Brian Alvey

Hy Zaret, who wrote the haunting lyrics for Unchained Melody died at age 99 this week. Unchained Melody was one of the most recorded songs of the last century. The version most of us knew was the Righteous Brothers one that had a resurgence in the movie Ghost.

According to stories I read about the song, he was asked to write it for the film Unchained and he did it without using the word unchained in the lyrics. My personal favorite version of the song is Willie Nelson’s.

Seven or eight years ago, Niki and I took my mom and her husband to see Righteous Brothers in Atlantic City a few years before Bobby Hatfield died. Mainly I did this because Unchained Melody was my mom’s favorite song. Afterwards I asked her how the show was. She loved it. I asked how she liked Unchained Melody. She loved it. I said, “That’s your favorite song, right?” She said, “No. I do love that song, but my favorite song is House of the Rising Sun.”

Argh.

So I kept an eye out for Eric Burden shows and ended up taking her to see him at B.B. King’s in New York City. We watched a great show that included House of the Rising Sun. I got to cross that one off of my list.

A few weeks ago I took my dad to see Chicago at Jones Beach for Father’s Day. I knew they were one of his favorite bands when I was a kid and at least he didn’t tell me after the show that he’d rather have seen The Doors.

Last night Niki and I saw Rush at Jones Beach. We met up with Craig and his friends and family and we had a blast.

I’ve seen the Canadian trio at least twice in the past, with Tommy Shaw opening for them once and King’s X another time. Last night there was no opening act, only a short intermission. My expectations were low since I’ve seen them and had heard just about every Rush song I’d ever want to hear in concert already and maybe those low expectations helped them blow me away.

The highlight for me was the South Park video leading into Tom Sawyer. Cartman and his buddies are in a band called Lil Rush and they’re doing their own version of Tom Sawyer, including Cartman’s lyrics, “Modern day warrior, named Tom Sawyer, he floated down the river on a raft with a black guy.”

I’ve seen plenty of great drum solos, with Mick Fleetwood and Phil Collins being way up there, and I’ve seen Neil Peart’s solos before. I considered myself immune to drum solos, done with them for life, but Neil’s last night was off the charts.

“I am Geddy Lee and I will sing whatever lyrics I want!”

What a great rock show!

We were driving along in our car and Jack said, “I wish there was a jump button in our car for if someone was going to hit us.” So do I, little man!

One of Jack’s two betta fish is dying. He has swim bladder disease, basically a big air bubble in his body that keeps him floating at the top of the little tank no matter how hard he tries to swim down. I showed Jack that the fish is in pain and will be dying soon and he asked, “Can we fry him and eat him?” Nice. The last one “hitched a ride on the porcelain express” to quote Gil from Finding Nemo. I explained that he’s too small for us to eat, only another fish would eat a fish that small. When Niki got home, Jack told her, “Rocky is going to die. Can we feed him to a dolphin?” Hah. We were just doing that at SeaWorld last weekend.

My boys and I picked up some takeout last week and as we were leaving the restaurant two men who were outside said good night to us. Jack yelled back, “Smoking is not good!”

Jack loves inchworms. He found one right before we were going for a car ride and wanted to keep it inside the house. I told him that he cannot leave an inchworm inside the house to run around while we go to lunch. Jack said, “He will not run, Daddy. He can only inch.”

Niki got Jack an ant farm a few months ago. The ants come in a little tube, separate from the farm. You pour the ants into the top of the farm and remove the ones that died in transit with tweezers. I asked Jack to hand me the tweezers once and he said, “Those aren’t tweezers. Those are called Ant take outers.”

Update: I forgot another recent one. We were at Barnes & Noble and I pointed to a baseball book and asked who was on the cover. He correctly answered “Derek Jeter.” I was thrilled and asked if he was sounding out the name on the cover or if he just recognized the face. Jack said that he didn’t really know who it was, he just thinks every baseball player is Derek Jeter. Then he pointed to a Babe Ruth book and said, “I think that man is Derek Jeter, too” and smiled at me. He cracks me up.

I guess I didn’t quit AOL in time to be eligible to enter this mind-blowing Autoblog contest — and I even knew the contest was coming.

To coincide with their redesign, Autoblog is giving away an all-new 2007 Dodge Nitro.

It’s good news, bad news for me. The good news is that one of our blogs is giving away a car and the new site is rocking with those four category tabs at the top, the Breaking News and Featured Stories boxes and a new comments system, but the bad news is that the old Autoblog site was one of the ones that I had designed and now it’s gone.

I am happy that the new logo uses the same speedometer theme. Matt did some fantastic design work on this one and Autoblog’s John Neff put like 5 years and 50,000 miles into making this sweepstakes happen.

Congratulations!

It’s not because they got rid of my old Autoblog logo and it’s not an April Fool’s joke involving Twitter this time.

About a year ago an old friend of mine asked me if I wanted to be involved in a comic book publishing company with him. We discussed it off and on and I was hooked. After all I had wanted to be a comic book artist since high school. Where did I go wrong?

We incorporated last summer and had plans to launch a site last fall. Mostly because my day job at AOL running Weblogs and Blogsmith takes up every online minute I have, that launch was delayed until February and even then we launched with just a news site and not the whole sprawling comic site I had envisioned.

