Do you like Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson? Yeah, we do, too. Next week marks the release of the latest singles compilation from the Daptone Records, the label that started the neo-soul boom—and home to the house band used by Ronson and Winehouse. Daptone7 Inch Singles Collection, Vol. 2 includes tracks from the amazing Sharon Jones, the Dap-Kings, Lee Fields, and a host of other combos featuring blaring horns, pounding rhythms and fat basslines.

Best of all, you can get a free taster here.

It’s a track from the compilation called “Now That I'm Gone,” by Charles Bradley & The Bullets. This is sure to get heads nodding at your next barbeque.

No one – not even Duke basketball fans, of which I am one – thought they’d hear his name again. Yet there he is, suddenly more famous than he ever was for his on- or off-court misadventures: Reggie Love. No, not the sassy lawyer played by Susan Sarandon in The Client – this Reggie is Barack Obama’s “body man.” A body man is a candidate’s constant companion, shadow and minder. He’s Radar O’Reilly to Bam’s Sherman T. Potter. Johnny-on-the-spot with his jacket should it be chilly, a Tide pen should he be spilly or a pick should the presumptive Democratic nominee wish to drive the lane.

Just read the New York Times story, if you didn’t already: "On the Court and on the Trail, One Aide Looms Over Obama." 

Hillary has a body person as well: Huma Abedin, who is totally hot.  

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You may remember Barbara Leigh as the original Warren Comic Book character Vampirella or from one of her roles in movies like Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner or the Roger Corman cult classic The Student Nurses. The former actress/model also posed for two memorable Playboy celebrity pictorials: an Indian-themed shoot (she’s part Cherokee) in May 1973 and again in January 1977. At Playboy Studio West, where Leigh works as a production coordinator, she is family and the first woman most Playmate hopefuls encounter when they try out.

For more than two years, Leigh has been working on a labor of love: the audio book of her autobiography, The King, McQueen and the Love Machine. Said to be the first dramatized autobiography in audio-book history, Leigh’s memoir focuses on her early years in Hollywood when she juggled romances with three of the entertainment industry’s most powerful figures at the time: Elvis Presley (voiced by Paul Casey), Steve McQueen (voiced by Tim Thomerson) and then MGM president Jim Aubrey (voiced by David Hedison).

“It was Sex and the City in the ‘70s,” Leigh says. “Why shouldn’t I have all the fun of having more than one affair at a time? I definitely didn’t believe in a double standard, and I didn’t feel guilty about seeing whomever I wanted. They surely didn’t.” 

The King, McQueen and the Love Machine is not simply a personalized account of some torrid high-profile affairs. Instead, silky-voiced Leigh gives us the feeling of what it was like to be a poor Southern girl-cum-rising starlet trying to survive in the male-driven Hollywood of the ‘70s. Every one of the three-CD sets, which also features Elvis’s right-hand man Joe Esposito as himself, has a signed photo of Leigh inside. “The plain truth of the matter—it was fun,” says Leigh of her three loves. So is listening to her relive it for us. 

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan is publishing a book called What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception that tells the inside story of the Bush White House. Apparently it’s not a flattering picture, and the president’s stalwarts have rushed to criticize the book. But as you hear what they say, consider what they must really be thinking.

WHAT PRESS SECRETARY DANA PERINO SAID: "[The President] is puzzled, and he doesn't recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years."
WHAT SHE WAS THINKING: Of course, if the president wasn’t puzzled, how would we know he was awake?

SHE ALSO SAID: "[The president was] disappointed that if he had these concerns and these thoughts, he never came to him or anyone else on the staff."
AS SHE WAS THINKING: Consider, for example, the warm reception with which he greeted the dissenting opinions of Paul O’Neill, Christie Whitman and Colin Powell. 

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There have been a lot of films dealing with the political and military aspects of the war in Iraq, but a new documentary focuses on the civilians. Heavy Metal in Baghdad goes into the heart of Baghdad and into the lives of five young Iraqi musicians struggling to survive and create music. It’s a poignant and powerful political story that just happens to involve heavy metal.

