Sure, she’s a train wreck now  and most people carefully steer around her, but back in the middle 90s, Courtney was grunge’s It Girl.  Infamous as the Widow Cobain, riding a very hot Hole album (Live Through This) and starting to receive some very significant movie offers, it looked like Courtney was going to take over the planet.

Even Playboy showed up at her door in Seattle, wooing the former stripper (yes, that’s on her resume) with a tempting offer.  ”Would you pose for us for $1 million?” they asked.

“A million bucks?  Not enough!”  Slam.

With all that’s happened with Courtney over the last sixteen years, what do you suppose her answer would be today?

Before he fronted J. Geils, Peter Wolf had formed a group called the Hallucinations who performed with everyone from The Velvet Underground to Howlin’ wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Van Morrison.

Wolf’s legacy also includes his marriage, years ago to Faye Dunaway. I’ve included a J. Geils live gem below following a hat-trick of vid’s from the band led by the other legend born the 7th of March.

His fans included Robert Plant … talking about the great Arthur Lee of Love, who is longer with us, but in his lifetime managed to amass acclaim in the sixties, as a song and multi-instrumentalist in the L.A. band known as LOVE.

Lee said when he first heard The Byrds, he felt vindicated since he’d already been writing music that had a similar sound. 

The 1967 album Forever Changes is regarded by critics and fans alike as Love’s finest recording, and one of the best records of the ’60s, but the song most often associated with Arthur Lee and Love, is their cover of ”My Little Red Book”.

This is the singular, emphasized catchy bit of the song.  It can be music or melody or lyrics or a combination of all three.  Everything comes together in a short burst of music that sticks in your head–the thing you remember–and becomes the main identifier of the song–and is the part most people are likely to sing along with.  It could be in the chorus or it could be the opening riff.  Or it could be a musical figure that repeats throughout a track.

The hook can be pleasant–or it can be really annoying.  Whatever: songwriters are always looking for hooks.  They know that if they can find something that will roll around in your head long after the song is done, they’ve, well, hooked you.

The other three guys formed Talk Show, which featured a new unknown singer named David Coutts.  Unfortunately, the Talk Show album was a flop, selling a grand total of 55,000 copies. Discouraged, Coutts was fired and Talk Show died.

As about the same time, Weiland went solo, released a record called Twelve Bar Blues.  Critically, it did much better; it got some great reviews.  Commercially, it was another flop, selling fewer than a hundred thousand copies.

Compare that to the first three Stone Temple Pilots albums which sold a combined 10 million copies.

Finally, the new REM album has a name (for those who still care about the band; they kinda lost me about a decade ago).  It’ll be called Collapse into Now and is set to come out on March 8.

If you’d like a free sample with a track called “Discoverer,” click on this link.  And you know something?  It’s actually pretty good.  It’s a throwback to the REM of the 80s and early 90s—which is a good thing.  A very good thing.

It’s official:  Dave Grohl is now a Muppet—or at least a stand-in for one.  He’s going to appear in the new Muppets movie.  It’s called The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made.  The plot has the Muppets reuniting after a major argument to save Muppet Studios in Hollywood from the clutches of an evil Texas oil tycoon.

Animal, the regular drummer, has to go for an anger management course, so Dave has to fill in for him.  Other cameos will include Jack Black, Ricky Gervais, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga.  The movie opens November 23, 2011.

Like I’ve said, Dave Grohl will play drums for anyone, anywhere.  You know he’s on the new Michael Jackson album, right?  Seriously.  He is.

If you’re into particle physics and the quest for Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider—and really, who isn’t?—you’ll be happy to know that scientists have taken time out from their experiments to record a charity album.

It’s called Resonance, a collaboration of 3,000 scientists, which includes a Dutch dude who created a pipe organ out of leftover particle detection tubes.  And it’ s all for a good cause.  Money raised will go towards an orphanage in Nepal.

If you’re interested in buying the CD, here is the link.  There’s blues, classical and even a competent cover of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.”  One track sings of the glories of liquid argon and muon spectrometers.

The LHC was supposed to be shut down for renovations, but things are going so well with theories involving quark-gluon plasma that they’ll continue to work through right up until December 2012—which is kind of freaky, because that’s when some say the Mayans predict the end of the world.

How did they know particle physicists would accidentally create an artificial black hole that will swallow us all?

Get a load of this scam:  a bunch of guys in the UK recorded some songs and put them up for sale on iTunes and Amazon.  Then they stole a bunch of credit cards and tied them to iTunes and Amazon accounts.  They then used these accounts and credit cards to download their own songs 6,000 times.  That works out to over $1.5 million in fraudulent downloads—and, of course, they got sales royalties from all these sales.

This went on for two years—but the gang (and there’s a dozen of them) were eventually found out and caught.

Very clever and sneaky.  Wrong, but clever and sneaky—and ultimately not worth it.

Pearl Jam will turn 20 years old in the next few months and in commemoration of that, they have a new live album coming out on January 18^th.  It’ll be called Live on Ten Legs and features 18 songs recorded on various tours between 2003 and 2010.  Naturally, it will come in all sorts of forms, from a basic CD to a super-deluxe box set.

And there’s more to come, too.  This is just part of a year-long 20^th anniversary celebration, so expect plenty of Pearl Jam stuff over the next twelve months.

Okay, so what’s going on with this Google music service that’s supposed to rival iTunes?  It’s happening.  In fact, Google is prepared to pay the labels tens of millions of millions of dollars so they’ll go along with them.

The big thing is Google wants to do is a cloud-based music streaming service where you’ll be able to access all the music you’ve already purchased from wherever you are.  There’s no streaming subscription plan—at least, not yet.

This is starting to get interesting.  More here.