Topspin™

[(almost) all the drums in Topspin’s Santa Monica office gathered up for a group photo]

Woah. Guess the cat’s out of the bag about Josh Freese’s upcoming album release. Not only has Josh made a great record, “Since 1972″, which he’ll be selling for $7, you can spend as much as $75,000 on items as varied as drum lessons (!), dinner at PF Chang’s, taking shrooms with Danny from Tool, and dinner at Disneyland.

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The Topspin platform is powerful, especially in the hands of someone as creative as Josh.

WE LOVE JOSH FREESE.

ian c rogers
Topspin

[potential packages below, subject to change]

Josh Freese – Since 1972

$7
* Digital download of Since 1972, including 3 videos

$15
* CD/DVD double-disc set
* Digital download

$50
* CD/DVD double-disc set
* T-shirt
* “Thank you” phone call from Josh for buying Since 1972. You can tell him what you like about the record that you purchased, or what you thought sucked. Ask whatever you want, like “Is Maynard really THAT weird?” or “Which one of Sting’s mansions has the comfiest beds?” or “Are Devo really suburban robots that monitor reality or just a bunch of dads from Ohio?” or “Why don’t the Vandals play more stuff off the first record?” It’s your 5 minutes to yack it up. Talk about whatever you want.

$250 (limited edition of 25)
* Signed CD/DVD and digital download
* T-shirt
* Signed drum head and drumsticks
* Go on a lunch date with Josh to PF Changs or The Cheesecake Factory (whatever you’re into)

$500 (limited edition of 15)
* Signed CD/DVD and digital download
* T-shirt
* Signed cymbal and sticks
* Meet Josh in Venice, Calif., and go floating together in a sensory-deprivation tank (to be filmed and posted on YouTube)
* Dinner at Sizzler (get your $8.99 steak and “all you can eat” shrimp on)

$1,000 (limited edition of 10)
* Signed CD/DVD and digital download
* T-shirt
* Signed cymbal, drum head and drumsticks
* Josh washes your car OR does your laundry … or you can wash his car
* Have dinner with Josh aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, Calif.
* Get drunk and cut each other’s hair in the parking lot of the Long Beach courthouse (filmed and posted on YouTube, of course)

$2,500 (limited edition of 5)
* Signed CD/DVD and digital download
* Get a private drum lesson with Josh, or for all you non-drummers, have him give you a back and foot massage (couples welcome)
* Pick any 1 member of the Vandals or Devo (subject to availability) to accompany you and Josh to either the Hollywood Wax Museum or the lunch buffet at the Spearmint Rhino
* Signed DW snare drum
* Take 3 items of your choice out of his closet (first come, first serve)
* Change diapers and make bottles with him for an afternoon (after hitting the strip club)

$5,000 (limited edition of 3)
* Signed CD/DVD and digital download
* T-shirt
* Josh writes a song about you and makes it available on iTunes
* Co-direct a video with him for the song about you and throw it up on the YouTubes
* Josh gives you and a friend a private tour of Disneyland
* Get drunk together. If you don’t drink, we can go to my dad’s place and hang out under the “Tuba tree”
* Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam will send you a letter telling you about his favorite song on Since 1972

$10,000 (limited edition of 1)
* Signed CD/DVD and digital download
* T-shirt
* Signed DW snare drum from A Perfect Circle’s 2003 tour
* Josh gives you a private drum lesson OR his and hers foot/back massage (couples welcome, discreet parking)
* Twiggy from Marilyn Manson’s band and Josh take you and a guest to Roscoe’s Chicken ‘n’ Waffles in Long Beach for dinner
* Josh takes you and a guest to Club 33 (the super-duper exclusive and private restaurant at Disneyland located above Pirates of the Caribbean) and then hit a couple rides afterward (preferably the Tiki Room, the Haunted Mansion and Tower of Terror)
* At the end of the day at Disneyland, drive away in Josh’s Volvo station wagon. It’s all yours … take it. Just drop him off on your way home, though, please.

