This one is about fakes - fake rock bands, fake cartoon people, fake concern - in honor of this spring’s best fake scandal. Despite the fact that the times abound with real issues to draw the ire and outrage of the American people, the nation chose to express its collective shock and dismay over the sight of a 15-year-old girl’s naked back. Never mind that teenage girls routinely show more than that dressed to go to the mall, or that the other photo, the one of Miley Cyrus draped across her father’s lap, is infinitely creepier. At least it took our minds off the war and that pesky recession…

Sympathy for the Devil (Or an Incredible Simulation!): I once saw an ad on the back page of this rag for an upcoming show featuring a band that billed itself as “Colorado’s #1 Widespread Panic Tribute Band!” This particular bit of hype caught my eye and continues to haunt me to this day, because it’s a very odd thing for a band to call itself. It implies that A) there are apparently enough Widespread Panic tribute bands in Colorado for there to be a clearly superior one, and B) there are enough Widespread Panic tribute bands nationwide to make a state-by-state distinction. This, in turn, leads to two inevitable questions: just how many Widespread Panic tribute bands are there in the world, and why?

Rock journalist Steven Kurutz examines the tribute band phenomenon close-up in his book Like a Rolling Stone: The Strange Life of a Tribute Band (Broadway Books, 2008). Kurutz spent a couple of years following a pair of Rolling Stones tribute bands, the East Coast’s Sticky Fingers and Canada’s The Blushing Brides, on their travels, from playing half-empty dives and wedding receptions to the occasional glory gig in Las Vegas or Amsterdam. Kurutz recalls the growth of the cottage industry in fake rock from its origins in Broadway’s Beatlemania (“not the Beatles but an incredible simulation!”) to its current state as a vast subculture, a network of barely ground-level bands and players who, week after week, leave their mundane day jobs to crisscross the country in cramped vans in order to pretend to be rock stars.

Along the way, Kurutz poses the burning question that has to be asked: why, if one is skillful and practiced enough to play like Jimmy Page or Jerry Garcia or Keith Richards, would one not direct that talent and drive toward original music which could result in real rock stardom? The answers are telling. As anyone in a band, particularly in this town, can attest, playing original music may be good for the soul, but it’s hard on the spirit (and the wallet). The guys in tribute bands have the opportunity to play the music they love for more people than just the bartender, and if that means aspiring, as the Keith for Sticky Fingers does, to be “the Keithiest Keith around,” so be it.

Kurutz’s book is alternately affectionate and sad as he documents the highs and lows of the would-be rock-star life, including the online sabotage wars between Sticky Fingers and its West Coast archnemesis of the same name, the monumental ego of a Mick Jagger who believes he’s now better than the real thing and the bizarre remora-like experience of a band following the actual Rolling Stones’ tour schedule for an endless series of warm-up shows in sports bars around the country. (At one point, Sticky Fingers plays a gig a hundred yards from the stadium where the Stones are going on, and watches its audience trickle out, primed for the real thing.) For an unflinching look at lives spent forever on the fringe or as a cautionary tale to everyone out there polishing up Eddie Van Halen hammer-ons, Like a Rolling Stone is a fascinating read.

Mmmm… Sociology…: In one episode of “The Simpsons,” an establishing shot of the Springfield Public Library reveals a desperate sign reading, “We have books about TV.” If not for the potential for cosmological implosion, many of those books would be about “The Simpsons,” which, after almost two decades on the air, is such a cultural phenomenon that it now informs our sociological experience as much as the other way around. The funny little badly drawn cartoon show has, in many ways, become a barometer of our collective lives, and cultural observers and academics have built a cottage industry from analyzing the show’s impact and deeper meanings.

The latest entry to plumb the rich history of “The Simpsons” is Tim Delaney’s Simpsonology: There’s a Little Bit of Springfield in All of Us (Prometheus Books, 2008). Delaney, a sociology professor at SUNY Oswego, is a self-described “Simpsons” fanatic and draws widely and meticulously from the first 400 (!) episodes of the show to illustrate concepts in sociology, a sort of guide for the uninitiated using the microcosm of Matt Groening’s universe to show how we study and understand the collective behavior of human beings. Using exhaustive examples and snatches of dialogue from the show, Delaney demonstrates how the Simpsons and their neighbors relate to each other in the home, the school, the workplace and the larger communities of religion, sports, politics, friendship and romance.

At first glance, the book reads rather simply, and one wonders if Delaney is only in it to wax excitedly about what a fan he is, but as the book delves more deeply into larger sociological spheres, the reader will find himself or herself internalizing the concepts without realizing it, like reading a textbook in cartoon camouflage. Delaney's mission to achieve crystal clarity often comes across as overly simplistic or condescending - in a book written for “Simpsons” fans, one needn’t explain the jokes - but neither is it dry or laced with academese like other treatments of the subject have been. Chris Turner’s Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation (Perseus Books, 2005) and Mark I. Pinsky’s The Gospel According to The Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World’s Most Animated Family (Westminster John Knox Press, 2001) are better, but Delaney’s Simpsonology is a fine volume for anyone intent on an in-depth study of America’s favorite freakish yellow nuclear family.

Apparently Not Fundamental Enough: The annual White House budget proposal may be a snooze but, like any document, is as important for what it leaves out as for what it leaves in. Of interest to me in President Bush’s 2009 budget - which may well have been passed into law by the time you’re reading this - is the elimination of funding for the Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) program, which promotes literacy by distributing free books to disadvantaged families. Anyone of my age can remember the endless commercials for RIF during our cartoon time, encouraging us to read and our parents to donate books. The continued health of this program would, one would think, go a long way toward that whole “no child left behind” business the President seems to want, but as usual, just when you think Bush could not possibly suck any more, he goes and finds new and innovative ways to suck. For more information about RIF, visit www.rif.org.

John G. Nettles