Aquarium Drunkard has a great three-part series on classic LA musical tracks spanning the last 3-4 decades or so. It's called "L.A. Burnout" and features songs from the likes of LA '60s garage great The Standells to longtime SoCal stalwarts like Neil Young, Flo & Eddie, The Mamas & The Papas, Albert Hammond (the older one) and others.

Go here for Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Get your "hey, man" going.

This is my obligatory New Year's Day post - January 1, 2007. Congratulations, you made it another year. Now go look at yourself in the mirror. And ask the question "Do I like what I see"?

Happy New Year.

This blog was started sometime back in 2002-2003 as the APWRock Blog, chronicling the merriments of my love of rock and roll and my band Anthemic Pop Wonder. Once APW bit the dust in late 2004, so too did that blog, resurrecting itself in early '05 as Waved Rumor (an anagram of my given name, btw), the secret daily outlet for undernourished rock 'n roll worshipers.

And it was swept up in exciting new developments like RSS, SNAP previews, video embeds and more. And it continued to serve as a focus for my solo music material at MySpace and my 2006 rock and roll covers project.

But a New Year turns new loves and new leafs and new treats, I find my focus on music is not as strong as it once was. Increasingly, it takes big efforts for me to write about a rock and roll scene that I'm far removed from. My love of rock and roll is from another time, not this time.

I still love to write and record classic pop songs - in fact, I've got a fresh batch of 6-8 catchy songs written in recent months and looking to be recorded and posted soon - but my energies to stay current with my blog have dissipated in recent months. Even talk of a new blog project in recent weeks with several co-collaborators has failed to sincerely rouse my enthusiam.

If the mojo returns, it may be in a different form. But for now, I am going to lay low, read instead of write, listen instead of talk and work instead of play. The old saying - "He who is not a rebel at 20 has no heart, and he who is still a rebel at 40 has no head" - applies here.

Look over to the right column for links to way cooler blogs that this one. Hope you enjoyed the ride. Happy New Year.

(Ed. note - This blog contains the words "Happy New Year" to fulfill a contractural obligation.)

-- Ann Powers of the LA Times talks to various music-related bloggers and websites to try to understand the changing landscape of music in 2006-2007. No quotes from Brooklyn Vegan, though; sheesh, we gotta get that guy a PR agent. Tasty morsels below. (via Music Press Report)

"Today, it's hard to know when buzz is more than just noise. In an age of accelerated connection, the buzz around every art form has intensified, but nowhere as much as in music. The growing ease of music-making and distribution resulted in 60,000 releases (that's in the U.S. alone) last year. Downloadable music multiplies that number like bunnies in spring. And pop's historical embrace of novelty and amateurism means that few heavy gates stop the flow."

"What is in flux is that imaginary portal where an artist makes the leap into public consciousness. There, where perception and reality don't quite match, time and space themselves are being messed with. In some cases, the very ground where music once emerged has been abandoned.

"You don't have to go to a record store or go out on a Tuesday night to see an opening band to get in on things," said Scott Plagenhoef, managing editor of Chicago-based Pitchforkmedia.com, the indie-rock-leaning website that's often cited as a source of today's groundswells. "And we're not part of the music industry. The industry knows a couple of months in advance what print magazines will put on the cover. I don't think anybody knows what we're making our lead review the next day."

"The FBI agreed Tuesday to make public the final 10 documents about the surveillance of John Lennon that it had withheld for 25 years from a university historian on the grounds that releasing them could cause "military retaliation against the United States."

-- Seems the FBI has unleashed (released) a few more dribs and drabs on singer John Lennon from his radical, anarchist days in the early 1970s. It looks like updated material to the book Jon Wiener released at the dawn of this new century. Apparently, the movie The U.S. vs. John Lennon covers all this stuff. So see it if you need more Lennon history.

You can see some earlier FBI files regarding Lennon here.

Lots of good music for your aural cravings today:

- Learn about New Music! Brooklyn Vegan has posted his fave 40 of 2006, with links to the CD sales sites. And SPIN Mag has its own 40 top of the pops for 2006 posted online as well. Dig in. Buy new music for your nieces and nephews.

- Rbally has blessed us with another vintage (ie 1981) REM show from Tyrone's in Athens, GA. I've already got this show (along with several other early REM boots), and they're just a blast to listen to - take you back to innocent pre-Internet college days.

- Wolfgang's Vault, an online site of vintage 1960s-1970s 'rare audio and video music performances collected over 30 years by Bill Graham, a famous concert promoter who died in 1991',
gets sued by old dinosaurs.

- Get Your Christmas Music on! Lots of good stations for particular holiday melodies resides over at Pandora Stations. via Whitney at Pop Candy..