The film has received a lot of positive attention, but it was an essay written about the movie by American guitarist Alex Skolnick of the heavy metal band Testament that seemed to capture the essence of the film with an acuity only another musician could offer. After the premiere on Friday, I spoke to Alex, and he was happy to contribute his essay to Playboy’s blog, which is excerpted here:   

HMIB puts a very human face on the misunderstood, overlooked population of Iraqi civilians, via this group of dedicated musicians. Right away I feel I know these guys. They're just like any other cool metal guys from other countries. They speak pretty good, if broken, English (much of it learned from metal lyrics), they use the 'f' word a lot and they wear black clad t-shirts with logo's of their favorite bands. These are guys with whom you can share a beer and listen to a Slayer CD, fist in the air. They have a great sense of humor (despite all they're going through) and love metal. They want the same things most of us want, to be able to pursue our dreams and have a good time doing it. But for them, like anyone else in Iraq, it's not so easy. 

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Documentary Day continues, as intern Seth Fiegerman considers At the Death House Door:

Carroll Pickett has spent the majority of his adult life as the chaplain of the Huntsville State Prison in Texas, the first prison in America to use lethal injections. Part of his job there is to minister to those on death row, a daunting task that requires him to accompany these men the whole day leading up to their executions. Pickett is the only person who listens to their final confessions or denials, the only one who helps them try to face up to their end. At the Death House Door, a smart new documentary from the Independent Film Channel, uses Pickett’s life story to explore the larger issue of the death penalty.

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Copy Editor Joseph Westerfield is a listener of a certain age—one who can still hear after years of rocking out. Here he appreciates some old wine in new bottles.

Covering a song can be risky business in the pop music world—especially when a singer-songwriter is involved. Come too close to the original and you risk being imitative like Leonard Nimoy singing “Proud Mary”; depart too much and you risk sounding like William Shatner singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” But sometimes unlikely musical pairings can yield sublime results.

On her new CD A Long and Winding Road, Maureen McGovern, who has been doing standards for years and is probably best remembered for “The Morning After” covers several brand-name singer-songwriters from the 1960s and 1970s, some of whom are unlikely choices and achieves some entertaining results.

While McGovern never actually sings duets with the singer-composers who make up the bulk of the offerings here, the combination of her voice and their music makes for some interesting alchemy. In fact throughout the CD her voice shows a nice range and richness. Without sounding imitative she can also evoke 1960s icons Judy Collins and Carole King.

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Our roving musicologist, blog contributor Ben Conniff went uptown for this report:

Ever wonder what James Brown’s music would have sounded like if he’d been raised Jewish? Neither have I. But the unlikely collaboration known as Abraham, Inc. asked just that, and earlier this month at the Apollo, they answered it. The band consists of David Krakauer, a highly acclaimed concert clarinetist who has toured as a soloist with the world’s best classical ensembles and crafted his own best-selling classical and klezmer recordings; Fred Wesley, a trombonist and funk pioneer known for his work with James Brown, Bootsy Collins and Parliament; and Socalled, a Canadian Jewish “beat architect,” rapper, singer, pianist, and accordionist, and probably more that I couldn’t keep track of. Since 2006, the three men have been on a mission to fuse their seemingly disparate influences—klezmer, funk, and hip hop—culminating in the blowout Apollo show.

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Crown Royal invited Assistant Editor Rocky Rakovic to experience auto racing with the Royal treatment. He was given a pit pass, a ride in the pace car and shadowed the race’s Grand Marshal. Oh yeah, Rocky had never watched a race, doesn’t much like cars and is content on taking the subway to work. This was his first entry. Here’s his second: 

-We drive past security guards to the back lot where the drivers’ RVs are parked. Because these guys are literally on the road all season their teams and families live out of motorhomes. But these trailers are amazing, nicer than my apartment and almost bigger.

-Someone in the party explains that there are two guys who drive the RV around the country, cook all the meals and do the beer and food shopping. Basically they are professional tailgaters.

