and "Wild Thing" is what Charlie Sheen's Ricky Vaughn character strode to the mound in the 9th to in that other great baseball movie, Major League .

We also have "Good Times" by Styles P, a song anointed slugger Manny Ramirez blasted over the PA system at Fenway as he walked to the plate, inciting a media catastrophe when the its chorus turned out to be the phrase "I get high" repeated over and over. A case of Manny Being Manny? Hell, no. We call that Manny Being The Coolest Player That Ever Lived. Sister Wynona Carr's gospel gem "The Ball Game" is a 1952 hit song Bob Dylan unearthed on his fantastic Americana-themed radio show.

Many of us have been reading baseball guru Peter Gammons since we were kids, but it may come as a surprise to folks that Gammons also plays guitar and sings. Here he's covering Chuck Berry. Meanwhile, beloved Yankee outfielder and October hero Bernie Williams plays jazz guitar on a song called "Just Because," from his 2003 debut album, The Journey Within. "Let Your Love Flow" is on here because I saw a video tribute to the Red Sox with it right after they won in 2007 and it brought a tear to my eye. Sorry. Anyway, we finish up with the Madonna song that A Rod listens to when making out with himself in the mirror (or so we hear).

So lace up your cleats, pull on your stirrups and settle in for a good half-year of joyfully deceiving your employers. It's an American tradition!

Dan Seals (right) and John Ford Coley

For anyone who's ever been dumped, then drunkenly cranked England Dan and John Ford Coley at a party or on a jukebox, thereby inspiring roughly 90% of the people within earshot to say, "Hey I know this song ... is somebody playing this on purpose?" it may come as a surprise to learn that Dan Seals ("England Dan") had a second, longer-lasting and higher-charting career as a country pop star. First of all, the songs England Dan and John Ford Coley are best known for -- the Chevy van-ready "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight" and "Nights Are Forever Without You" -- are archetypal '70s masterpieces. Acoustic guitars are closely tracked by electric ones, with earnestly romantic lyrics about moonlight through the raindrops and that gently swinging, open-chested velour-shirt bongo rhythm Rupert Holmes perfected with "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)." Early track "It's Sad to Belong" is another lite-rock nugget, amid a handful of charting singles the duo had between 1976 and 1979. To think the man behind such musical time capsules could end up anything besides one of those guys you see performing in a beach resort TGI Friday's lounge with "Please kill me" written all over his face is a testament to Seals' talents.

England Dan and John Ford Coley disintegrated in 1980, and Seals threw himself into country music, perhaps as a result of his Texas upbringing. He scored 11 No. 1 hits over the course of 16 albums before succumbing to lymphoma on March 25 of this year. For the most part, Seals' solo output follows the countrypolitan blueprint of fellow '80s and '90s Nashville artists and eschews the wimpiness of his past almost entirely. But several songs -- "Addicted" most obviously, as well as "My Old Yellow Car" -- feature the acoustic pickings, mellow distortion and distinctly lite-rock vocal stylings that, if you're anything like me, bring you back to Seals' '70s output every now and then -- preferably alone, sure, but with true delight. Seals' passing is a sad one, for the rock community as much as the country scene he was clearly more drawn to.

On Mastodon's fifth full-length, Crack the Skye, the Atlanta-based progressive metal quartet demonstrate their depth with sweeping themes and spaced-out riffs. In celebration of its release we hammered together this guide to all-things Mastodon with an exclusive interview, a playlist picked by the band, a guide to their most essential riffs and a voyage through Rhapsody's most epic metal LPs of all time.

Play Crack the Skye

BROWSE: Check out Rhapsody's review of Crack the Skye.

INTERVIEW: Check out our exclusive chat with Mastodon's Troy Sanders.

EXPLORE: Dig into Rhapsody's selection of "12 Most Epic Metal Albums Ever"

HEAR: Listen to a playlist of essential Mastodon riffs.

PLAY: Check out Mastodon's celebrity playlist.

ROCK THE RADIO: Hear the metalhead's dream, "High Voltage" radio.

Mastodon
Crack The Skye

Progressive metal badasses Mastodon have put out concept albums before. Leviathan is dedicated to and about Melville's Moby-Dick; and Blood Mountain is about man's struggle with nature, specifically getting lost in the woods at night and facing all the things that could happen, like getting attacked by a one-eyed sasquatch that can see the future ("Circle of Cysquatch").

This latest album, their fourth, follows several seemingly disparate ideas and ties them all together with the band's now-accepted talent for linking song parts to one another, their particularly onomatopoeic use of rhythm (Leviathan actually rolls like the ocean), and, for those of us who care about such things, awesome, awesome guitars. The songs on Crack the Skye are concerned with the loneliness of death, astral travel, a spirit that enters a wormhole and ends up inhabiting Rasputin's body and ... um ... stuff like that. The attendant jams are built around bass lines and guitar parts that groove like the good parts of "Starship Trooper" (do not miss the 8:20 mark in "The Last Baron"), sketching a sort of spirit ride through space. Nods to classic rock pepper the album, from Animals-era Floyd ("Oblivion") to the life-death-rebirth-but-really-just-death cycle it shares with the Pretty Things' S.F. Sorrow and the melodic vocal parts learned directly from Peter Gabriel-era Genesis that emerge in just about every song at some point.