Having a site described as the “Huffington Post of comics” is flattering, but it’s not what I want to build.

So I’ve been planning for a while to leave AOL and I’m way past my own personal limit of “Shoot me if I’m still working there in March.”

Next Friday will be my last day. If you have any favors you’ve been waiting to ask me for, let me know soon. After June 1 I will not be able to stuff the free car contest ballot boxes for you or get you those high-traffic links from Engadget, TMZ and Cinematical.

I’m leaving my companies in the capable hands of Brad Hill and Gavin Hall and they’re working for the two best people I’ve worked with recently at AOL, Marty Moe and Ted Cahall. The only drawback to me leaving AOL is I won’t get to work more with Ted or have a front-row seat as he tries to revamp AOL’s entire technology foundation, but I’ll do that vicariously through Gavin.

Actually, there is another huge drawback: I’ve built two amazing teams for Blogsmith and Netscape and I’m leaving them all behind at AOL. I always imagined I’d be working with these guys for years and years on many new projects and now I have to see if I can continue my winning streak and put together a third bunch of geniuses for the publishing platform at ComicMix.

At least I’m smart enough to not try and build it all by myself.

Like I said, I’m glad the new Autoblog logo is a new take on my old one and not something radical. I am considering snagging the old “tire tracks” background I drew in Illustrator and slapping it on my own blog. We’ll see.

My old logo:

Matt’s Dennis’ new one:

UPDATE: Matt did all of the site’s design work, but the logo came from a reader contest. I vaguely remember that. It was a long time ago.

I read a story about Bono and The Edge writing the music for a Spider-Man musical about a month ago and I have had trouble getting it out of my mind.

When I saw Spider-Man 3 I thought to myself, “Wow, I hope Spidey has better luck on Broadway than Mary Jane had.”

Just like with Cork’d, I am pretty sure that they should at least hire me as an advisor for this project. My big contribution to the show will be an insistence that all of the songs are taken directly from ones that U2 has already recorded. Why write something new that might not be a hit with audiences when people already know and love your old stuff?

Remember, you heard these here first:

Act One

• Stuck in a Web You Can’t Get Out Of
• Mysterio’s Ways
• Sandman Bloody Sandman
• The Unforgettable Vulture
• With or Without Electro
• In Goblin’s Country
• Who’s Gonna Catch Your Gwen Stacy
• How to Dismantle a Pumpkin Bomb
• Octopus Baby
• Under a Blood Red Scorpion

Act Two

• Beautiful May
• Two Goblins Beat as One
• When Lizard Comes to Town (with B.B. Kingpin)
• Kraven of Harlem
• Jameson’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car Photos
• Where the Streets Have Silvermane
• Rhino and Hum
• Sandman Bloody Sandman (Reprise)
• Brock (In the Name of Venom)

Mr. Bono? Mr. Edge? Call me!

Last night, Gwen Stefani kicked off the summer concert series at the Nikon Theater at Jones Beach. I half expected someone in the tour’s marketing team to place little stickers over those signs changing it to the “Akon Theater at Jones Beach” for the night since he was one of her opening acts, but that didn’t happen.

She began with The Sweet Escape and Akon came out and sang his essential “woo hoo, yee hoo” lines. Then she spent about 90 minutes doing song after song from her two solo albums and talking about her baby Kingston who turns one this Friday.

I liked the show. I liked everything she did. It was probably similar to going to a Madonna concert. I’m just a little disappointed that it wasn’t the “Gwen Stefani Greatest Hits” show with eight or ten No Doubt songs and Moby’s South Side thrown in.

If she came out and did three No Doubt songs in her encore I would have been thrilled. Spiderwebs, Just a Girl, Hey Baby, Don’t Speak, New, Ex-Girlfriend, It’s My Life, Hella Good, Underneath It All, Excuse Me Mr. — anything.

She did repeatedly thank the crowd for indulging her dance album phase and told us that the next album she was doing would be with No Doubt — which was answered with insane cheering. To be fair, many solo artists don’t play their band’s material. Phil Collins figured that if you wanted to hear Genesis songs you’d go to a Genesis show.

Oh well. It was still a ton of fun to see the wardrobe changes and watch all of the solo Gwen songs, but now I’ll know to not miss the next No Doubt tour.

Some of my favorite Dans — one I worked with and one I haven’t yet — made a clever little social wine site called Cork’d about a year ago. Just a few days ago they sold it to a new company run by Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV.

When they launched I had a ton of great ideas for Cork’d, but I waited so long that I guess I’ll have to get in touch with Gary to share my killer ideas.

The ones I can recall most clearly were that Cork’d should create a sister site called Hungov’r for user submitted videos and hire Sammy Sosa as a celebrity spokesperson.

If drinking wine didn’t give me instant headaches, I could have been a huge asset to that team.

I’ve been a big fan of Squeeze for a long time, seeing many of their line ups over the years and turning my sister on to them as well as individual members like Glenn Tilbrook, Chris Difford, Paul Carrack and Jools Holland.

This year after an eight year break they’re doing a short reunion tour. Their reunion isn’t getting the press that The Police are getting, but I’m psyched about seeing Squeeze again even if I don’t get to sing with them this time.

Will they even recognize me with hair?