Why You Should By This Album By Curtis Hanson, Rock Journalist I’ve met these guys. I know these guys. These guys aren’t Mick Jagger. Hell, Mick Jagger isn’t even Mick Jagger anymore—he’s a middle-aged housewife from Brookline who watches The View to get the day’s top stories. I should know. I’ve met him too. But these guys aren’t Billy Idol—these guys aren’t even Bonnie Raitt. These are the kind of guys who have sex with their girlfriends a couple times and take ‘em to a magical weekend at a bed and breakfast before they introduce ‘em to their friends. And yet when these guys play… Have you ever had your ear blasted off by a circular saw? Has anyone ever lathed your skin off your body? I mean, fucking, LATHED it off? Well that is the kind of fucked-up sh*t that happens in those “Saw” movies. I sh*t you not. People have to cut off their own hands. I can’t even imagine what I would do in that situation. Which is why it’s so fucked up. It’s like, what would you do? If you were there? That’s what listening to these guys play is like. You’re like, could I have done it any better, if I were these guys? Could I have played these instruments any better? Well, let me ask you a question, Sherlock: what if that instrument you casually mentioned, was your mind? A bee is coming at you. Think fast! What should you do? But a better question is: what DID you do? Why is that bee coming at you? Bees think: honey, flowers, the queen, protect the queen, make the honey, BZZZZ. But suddenly YOU put out a pink colored cardboard box full of cookies, in the middle of the fucking park. Why do YOU think that bee is around? That bee is music. And you just purchased it. So don’t blame me when your eardrums jerk you off into next month. Don’t come crying to me when your toes start tapping and your bong starts ripping the sh*t out of your axe, playing purple haze like some forgotten fever dream, passed down through the generations from the soul of glass bong to the soul of glass bong, with one great great grandfather bong telling the story around the campfire about the day that Jimi Hendrix and one of the guys from Sha-Na-Na all took huge bong rips from his quivering, glass neck. “He wore a crazy, gold sequined jumpsuit, and he was the greatest artist who ever lived,” says the elder bong, so high out of his mind he doesn’t even remember that Jimi Hendrix was there also, not just the dipshit from Sha-Na-Na. “He had some weird ideas about retro.” Still keeps going on and on about this Sha-Na-Na guy. So, in conclusion, congratulations. You bought this album, or you found it in a car—either way, you finally made one good decision in your life. But my point is, you can’t just listen to this album. Get off your tractor and get to the Acropolis, or Madison Square Garden, or wherever music happens, and insist that you see a live Mr. Dream concert. It’s like they say: once you see the Mona Lisa in person, you’ll never go back to printing out a color copy from the internet and cutting a hole in the mouth so you can act out getting a blowjob from the Mona Lisa. Peace is everywhere, Curtis Hanson August 2009