Dr. Neeko is back for Round II — before we begin, let’s point out that he loves his mother, his aunt, all his old lovers and Rue McClanahan…

When I was a kid, before I became a doctor of course, Halloween was all about the mad rush to stuff as much tooth-rotting, brain-zipping sugar as you could fit into an old pillowcase before the sun went down and you missed curfew. We usually made out pretty well. We knew which houses gave the full-sized candy bars, which houses turned off the porch light and pretended not to be home, and which houses you could get away with visiting multiple times.

Of course you got the occasional old lady who’d give out four pennies wrapped in Scotch Tape, or the big buzz-kill-do-gooder handing out pieces of fruit. Fruit? Handing out fruit on Halloween is like giving out cap-guns in a war zone. Handing out fruit on Halloween is like dispensing condoms at an Indigo Girls/Ani DiFranco double-bill. Handing out fruit on Halloween is like giving out handjobs at an orgy. But all in all, it was a good racket we had going back then…

Look, ma: These girls show up on Google Images under “Halloween sluts”

Then, sometime around college, Halloween took on a new meaning. It was still about candy, but a different kind of candy, an even sweeter candy, a candy for the eyes. In the same way that St. Patrick’s Day is a ‘free pass’ to start drinking at 9 am, Halloween is a ‘free pass’ for many women to dress slightly more revealing than a Mexican hooker in August. And I, for one, think that’s just great.

Now, you can’t appreciate this fine aspect of the holiday if you’re at the wrong location. Chances are, you’ll wait till the last minute to make plans, and you’ll end up sitting at home watching Heroes on the DVR, handing out your hard-earned candy to a bunch of ungrateful neighborhood brats. Not cool, man. So, in an effort to spare some of you hornball HT readers from that awful fate, I’ve decided to compile an in-depth review of the eye-candy potential for a handful of Halloween concerts around the country. Let me guide you in the right direction…let me help you realize the full potential this holiday has to offer. So read on for a full list of concerts and what you may expect in terms of post-show spank material…

I’m all for alleged OiNK founder Alan Ellis’ freedom from prosecution and cult hero status, but someone needs to help this dude out with his analogies.

Ellis told The Telegraph he shouldn’t be in trouble because his site doesn’t sell music to people, he just directs them to it. Here’s some specious reasoning:

As far as I am aware no-one in Britain has ever been taken to court for running a website like mine. My site is no different to something like Google. If Google directed someone to a site they can illegally download music they are doing the same as what I have been accused of. I am not making any Oink users break the law. People don’t pay to use the site.

Yeah, and the companies that sell assault weapons and chemical components to terrorists aren’t doing anything illegal either, because they’re not weapons until they’re used by the terrorists. I’m tired of tawdry excuses and incessant rationalization — if Ellis is gearing up for a court battle that will “set a huge precedent” and “change the Internet as we know it,” then he should know that proposed defense holds no water and it’ll be punched with more holes than the walls in GOB Bluth’s office, post-pool table. See, Alan, that analogy sucked, too.

We take some comedic pot-shots at moe. from time to time, mostly because they’re a band with a good sense of humor. If a group’s clever enough to re-create the fight scene from Raising Arizona on its tour blog at a time when rumors of “the band’s creative differences” ran rampant, surely they can take a little ribbing from a couple of jerks with a website.

But, shit, sometimes moe. just deserves what they get. And either the moe. organization conspired to pass along its best inside joke yet that sailed wildly over my head, or some pranksters hacked into the band’s listserv over the weekend. Otherwise, I’m not entirely sure what explains the following mass e-mail, a note about corporate partnerships with its fans that included this dubious last paragraph:

If you work for a company that would possibly like to talk about some marketing opportunities, whether it be sponsorship, partnering, or possibly having moe. write a song for an ad, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me. We owe everything to our fans and if we could team up with some, we think it would be a lot of fun and ultimately, beneficial for everyone.

Wait, is that for real? Are times that tough for the self-described indie-jam rockers that they’re praying Tampax will make Don’t Fuck With Flo their new jingle? Do you, moe. fan, have an in with T.G.I.Fridays, and if so, could you possibly get Happy Hour Hero into the weekend rotation? Was The Conch’s Blue Jeans Pizza the band’s effort to kill two jingle birds with one stone? This e-mail has left me with more questions than answers, and most of them surround moe.’s newfound evolution into Uncles Jesse and Joey in Full House. C’mon, you watched it too.

• Related video: Thirty-six minute Vegoose webcast of moe.
• Read on after the jump for the full letter from the band…

Radiohead in the wee small hours of last night/this morning digitally shipped off In Rainbows to nearly 756 million people. We don’t have the actual sales figures in front of us, but if we use the rubric that one blogger’s online fawning equals 100 non-bloggers’ purchasing, that’s our unofficial estimate. We received our copy this morning, but we’re waiting for that perfect moment to crack into this badboy. Our Glide Magazine cohort E-Dub posted this incredible review already. Well said.