$20,000 (limited edition of 1)
* Signed CD/DVD and digital download
* T-shirt
* A signed drum from the 2008 Nine Inch Nails tour
* Maynard James Keenan, Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo and Josh take you miniature golfing and then drop you off on the side of the freeway (all filmed and posted on YouTube)
* Josh gives you a tour of Long Beach. See his first apartment, the coffee shop on 2nd Street where his buddy paid Dave Grohl $40 to rip up tile just weeks before joining Nirvana. See the old Vandals rehearsal spot, the liquor store he got busted at using a Fake ID when he was 17 (it was Dave from the Vandals’ old ID). Go check out Snoop Dogg’s high school. For an extra 50 bucks see where Tom and Adrian from No Doubt live. For another $25 he’ll show ya where Eric from NOFX and Brooks from Bad Religion get their hair cut.
* Spend the night aboard the Queen Mary and take the “Ghosts and Legends” tour. (Separate rooms … no spooning.)
* Josh writes 2 songs about you and both are made available on iTunes and appear on his next record (you can sing back up on ‘em, clap, play the drums, triangle, whatever)
* Drum lesson OR foot and back massage (once again … couples welcome and discreet parking available)
* Pick any 3 items out of Josh’s closet

$75,000 (limited edition of 1)
* Signed CD/DVD and digital download
* T-shirt
* Go on tour with Josh for a few days
* Have Josh write, record and release a 5-song EP about you and your life story
* Take home any of his drum sets (only one, but you can choose which one)
* Take shrooms and cruise Hollywood in Danny from Tool’s Lamborghini OR play quarters and then hop on the Ouija board for a while
* Josh will join your band for a month … play shows, record, party with groupies, etc.
* If you don’t have a band he’ll be your personal assistant for a month (4-day work weeks, 10 am to 4 pm)
* Take a limo down to Tijuana and he’ll show you how it’s done (what that means exactly we can’t legally get into here)
* If you don’t live in Southern California (but are a U.S. resident) he’ll come to you and be your personal assistant/cabana boy for 2 weeks
* Take a flying trapeze lesson with Josh and Robin from NIN, go back to Robins place afterwards and his wife will make you raw lasagna

Spinnerette has officially released a special 7″ colour vinyl version of the Adam Freeland remix of Sex Bomb, available only on SpinneretteMusic.com. When you buy the 7″ you can immediately download MP3, FLAC, or Apple Lossless, and the individual stems in case you’d like to remix your own version of Sex Bomb, and a premium package that offers both the stems and vinyl at a discounted rate.

Also, to celebrate Valentines Day, Spinnerette is helping you send a Sex Bomb Lovegram to everyone you love. Click here to send a Sex Bomb to that special (or not-so-special) someone.

Happy Valentine’s Day,
ian c rogers
Topspin

I don’t think any album has actually changed the course of my life as much as Beastie Boys’ 1989 masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique. Therefore it’s with tremendous pleasure and pride I announce you can purchase a deluxe edition of this classic album –

Wait, before I go into that, let me share my Paul’s Boutique story. We’ve all got one and you can share yours in the “User Photos and Stories” section of PaulsBoutique.BeastieBoys.com, but if you’ll indulge me for a few lines I’ll share mine here.

1989, my best friend Ryan Timmons and I were headed to the Warren Dunes in Michigan from Goshen, Indiana, where we grew up. There was no record store in Goshen, so we convinced my sister to stop at Concord Mall so we could shop for music. I can remember distinctly Ryan looking at the rack of tapes and letting out an excited, “Hey! There’s a new Beastie Boys record!” And I remember just as clearly me looking at him like he just admitted to digging Vanilla Ice and saying, “So?” He bought Paul’s Boutique (on cassette) that day, I bought Honey Bubble by Tar Babies.

Now I don’t mean to dis, but you have to remember that Beastie Boys were these beer-swilling pop stars who had disappeared as far as I could tell. No one was looking for another Licensed To Ill in 1989. Or at least I wasn’t.

Lucky for me Ryan hated Paul’s Boutique. For whatever reason he gave the tape to me, and for whatever reason (curiosity? boredom? destiny?) I played it. But I didn’t just play it, I sat down on the floor of my bedroom with headphones on, opened up the lyric sheet, and dove in. It would be an exaggeration to say my life changed at that moment but it would be an understatement to say I simply liked it — I was mesmerized by Paul’s Boutique. I played it, literally, to death, I wore the tape out and had to buy the CD. It felt as if someone made an album out of my record collection (from Cash to Sly to Mountain to The Isley Brothers) and it was these punk rock hip hop skateboard kids from NYC who took drugs and seemed to love music just as much as I did. I identified with it even more than the punk rock records that seemed to be made by kids just like me. Not only was it cool and accessible, it was musical, complex, and unattainable at the same time.

