Steaming Malmsteen

Pity poor Yngwie Malmsteen. The once-svelte-now-stout hair-farming metal-guitar god, who still thinks it's 1987 someplace (check out that photo!), worked himself up into a snit last week during a flight to Tokyo. According to a report on the music site blabbermouth.net, the scraggly Swede was mouthing off against gays when a female passenger decided to offer her rebuttal by pouring a glass of water on his head. (With Yngwie's locks, perhaps she thought she was moisturizing a fern.) This naturally pissed off the hefty hessian, prompting Yngwie to blab a stream of barely decipherable invective, including at least one death threat. Even funnier is that someone in Yngwie's entourage—yes, faded rockists apparently still have entourages—had a tape recorder running during the whole thing, and a two-minute MP3 segment has been making its way around the Internet. Check it out at www.blabbermouth.net/yngwie_tokyo_flight.mp3, and be sure to keep an ear out as Yngwie mutters what's quickly becoming THE hot catch phrase of the moment: "You've unleashed the fucking fury!" Or would that be, "Yooulushafookinfurry?" You decide!

BIKERIDE BREAKTHROUGH
For more than five years, we here in the Weekly music pages have been living off the stale oxygen of dank, dark rock clubs and have forced ourselves to listen to incalculable numbers of bad local bands who've sent in their demo music in the hopes of getting reviewed. Occasionally, though, there are the bands who make slogging through this Valley of the Shadow of Deaf worthwhile. When we find these bands, we write nice things about them. When we really, really like these bands, we tend to write about them a lot. Take Long Beach's fabulous Bikeride, f'rinstance. We've run one live review, at least one album review, and two longish features. Naturally, we want as many people to know about Bikeride as humanly possible. Now the Los Angeles Times knows about Bikeride too—and, judging by their recent review of the band's great new album Morning Macumba, they seem to think they've discovered the band all by themselves. "How such grand, embraceable vocal harmonies have flown so long under the radar is a bit of a mystery, but Morning Macumba is Bikeride's fourth album," scrawled reviewer Dean Kuipers. Jeepers, Kuipers!