So what say you, fans? All it’s cracked up to be? Terrible terribleness? Not downloading it on general principle? Hate British people? Let your voice be heard…

I don’t keep a personal MySpace page, my love of malleable 15-year-olds notwithstanding. So it came as quite a shock to me when we set up the Hidden Track profile just how often the dear friends in our extended network wanted to inform us about every last fucking detail of their lives and careers. I understand the purpose of this bulletin system, and I’m cool with it, shit, I’m cool. But we’re now bordering on the kind of rampant abuse that only Joe Jackson could endorse.

Oh really, Perry Farrell, you have a HUGE video and photo update…for the third time this week? Congrats, Mr. Franti, that video you so urgently requested I watch actually changed my life. That is great news, Robert Randolph, be proud your latest song gets 30 seconds of airtime in The Rock’s shitty new Disney schmaltz! Let me buy you all a pack of gum and I’ll show you how to chew it. That place marked “Bulletins” just stinks of musician farts.

We received three bulletins today from Apollo Sunshine, a band we genuinely adore. But good lord, gentlemen, do I really need three messages in a 16-hour stretch when one contains tourdates I already knew and the other two are about a show in BOSTON!!! TONIGHT!!! Fellas, I don’t live in Boston. But say hello to Fenway and tell ‘em the Yankees are coming. Actually, hold up, I’ll send you a bulletin with the exact wording of my message. And then I’ll send one about how many solid dumps my brother’s dog took today (the answer is zero — she hasn’t had solid stool since, like, the late ’70s).

I like the aforementioned Randolph, I do. But now I love him, and it’s a boner-inducing night knowing that he’s secured a brief spot in a crappy movie. Oxygen takes a backseat to this missive: “Check out Robert Randolph & the Family Band’s ‘Ain’t Nothing Wrong With That’ featured in Disney’s The Game Plan now in theatres.” So let’s watch greatness:

That was awesome. Call the Grammy peeps, call the Oscar peeps…shit, get me the Rick Rubin on the phone. It’s Gospel Rock, it’s The Rock, it’s perfect. Thanks for sharing, guys. Now I can die in peace.

Spielberg, Lucas, Harry Ford, everyone’s on this thing but Sir Connery. And, of course, the honor of revealing the closely held name of the fourth installment of the deservedly legendary Indiana Jones franchise went to Shia LaBeouf at Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards. Wait…shit? Can that be right?

As if it couldn’t get any more questionable than the conduit, the name drops and it’s rather unclear to us whether or not this is a documentary about the Sound Tribe Sector 9 lots. We’re not too fond of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and neither is the HT Braintrust known as Team HLA. A late afternoon virtual meeting produced a list of 20 better titles we’d like to see:

• Indiana Jones and the Treatment for Enlarged Prostate
• Indiana Jones and the Dankness of the Leathery Taint
• Indiana Jones: A Race Against Time to the Early Bird Special
• Indiana Jones and the Hey, Kids, Get Off My Lawn
• Indiana Jones and the Medicinal Search for a Raging Boner
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Prunes
• Indiana Jones and the Bingo Game of Regret
• Indiana Jones and the Walker of Triumph
• Indiana Jones and the Idol of the Weak Stream
• Indiana Jones and the Crystal Colostomy Bag
• Indiana Jones: Because I’m Wearing Them, and I Just Did
• Indiana Jones and the Coordinated Bus Trip to Branson
• Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Car Keys
• Indiana Jones and the Search for Depends Coupons in the Sunday Circular
• Indiana Jones and Quest to Pass the DMV Eye Test
• Indiana Jones and the Pursuit of a Bowel Movement
• Indiana Jones and the Legend of the Unending Turn Blinker
• Indiana Jones: Older, Fatter, Uncut
• Indiana Jones: Friday After Two Fridays From Now (w/ Ice Cube)
• To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Indiana Jones

We know you’d rather plunk down 10 bucks on one of those flicks…

Hey, so, if you were the early twentysomething guy in the Kid Ray suit behind me in the queue to board last night’s Bustle In Your Hedgerow cruise, the dude who uttered the title expression in response to “How you doin’?,” then I really hope at some point in the night someone wound up and kicked you in the junk. Very hard. Just because Camp Bisco “changed [your] whole perspective on shit,” it doesn’t entitle you to commit flagrant acts of douchebaggery. Stop it.

The intentionally oxymoronic Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a 20-page report on illegal file-swapping and peer-to-peer sharing, and the results are exactly as you’d expect. Four years after the RIAA filed its first lawsuits against often unsuspecting individuals, the EFF concludes that you really don’t make friends with salad: “Suing music fans is no answer to the P2P dilemma.”