It was also a relative failure. After selling six million-plus for Def Jam Beastie Boys had jumped to Capitol Records, spent a ton of money, and not managed to find one commercial hit. The record peaked out at a few hundred thousand records and the band never even toured. There was a bit of critical acclaim as the album was discovered randomly but Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique was located very near purgatory; the album had too much depth for your average Licensed to Ill fan and us music nerds who avoided pop music weren’t exactly looking to Beastie Boys for our latest fix. That was respect the band would earn over the next ten years, their cache was near-zero at the time, at least from my point of view as a kid in Indiana.

Just a year later, Zoe was born. I was a few weeks shy of eighteen, working two jobs and just started college full-time. I don’t remember much about that first year of Zoe’s life, but I remember distinctly pacing around the living room in our Section 8 apartment in the middle of the night, Paul’s Boutique playing, me singing along, trying to calm a colicky baby.

Thankfully for everyone, Beastie Boys were far from done. They continued to reinvent themselves, playing live instruments and making another classic in 1992, Check Your Head. My fan-dom continued and in 1993 I moved the discography I’d been maintaining on Usenet to this new thing called The World Wide Web. I kept the Beastie Boys Web site up religiously as a fan through the release of Ill Communication in 1994 when I put up video of Beastie Boys live on Letterman before it aired on the West Coast. After that, I got a call from Beastie Boys management, John Silva (actually Bethann Buddenbaum, who was tipped off to my site by the only guy in the building with a computer, Jason Fiber, who was working for Dave Allen at World Domination at the time). I figured they were calling to shut me down for copyright infringement but John, forward thinking even then, said, “Are you crazy?! I wanted to know if you’d do this for *all* our bands!” I started a little consulting business charging John and Old School Ron Stone $8.50/hour to build Web sites. Laughable today but living in family housing in Indiana in 1994 it was just fine.

I spent a little time on Lollapalooza in 1994 and made friends with Beastie Boys. Mike D had Grand Royal, Yauch had Milarepa, and this Internet thing just might be useful for those low-budget endeavors. I was, of course, excited to be able to help in any way. Late in the year they asked if I’d come on tour with them in the spring of 1995. I was in grad school studying computer science at the time but made a decision to be done with that about five minutes after their invitation. Tour I did, and then moved to LA where Beastie Boys were at first the only people I knew, really.

So as I was saying…

I don’t think any album has actually changed the course of my life as much as Beastie Boys’ 1989 masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique, and it’s with tremendous pleasure and pride I announce you can purchase a deluxe edition of this classic album, complete with DVD-style “director’s commentary”, limited edition eight foot long poster and t-shirt, lossless remastered audio in addition to the MP3s, and interactive album art, all via Topspin’s technology at BeastieBoys.com. Hopefully you’ll agree it’s the treatment the album deserves.

If you already know this album, I hope you’ll appreciate the excellent remastering and hearing the band recall those days. If you skipped over this one, well, I envy the experience of sitting with this album for the first time. Grab the below to throw the album on your blog or Web site and maybe even read the 33 1/3 book for some serious back-story. Sampling laws shut albums like this out of existence. Enjoy of of the crown jewels of the era.

The very fun Paul’s Boutique Web site was created by the fine folks at Prod4Ever. Thanks to Jon, Jon, Greg, Nick, and everyone else over there for getting it and making it happen. Thanks to Jen Hall at Silva Artist Management for being the glue that holds this project together. Thanks to Jesse Ervin and Cory Ondrejka at EMI for fighting the good fight from within. And thanks of course to Beastie Boys and John Silva for, well, for everything. Always a pleasure. Thanks for believing in me fifteen years ago and for believing in Topspin today.

ian c rogers
Topspin

ps – Beastie Boys were kind enough to speak to me from Oscilloscope Labs this morning via Skype. Results below: