Last night's show in Toronto got completely fucked up. The Silver Dollar holds 190 people but Craig Laskey the promoter let 350 people in there. That's cool if there's some sort of security or crowd control - we don't need people getting so wild they jump on stage and smash our gear - but that's exactly what happened. Right when we started playing someone pushed the monitors right on top of Stephen and on to his pedals - breaking them, people were throwing beer bottles at us, a someone jumped onstage and smashed my pedals, another guy took a full pitcher of beer and dumped it all over the rest of my pedals, and then threw it right at my Flying V, breaking the pickup and the input electronics. After three songs all our gear was smashed and unusable.



...I'm getting really sick of shit like this happening. We'll come back in Toronto soon and do a free show to make it up to the real fans in Toronto. And we'll steer away from greedy promoters who don't have any control of their shows and who don't care about doing right by the audience.

"Shit like this" does seem to happen to Reatard more often than, say, to Cat Power. You can see him kick a guy in the chest twice at the end of this clip.

I doubt violent YouTubes like this will keep jerks like this away from his shows, so he might want stick to clubs with taller stages.

Jay Reatard [blogspot.com]
Jay Reatard punching kid at the Silver Dollar [YouTube]
Jay Reatard - Kicks a dude in the face in Vegas! [YouTube]

Eleven female contestants — all about age 20 and competing for places in Girlicious, the Pussycat Dolls spinoff group the show will found — were to perform to an audience of tween girls, the age group that made Miley Cyrus so popular that she was an Oscar presenter this year.

"This is part of the key demographic you want buying your CDs," intoned Antin. "They're the ones that dictate the future of music."

And the music industry needs them, if only because the tweens are largely believed to still purchase CDs. If junior high kids weren't entirely responsible for what Nielsen SoundScan estimates as 2.8 million copies sold of "PCD," the debut album from the Pussycat Dolls that contained the (still) inescapable single "Don't Cha," Antin knows they accounted for a sizable percentage.

"If you go to a Pussycat Dolls concert, it's all these little girls, and they all have on their hoodies," Antin said recently in the family room of her modest one-story West Hollywood home. "When I first started the Pussycat Dolls, I never would have imagined that would become our target audience. But it makes so much sense. My idea, from the very beginning, was to have sort of live dolls, dancing and singing. That's what these girls relate to."

The thing that makes this "marketing women who are merely 'living dolls' and don't have much interesting to say or offer except the flaunting of their bodies, which are pretty obviously temporary attractions based on the way that the group is completely interchangeable with the possible, but not probable exception of Nicole Scherzinger" ethos even more depressing? Antin's brother Steve, who had the idea to transform the PCD burlesque show into the music/reality-TV juggernaut that it is now, was in The Goonies. Talk about your stark, depressing differences between the aimed-at-kids pop culture of then and now—just try and imagine La Scherzinger singing something like "The Goonies R Good Enough." The lack of superobvious lyrical references to her vagina would probably make her choke.

Pussycat Dolls run hurdles in high heels [LAT]
[Photo: AP]