Todd Owyoung

Gregg Gillis in 2011, pre-apartment party, perhaps?

​Update, 3/22 Our mystery Girl Talk party host is Chiara Andriole, whose story you can find in the comments. Pin-Up Bowl, evidently, is where you can find Nirvana fan mash-up kings.

Original post follows.

Last year's deluge* of coverage upon the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind included just about every perspective on the punk-breaking landmark. Spin asked musicians to explain what the album meant to them, and Girl Talk's Gregg Gillis included an anecdote about St. Louis:

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​There are hundreds of hilarious Craigslist ads posted every day, but we're partial to the Missed Connections- the section where the besotted post regrets over incomplete love connections.

This week we bring you a music-related missed connection. We're not quite sure what this post means as a whole, but the individual elements are interesting: vomit, babes, cookies and the Cramps.

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Some of the blog entries written about Whitney Houston's death last week were a legitimate outpouring of grief, and some of what I felt when I heard the news was a real sadness, a real desire to express what the passing of a musician I hadn't thought about in a few years meant to me, but this blog entry--and a thousand others--is mostly just a response to bad incentives.

At their most benign, these incentives lead to blogs ostensibly about gardening or sports cars trying desperately to write Tim Tebow's name into the front of a headline, where Google News will read it. At its most cynical, it leads to a wall of identical, slapdash posts with Whitney Houston Death in the headline--like this one--because that's what tested well and because five small posts are infinitely better for pageviews than one long one.

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Walter Iooss Jr. / Sports Illustrated

Kate Upton's stimulus package.

​There is a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Music Festival, sponsored by Lexus, where blog-approved bands like White Denim and the Black Lips will play at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. Wait, what?

The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Beauties & Beats Music Fest (didn't spend much time on that name, did they?) will be held today and tomorrow at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. The ten bands scheduled to perform are Delta Spirit, Elan Atias & White Elephant, J. Roddy Walston & the Business, Little Hurricane, Maluca, Nick Waterhouse, Vonnegutt, Selebrities, White Denim and the Black Lips as headliner. This coincides with a series of videos on the SI Swimsuit web site soundtracked by the same bands (plus a few more). How a sports magazine came to host a music festival via its annual bikini diversion says a lot about new media strategy and how its marketing departments have become unlikely (and essential) patrons of up-and-coming musicians.

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Just when you thought it was safe to listen to Rick Astley in a non-ironic way, the British singer comes rolling back with a downloadable song in Rock Band 3.

​Any DJ, cover band or organ grinder can attest to how touchy people can get when a requested song isn't played. The blowback can be even more harsh when the musical entity in question is Harmonix, the creator of the Rock Band video game franchise.

Even though music gaming experienced some discernible low points in recent months, Harmonix has continued to pump out new downloadable content every week since 2007.

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Gareb Shamus -- the founder of Wizard Entertainment -- may be down. But St. Louis' Chris Ward is trying to prop him back up.

​Gareb Shamus was a colossus among men, founding Wizard Entertainment and turning it into the go-to source for news and views on collectables. For years he was on top of his fantastical world, running a company that produced widely-read publications such as Wizard Magazine and Toyfare Magazine.

Yet like most high-flying pseudo-celebrities, Shamus eventually came back to Earth. Both of the aforementioned magazines stopped publishing in 2011. He eventually resigned as president and CEO late last year. And those that knew Shamus haven't exactly been complementary about his leadership style.

But just in time for Valentine's Day, Shamus has an unlikely ally. Chris Ward -- a former Wizard staffer who moved to St. Louis to work as marketing manager of 88.1 KDHX -- created a benefit album aimed at getting Shamus back in the saddle of power. WIZtory Vol. 1: Rock to Reinstate Gareb Shamus As the One True CEO of Wizard Entertainment -- which is available today -- features mind-bendingly awesome tunes such as "The Ballad of Gareb Shamus," "Top of Your Game (1991 Edition) and "Where Have All the Garebs Gone?"

RFT Music managed to catch up with Ward via e-mail to discuss this ambitious project, which may one day be on par with Live Aid or Hands Across America. Or at least equivilent with the time a bunch of Simpsons characters recorded "We're Sending Our Love Down the Well."

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The Beach Boys. Not pictured: Adam Levine.

​Beach Boys fans are resilient, and they'll get over it. I want to begin there, because it's important to remember that the news that recently broke about the Beach Boys' reunion performance at the Grammys is no more than the fifth most embarrassing thing Beach Boys fans have had to deal with in the band's impossibly convoluted history. A long-awaited reunion combining Brian Wilson's stationary post-breakdown stage-manner and gruff voice with Maroon 5's auto-tuned Jaggergänger Adam Levine?

Sure, whatever! It's not a collaboration with Jeff Foxworthy! We'll always have Pet Sounds, and we'll always trust in Brian Wilson's fragile genius, and that's good--because If you put together the five worst indignities suffered by any of the sixties rock-and-roll patriarchs--the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, et cetera--it would probably be entirely unchanged from the list I'm about to present. Okay, maybe Spies Like Us.

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Home at last.

​As first reported by LA Weekly, the youthful new-west hip-hop collective known as Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (AKA Odd Future or OFWGKTA for short, and OFWGKTADGAFLLBBLSBFBN for long) is finally seeing the triumphant return of (arguably) its most talented member. Earl Sweatshirt -- real name Thebe Kgositsile, now nearly eighteen -- became the talk of the entire Internet when he released a controversial video for his self-titled single in July of 2010 -- one which depicts a then fifteen-year-old Earl and the rest of Odd Future mixing drugs and malt liquor in a blender and passing it around before leaving the house to skate.

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Patriots Lineman Dan Connolly will not be escorting Madonna during the Halftime show. He is from St. Louis, however.

​The Rams may not be taking the field on Sunday at Super Bowl XLVI, but someone from St. Louis will be: Nick Smarrelli, chief operating officer at St. Louis IT firm GadellNet Consulting Services. He'll be helping to escort Madonna on the field for her halftime show, as reported yesterday in an article in the St. Louis Business Journal.

With exactly one minute of Facebook stalking we learned a bunch about Smarrelli. He was married a few years ago, he does a bunch of traveling (Tibet, Australia, Jamaica, Lake Tahoe) and he has cute dog named Cooper. He seems swell and he has a very nice smile. We're glad we have a man on the inside and we want all of the juicy details when he comes home. (Was Madonna a bitch? Yes? In the good way or in the bad way? And seriously, how was her face without HD-ready makeup?)

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​Sure, Facebook filed its S-1 with the SEC yesterday, presaging one of the most talked-about IPOs in tech history -- and for college students, FarmVille users, amateur stalkers, and anybody who likes to talk to people they know, Facebook's performance on the open market will offer an interesting perspective on the monetary value of their social bonds. But what about people who were in high school in 2004 and then left the Internet forever, and glitter-art designers and bar bands?

For those groups -- our core demographic -- RFT Music has obtained a copy of MySpace's announcement of its stock market intentions, which has been lost in the furor over Facebook.

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