So if filing 20,000 lawsuits against college kids, grandparents and other societal menaces with no sign of abatement is not the answer, then what is? The EFF advocates a “voluntary collective licensing regime” whereby users pay a monthly fee that allows them to legitimately download and keep any music in the collective.

That’s not a bad plan. Some lawsuits would still be necessary to prevent widespread illegality under the new system, but the targets will likely change. We’re not exactly sure how that would shut down illegal file-sharing once and for all, but it would at least provide a more reasonable outlet for legal downloading.

Here’s our modest proposal: Product Placement, Advertising and Licensing. All music, in all forms, from this point forward will be free or low-cost to the consumer, and the artist will be responsible for financing the albums and growing rich through advertising income, selling the songs to movies and telly, and touring the country. Sure we’ll have to put up with more songs about the Whopper, hip sneakers and cellular telephones, but hey, think how free of guilt you’ll be when Wilco’s new album, Crying With My Sears Craftsman Portable Power Tools, hits the iPod.

• EFF PDF: RIAA v. The People: Four Years Later
• Great Arts Technica blog post on the subject: EFF report slams RIAA lawsuit campaign, calls for flat-fee, unlimited P2P

Every once in a while we receive some hilarious e-mailed thoughts that don’t make it into the comments section. Today we’d like to feature one of these letters.

Occasional HT collaborator Chilly Jackwater responded to our Tuesday post on 50 Cent’s ongoing feud with Lil’ Wayne and how jambands should start gang wars to reinvigorate the scene. Chilly weighed in with his thoughts:

“The 50 Cents piece was straight gangster. Strong to quite strong stuff. The scene definitely needs to put itself back on the map, because the music sure as shit ain’t doing it. And no matter how many side projects the members of String Cheese form, the bottom line is (in my Rick Pitino voice): Jerry Garcia is not walking through that door. Trey Anastasio is not walking through that door. And if they do, they’re gonna be old and grey. And, I’d add, hooked on heroin. We need something big to happen. A MMF bukkake sex tape featuring someone from The Hills, DJ Logic and Keller Williams, perhaps.” That’s how it’s done.

Jerry Garcia, Rick Pitino, and bukkake…you all can learn something from this man.

…aka The Dumbest HT Post Ever, aka Don’t Hit Publish, Don’t Hit Publish

This may come as a shock to some of youse, but apparently many rappers don’t care for each other’s company. They tell me there’s some bad blood out there, and occasionally it gets spilled in the mean streets when shit needs to go down. We don’t tend to cover the rap world (that’s why we keep Passion of the Weiss on the RSS feed), but the latest salvo in the altogether-necessary battle between 50 Cent and Lil’ Wayne caught our attention.

The insanely talentless 25 Pence unleashed a fresh attack this past weekend against both his rival Lil’ Wayne and his supposed boss, Interscope President Jimmy Iovine, and we always like to take a second to bow down to rhetorical genius when we see it. Fitty first takes issue with Lil’ Wayne’s odd relationship with Cash Money Records founder Bryan “Baby” Williams, including this poetic stanza in his latest mixtape track:

“You make me wanna kiss you like Baby kiss Wayne. And make you call me daddy like Baby do Wayne. Damn that s**t sounds gay it’s insane. I guess that’s the price a lil’ bitch pay for fame.”

Hooo snap, yo! Wow, Lil’ Wayne must be crushed, his spirit broken by such lyrical brilliance (even though this pic of Lil’ Wayne and Baby Williams does leave itself open for public comment). The sheer intelligence oozing from this shot reminds me of the scene in Roxanne when Steve Martin’s character hurls 20 insults at himself with cheetah-like speed and rapist wit. Fitty must have a crew of ghost-writers working nonstop on this shit. And rhyming “insane” with “fame?” I just came.

Fitty also insults his non-boss, though I hesitate to reprint it here lest we all Hale Boppily kill ourselves for feeling far too mentally feeble. But the point here is this: Can’t we bring more of this showdown shit to the jamband community? Can’t the Untz Untz stare down the collective throat of the Straight Noodlers and threaten their well-being? Would it be too much to ask for Disco Biscuits’ bassist Marc Brownstein to bust a cap in Tea Leaf Green’s Trevor Garrod in Vegas?

The scene’s got a built-in divide right now, and with sluggish ticket sales and declining interest in the jam world, isn’t this exactly what we need to save it? It can’t be too much to ask for Lotus or FutureRock to write a song with the lyrics: “You make me wanna kiss you like Gregg kiss Haynes. And make you call me daddy like Trucks do Haynes. Damn that s**t sounds gay it’s insanes. You don’t dig the untz, you’s all sloppy cuntz.” C’mon, motherfuckers, make it happen. Gats out.