Eagles clipped

You'll have heard The Eagles' Life In The Fast Lane, of course. Did you manage to listen to it without fainting clean away?

After 40-odd years, Birmingham radio station Eagle 106.9 FM has started to remove an offensive bit from the song:

We’ve been up and down this highway/ haven’t seen a goddamn thing.

Eagle 106.9 program manager Mike Schoenherr, a.k.a. Hurricane Shane, replaced “god” with a snippet of lyric-less music from elsewhere in the song.

This is, in case you hadn't guessed, Birmingham in Alabama, not in the West Midlands.

It's unclear how many people objected to the "god" more than the "damn", if, indeed, anyone objected at all.

Eagles over Greenwich

We imagine if you like the Eagles the news they're playing the Millennium Dome would be a cause of great excitement. March 20, 22, 23, 26, since you ask. If they sell out - and, of course, they will, as touts will ensure there's not a ticket left in the box office, if not ensuring that there's not an empty seat in the venue - we expect they'll add... two more, maybe?

Tickets go on sale Friday morning; onto eBay around lunchtime.

Hell freezes over; Eagles and WalMart benefit

Another one of the thousands of tiny cuts for the majors' current business model: in order to avoid the embarrassment of a high-profile, best-selling album not qualifying for the charts, Billboard have made an eleventh hour rule-change to album eligibility.

So, the old rules about records having to be "generally available" to count have been dumped and the WalMart-only Long Road Out Of Eden takes the US number one spot.

Of course, it was ridiculous to pretend that a record on sale in one of the seventy-eight squibbilion WalMarts wasn't "generally available" in the first place; but if records sold in one supermarket only can count, then it's hard to see how any other retailer's exclusive deal can be frozen out of the chart. And, of course, if you've cut a deal to have a store as sole distributor, why not get them to release the thing as well?

If Billboard apply these rules fairly and equitably, for example, those stores who do their own celebrity Christmas albums should see those being reflected in the charts.

Billboard might think its changed the rules for The Eagles; it's also shifted them for the RIAA companies.

Madonna prepares the jump

If the excitement about Radiohead's album seemed excessive, wait until the final deal between Madonna and LiveNation gets signed - sometime quite soon, according to the New York Times.

Elsewhere, at the end of the month, The Eagles launch a new album, Long Road Out of Eden. The band are releasing it themselves, and pushing it exclusively through - mmm, classy - WalMart and Sams Club in the US.

Bookmarks: Some other things to read on the web

The top ten most ridiculous music couples, as chosen by Stylus magazine:

07. Goldie and Bjork (mid-90s)
Maybe the bomber was trying to tell her something. In ’95 it might’ve seemed like Goldie would go down in the history books as the man that brought jungle to the masses, and not the ‘90s punchline he is today, but while the internet froths over the release of Bjork’s Volta, you could probably count the people on one hand who can even name an album Goldie’s released this decade. Assuming he’s even released one, anyway.

Ryan Gilbey remembers his first gig:

While I would love to continue claiming that I lost my live-music cherry seeing Prince on his Lovesexy tour, that was in fact my third gig. My first - oh, the shame - was Erasure at the Hammersmith Odeon. In case you're wondering why I didn't simply promote my second gig - Sinead O'Connor at the Dominion - to first place, I think there's something a bit drab about saying that Sinead O'Connor, wonderful though she is, was the first person you saw play live. It's like saying that your first car was a Mini Metro.

The Eagles are the best band in the world, reckons New York magazine. It does show its working:

The fact that in 1978, they attempted to cash in on the disco craze by writing “The Disco Strangler,” a song about a murderer who loves the nightlife.

An interesting, though fundamentally flawed piece on Indymedia casts Paris Hilton as a victim of celebrity, without stopping to wonder if maybe she sought that status in the first place:

There are many unhealthy aspects to this whole business. In the first place, the Paris Hilton celebrity phenomenon was a product of the foul media-entertainment apparatus in the US and a generally diseased social climate. Under healthier circumstances, Hilton’s “bad girl” antics would have been of concern only to her family and close friends.

Eagles to soar again

From global warming to hell freezing over: Don Henley has let slip that there's going to be a new Eagles album is nearly ready.

It's not the first announcement of a new album - indeed, it's almost a year since Henley started to talk up the Long Road To Eden. This would be their first studio collection since 1979, when they decided they hated each other and Don Henley and Glen Frey decided knocking out lame solo efforts would be a less stessful way of raising the money to have the aluminium siding kept up to date on their respective houses.

The Long Road To Eden is meant to sound a little like the other Eagles albums, although obviously not as good.