-The Crown Royal RV has a stocked wet bar. I’m told to help myself and though it’s not yet 11 AM, as a serious journalist who wants to immerse himself in the culture of NASCAR, I figure when in Richmond…
 

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Dear Playboy Fans,

I’m sorry to report that we let you down last night in an 8-2 softball loss against the vaunted Bonghitters of High Times on the Great Lawn in Central Park. If you are unfamiliar with New York media softball, the Bonghitters are the Yankees, only they are allowed to grow facial hair.

This was no beer league game, and their performance enhancements (we could only guess) proved far superior to our Don Julio tequila margaritas and swigs of Bushmills. But in a game billed as “Stoners vs. Boners” we did excel in double entendres. “We played hard,” etc. 

 

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George A. Romero is still the Shakespeare of zombie movies. If you didn’t catch the fifth installment in his Dead series, Diary of the Dead, check out the just-released DVD under the Dimension Extreme label from Genius Products and the Weinstein Company.

The film follows a group of young Pittsburgh film students shooting their own low-budget horror movie when they encounter a real-life zombie plague and document the chaos and carnage as the undead attack the living. 

The film is presented in a first-person style and is shown through the footage of the characters’ camcorders, cell phones, security cameras and news footage.

Although the shaky-cam, first-person perspective is hardly a novel idea, it seems to energize Romero and bring him back to his indie roots. He’s one of those directors who seems to flourish with less money, as he did with the original Night of the Living Dead, the landmark 1968 horror film that has been beautifully restored for a new 40th Anniversary Edition out this week. It includes a feature-length documentary about the film’s lasting impact, as told by the cast and crew. After four decades and countless imitators and remakes, it remains the zombie film with the most bite.  

When it comes to music, Playboy.com’s Antonia Simigis prefers going to the source.

Many of you already know about New York's Vampire Weekend before: Four privileged young Ivy Leaguers whose catchy but contrived "Upper West Side Soweto" gimmick (setting Hamptons imagery to beats blatantly lifted from their original African sources, all while wearing pink Polo shirts with the collars flipped up) has made them one of the most loved -- and hated -- new indie rock groups this year.

It's a silly controversy over a flavor-of-the-month band, but there's been a nice upshot: A swell of interest in African music, particularly West African genres such as Afropop, Afrobeat, juju and highlife.

One of the best examples of this resurgence I've found is the new Nigeria Special series from British-based Soundway Records.   

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Playboy.com’s super-heroic Stacy Klein has been reading her comic books again...

Is Wonder Woman peeved because Playboy never asked her to pose? Or more likely, because Tiffany Fallon posed in a Wonder Woman-like costume on the cover of our February issue. Anyway, something has apparently pissed her off at us, at least judging by Darwyn Cooke's Justice League: The New Frontier Special comic book.

In DC Comics' recent one-off, Cooke mixes Silver Age superheroes with 1960s politics -- outlaw Batman secretly teams with government agent Superman, Robin and Kid Flash bag some Commies -- both somewhat noble pursuits. But who knew all the world was waiting for Wonder Woman to put the kibosh on the original Playboy Club in the name of feminism?

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Playboy videogames contributor Scott Jones has been living with Nintendo's latest darling, Wii Fit, for the past few days.

A "balance board" that comes with fitness training software, the device is aggressively unexciting and will almost certainly be a smash success. Today over on Crispy Gamer, on the occasion of Wii Fit's release he reveals the results of his fiendish and unnatural experiments; namely his attempts to use this modern marvel to whip a twelve-pack of beer into shape:

 I decide to start a new profile. Not for my girlfriend, or for my cats ...but for the recently purchased 12-pack of beer that I've just brought home from the market.

I label the profile "Twelver," then toss the beer on the Wii Fit balance board....

...Twelver takes a few tests, on which he does surprisingly well. His balance is infinitely superior to mine, but when it comes to shifting weight from side to side, Twelver fails miserably at these tasks. Finally, Twelver is told that he weighs 14.8 pounds. That his BMI is 25.76. That he is, like myself, obese. And that his Wii Fit age is -- ready for this? -- 32 years old.

 

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