This is not your run-of-the-mill major label rock music (even in an era when metal is getting so much attention in the mainstream). Mastodon has turned a pretty cool trick, selling their music on a massive scale while retaining the characteristics that have marked them as one of outsider metal's most interesting acts (read: the weirdness) since they first turned up in the early '00s confusing people (read: me) with their Thin Lizzy-gone-death-metal guitars. Crack the Skye is simply where they're at right now -- astral travel and Rasputin and such, with less death metal thud and more vectoring jammery -- and it works. The best thing about Mastodon is that, with each record, they don't evolve so much as they just get more to the core of their potential.

Gentle Reader,

Here is a playlist designed to act as an overview of a positively enchanting genre of rock music: Floridian death metal. We've compiled key tracks from some of the key players in this seminal metal scene, which emerged in the early '80s and went on to dominate the underground metal landscape through that decade and well into the '90s. Death metal's effects can be felt today anytime one person punches another or cannibalism is practiced, and also in the music of Lamb of God, Mastodon, Avenged Sevenfold and the Dillinger Escape Plan, among many others.

When death metal bands were spreading like a plague on the country in the early '80s, Florida was a definite epicenter of the scene, with pioneers Death brutalizing almost beyond recognition what Slayer had started a couple years before. Tampa Bay-based Obituary, Deicide and Morbid Angel followed, each with their own distinctive take on what was -- with its blastbeat drums, grunted vocals and overload of violence in both lyrics and imagery -- initially thought of as a tasteless offshoot of thrash metal. Malevolent Creation, who moved to Tampa from Buffalo, N.Y., to be a part of the movement, and Obituary represented a form of death metal with strong ties to the midtempo doom of Black Sabbath. Deicide and Acheron incorporated their beliefs in Satanism into the traditionally nonreligious form (their music was later termed “blackened death metal”), and Morbid Angel played a technically complex style that not only outsold all their peers but also arguably had the largest effect on death metal becoming a formidable subgenre in its own right. From there, bands such as Cynic, Atheist and Massacre took death metal in an extremely technical and progressive direction, Six Feet Under moved toward sludginess and St. Petersburg’s Hate Eternal gave rise to the “brutal death metal” subgenre, typified by even more blastbeat drums, Cookie Monster vocals and breakneck tempos than the music of their peers. In short, a sunburst of blaring, putridly awesome music flowered.

As Lamb of God’s new album, Wrath, sells into the millions and the once-despised death metal subgenre gains mainstream acceptance, the intensity and innovation of the songs below only grow in importance. Maybe not so good for your next picnic with Grandma; however, you gotta at least listen to “Til Death” by Obituary.

Son House, Tuts Washington and Slim Harpo represent three distinctly different strains of blues music, a fact that shines a spotlight on the spray of styles that make up the genre. Here we’ve picked out an album from each artist, as well as that album’s attendant must-hear cuts for folks looking for an introduction to (or a reminder of) the enduring material these men set to tape. House works best when you’re alone, Washington goes well with one or two (or six) Pat O'Brien hurricanes and, with the right dance partner, Harpo will get you in heaps of trouble.

It’s been a rough week for me. I’ve had to accept a couple harsh realities of this life. Let go of some dreams. First of all, I finally had to give up on the idea that anyone -- anyone -- in Thailand was ever going to get it when I referred to Jimmy Buffett as Jimmy Buffet, which I did at every opportunity in the past few months, believe me. No laughs though. Just blank stares, more loneliness. I was also forced to abandon my letter-writing campaign to punk-pop upstarts New Found Glory and the surviving members of Hole urging the two bands to unite and form a single supergroup called …

I woke up today and went downstairs to get breakfast from one of the vendors on my street. A table with an array of hotel pans and stock pots all with fresh, colorfully blazing curries and murky stew-type things for sale. This is real cheap food but delicious, in fact way better than what you are served in practically any restaurant with a door here. I had spicy pork with unknown fruits and vegetables in it – off-green melon (?) and this strange giant caper type thing I have only ever seen since coming to Thailand. I don’t know what it is but it’s good and, unlike some street food, isn't flavored with anything that smells alarmingly like sewage canal fish so I don’t ask any questions. Thai food is really tasty but it can be like a minefield with the fish-stank if you’re not careful. Sometimes they just toss the aforementioned fat capers in without taking them off the vine they grow on and that’s kind of not so cool unless you are a deer or perhaps a deer-monster, and into eating branches, but like I said, non-fishy so okay...

They walk these elephants around at night in the tourist areas. Sometimes little baby elephants and sometimes big guys. You give the dude 20 baht and he hands you a bag of fruit and you feed the elephant. The first time I had to make room on the sidewalk for an elephant I gotta admit my thought was “Wow. This place is insane and I am never leaving.” So I fed them whenever I saw them.