1. Sammy Hagar's Death Wish (4/31/00) -- We were the first to break the news of Sammy Hagar's unfortunate death last April, in a story that claimed Sammy Hagar had been crushed to a pulp by a very large rock while quietly drinking tequilas next to his swimming pool. The story also reported that Hagar's dying wish to fans was to "burn all my records." We were also the last to break this news, as it turned out to be mostly false. The story should have read that Hagar was at a large rocking party where he was crushing his opponents in game after game of pool, and that Hagar's records are hot, hot, hot! DAA regrets the error, with a special apology to Eddie in Tampa, who followed through on burning his Hagar records, and who has been driving well over 55 to find us and enact his retribution. Please go easy on us, Eddie: a free Scorpion CD is in the mail until we can get Hagar's record label to send us his back catalog for free, though given our story such a request seems unlikely to be honored anytime soon. In the meantime, Mas Tequila!

2. Subliminal Message in Radiohead's Kid A (9/31/00) -- Always on the search for subliminal messages (particularly those that are intent on corrupting today's youth), we recently broke the news that if one played Radiohead's Kid A album backwards, the lyric "yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon" could be clearly heard. There were two problems with this discovery. First, no one on the DAA staff buys those big flat records anymore , most likely they wouldn't even know where to find them, and as of yet none of the staff members have figured out how to play a CD backwards. The story was further tarnished when it was noticed that one can hear the lyric "yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon" when playing the CD forwards at regular speed. Staff member Burt Glass then coined the phrase "In-Your-Face Subliminality" to describe Radiohead's use of subliminal messages in an obvious way, a phrase which has since become part of the lexicon in the southern half of North Dakota. Nevertheless, DAA regrets the error.

3. Britney Spears to Join Sonic Youth (6/31/00) -- We could hardly believe it ourselves when we first heard that teen idol Britney Spears was joining Sonic Youth, but then we heard that Kim Gordon had been quoted as saying that Britney would be their "fatter, happier" version of Karen Carpenter, and we confidently put this breaking news out there. As it turned out, the actual quote came from Gordon Sumner (better known as Sting), who made the "fatter, happier" comment about his butler while on vacation in Brittany. DAA regrets the error.

4. The Ever-Changing Airhead CD Review (4/00 - 9/00) -- Unable to make up his mind about the latest Airhead CD, staff member Tim Frommer continued to revise his review of the CD (quizzically titled This is Airhead's New CD - The Band Doesn't Like It But Hopes You Will Anyway), sending revised versions of his review to production every few days. It turns out that Frommer's changing opinions were due strictly to his unpredictable personal life, which influenced his feelings about the record and caused him to either praise it with unbridled enthusiasm or trash it mercilessly. DAA regrets the review's volatility, with a heartfelt apology to Mickey in Fresno, who continued to buy and sell back the Airhead CD based on Frommer's ever-changing moods. However, Airhead thanks you, Mickey, for the boost in sales, though news of an Airhead cult following in Fresno based on local record sales (as reported last month in DAA) now appears to have been somewhat misleading. DAA regrets, etc.

5. DAA Discovers the Lost Chord (2/30/00) -- We started off the year in high spirits, as it appeared that our dedicated staff had discovered the fabled lost chord, and we reported it in a special cover story entitled "G#aug5dim11-3/4x: the Lost Chord Found - Music Will Never Sound the Same!" Our enthusiasm caused the story to be rushed into cyberspace, but if we had waited we would have eventually noticed that 1) Rush had based the second half of their 1978 Hemispheres album on this very chord; 2) the chord sounded like hell; and 3) this supposedly lost chord was also the answer to problem number four on editor Rob Brookman's college calculus test from October of 1985. DAA regrets the error, though it notes that Rob got an A- on the test, which is a much better grade than Rob gave Hemispheres in our "Bands We Never Cared For" retrospective.

(Editor's Note: Due to the absence of a fact-checker, we were unable to determine until after these corrections were posted that all of these corrections were in fact incorrect. DAA regrets the errors. To the best of our knowledge, there is no band called Airhead. Also, I never took calculus.)

Artists l Essays l The List l Sites & Sounds

New Issue l Best Of l Fave Links l About Us