Photo by Marc Brubaker

The author watching Free Energy at Fitz in 2011.

I had a hernia operation in the early summer of 2006, and had nothing to do all day but hobble around with cool cane a borrowed from Grandpa Hlavaty and play on the Internets for two months or so.

I had developed the injury while working at Domino's, but it was cool because their insurance helped pay for it, and the cool pills that came with the painful surgery.

That summer while trolling around on Craigslist for stray local writing gigs, I saw that then Houston Press music editor John Nova Lomax had put out a call for freelance music writers.

A-ha.

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24 seasons and over 500 episodes in, the Simpsons has established itself in the domain of pop culture for good, regardless of where and when you believe the show began a downward trend in quality. One thing that has kept it alive this long is that in lieu of writing stories focused on the central Simpson family or even the supporting cast, the show has become a sort of guest-star mill, featuring whatever flavor-of-the-week celebrity will agree to appear on the show.

That means a lot of musicians have shown up on there as well. In fact, the Simpsons has long been renowned for featuring some of the greatest musicians of all time in some of the greatest scenes in the show's history. All three Beatles and Michael Jackson have shown up in the past to wide critical acclaim.

But in recent years, music has become sort of a blight on the show. In ratings-grab stunt-casting, the show has featured some awful musician cameos that have embarrassed all parties involved. These are the five worst the series has ever featured.

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Courtesy of Warner Brothers Nashville

Hey, Old Farts. You're Welcome.

"Can't they just shut up?"

That's the question many country music fans proffer when musicians publicly express opinions that dare venture outside of benign Q&A quicksand and into the murky waters of relevant social issues.

Country consumers from both sides of the political aisle can get riled up in these instances. It's not just the left-wingers griping about Toby Keith's need to fill the asses of terrorists with red, white and blue boots, nor is it only the right-wingers who still are unable to forgive Natalie Maines for Bush-bashing on foreign soil.

Recently, a specific sect of fans felt their tighty-whities twist when a prominent contemporary artist went rogue while discussing his musical offerings in a manner that offended them. Sticks and stones still break bones, but name-calling has evidently gained a great deal of destructive power.

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Get 'em, Billy!

I've previously been critical of Billy Corgan for a lot of the ridiculousness he has engaged in. But folks, I'm here to tell you, all of that changed for me last week when I saw this video of good old Billy and his wrassling federation shilling furniture. Now I get it.

Billy Corgan is not Generation X's greatest embarrassment or their greatest fallen idol, as I've described him before. No, Billy has made it abundantly clear that he's the opposite. He's maybe Gen X's one, greatest success story.

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Photo by Son Lam.

Skrillex, when dubstep was cool, circa 2011.

Mainstream music has a history of taking musical genres, smoothing out the rough edges and turning them into something easily digestible to the masses. Punk rock went from being the music of rebellion to the music of crying about failed relationships, and rappers went from rapping about what was happening in the streets to rapping make-believe stories of violence and drug running.

For the last two years, much has been written about the rise of EDM, and dubstep in particular. While dubstep was never threatening or edgy in the way that punk and hip-hop were, there was a certain hardcore bent to it that was exciting. It was aggressively modern, the perfect music for our ADHD culture.

I'm speaking about it in past tense because we have to face the fact that mainstream music has had its way with dubstep, and the results aren't pretty.

Dubstep isn't dead, it's just completely toothless.

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Manfred Werner-Tsui via Wikipedia Commons

Yoko Ono, never one to bend to the rules of societal convention, has got this old-age shit down to a science. Screw bridge club and Metamucil; this soon-to-be octogenarian is putting your grandma's ideas about the twilight years to shame.

True to form, the famed conceptual artist/musician/fashion-designer/philanthropist/Beatles destroyer (to a few of you, anyway) is not spending her 80th birthday this coming Monday kicked back in her recliner. Spry as hell, she will instead be performing at the Volksbuhne in Berlin.

Ono will be backed by the Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band, as well as her son Sean Lennon, who also collaborated on the 2009 critically acclaimed album, Between My Head and the Sky.

Don't start covering your ears in a preemptive protest just yet. Yes, a lot of her work has been ridiculous, especially the earlier stuff. But despite some really, ahem, interesting work over the years, it seems Ono has evolved, offering up art that is more than apples with price tags and poorly landscaped crotches.

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Photos by Bruce Kessler

Today, Houston Astros pitchers and catchers started returning to Kissimmee, Florida, for spring training in anticipation (and somewhat fright) of the 2013 season and their debut in the American League.

Rewind:

Rockin' Houston Site Is a Glorious Monument to Local Concerts Past

In honor of baseball returning to Houston in just a couple of months, Bruce Kessler of RockinHouston.com sent me two pictures from Houston Astros history that he managed to capture along his career as one of Houston-based promoters Pace Concerts' house photogs.

Kessler has amassed a database of every show that he and others shot in Houston from 1965 up until 2005. This past week he uploaded 1986 onto the site.

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Some weeks back, while doing Christmas shopping for younger relatives, I realized just how different the musical world looks to someone who is, say, just now reaching ten years old. I discovered this when I realized that things like vinyl, cassettes, and even compact discs aren't coveted items to most kids. They are, in fact, stupid.

And all the trappings that go with those things -- scratches, tapes breaking, special-ordering, etc. -- are foreign concepts, old-people problems.

Some things that I miss the most, like the concept of a "fan club" -- when now, with social media, everyone is invited to the party -- ordering merch from Rockabilia, or collecting every cassingle from an album, are quaint now.

And are kids (or parents) in 2013 really worried about "Parental Advisory" stickers on albums? Parents, do you still buy (or download) your kids the edited versions of popular records? It seems to me that that concept became antiquated sometime in the late '90s.

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One of my favorite pastimes is reminding my friends how old we are all getting, partly because I am cruel, and probably because even I am astounded that actor Steve Guttenberg is now three years older than Wilford Brimley was when they filmed Cocoon together in 1985.

We can all think of things that will officially be old and played out in 2013 -- dubstep, the band Fun., whatever PSY is, ironic moustache accessories, high-waisted acid-washed denim -- but that would be boring, and probably the job of someone else. Wait for it...

But what about things that officially turn ancient next year? Ancient meaning reaching the age that people can look back at said things fondly as they stroke their beards and watch their children play Angry Birds.

2012 itself was a pretty good year for anniversaries: Rage Against the Machine's first album, the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main St. (and the Stones themselves), Dr. Dre's The Chronic, Ziggy Stardust, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Pantera's Vulgar Display of Power... the list goes on.

No doubt Rocks Off wrote about these and many other milestones in 2012. Speaking of No Doubt, they released their first album in 1992.

But what about 2013? What anniversaries are lurking in just a matter of days, weeks and months?

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Seventeen years and change on, opinions on the Smashing Pumpkins' sprawling 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness differ vastly from one fan to the other. Most everyone agrees it's bloated, and some even call it the beginning of the end for the band, the point when Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan went full-tilt Roger Waters.

This week Corgan reissued the diamond-selling album just in time for the holidays with deluxe packaging and extras, depending on how much you want to shell out for velvet disc holders, copious artwork, and liner notes. Prices range from $27.99 for the low-end basic release, $75 for the download with extra art, $135 for the fancy box, and $250 for the super-fan smorgasbord.

Corgan has also "painstakingly remastered" the album from the original tapes, which seems almost like an afterthought. What needed fixing?

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