August 30, 2007

Bake a cake made of crazy and decorate it with scarecrows and gnomes and bicycles: It’s time for a Syd Barrett celebration. On September 4th, EMI Records will honor the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd by releasing special edition two- and three-CD sets of their debut album, The Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

Now, as part of our recurring Everybody Wins When I Plug Something And In Return We’re Offered Free Shit To Give Away Contests, we’re happy to offer up a free copy of the two-CD special edition to the lucky commenter that best answers this simple query: Piper, The Wall, Dark Side, Animals, or one of the other classic albums — which is the best Pink Floyd album from top to bottom? Explain your answer in 10 words or less (bonus points for Barrettesque insanity).

• Streaming Video: Arnold Layne
• Streaming Audio: Bike
• Pre-order Info: The two-CD set and the three-CD set

Read on after the jump for the full details of the special edition releases…

As we mentioned last week in Vol. I, soundchecks are a touring band’s chance to work out new material, get comfortable with a stage and, sometimes, let loose with each other (non-sexually). This week’s B List concludes a two-part series in which we’re featuring the best soundcheck videos out there on The YouTube. Some are hilarious, some rock, and others are simply…bizarre.

So make sure to read on after the jump for 10 awesome soundcheck videos, including Genesis, Skynyrd, Floyd, The Misfits, Zappa and many more…

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

Licorice Pizza has posted some of Eddie Vedder’s demos from 1988, a few years before he joined Pearl Jam. The blogger unearthed a bit of information about the four tracks,