Fun on The Jellyfish mailing list:
”We are in the process of digitizing all our CDs so that we can share ‘em all over the house via the wireless hub. I was reading in [the liner notes to] The Wallflowers’ “Bringing Down the Horse” that Jon Brion played on it, and I started thinking… what hasn’t that guy been on?! Well, since Kyle loooves the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon game (and he is sickeningly good at it) I thought… why not a 6 degrees of jon Brion game? i bet it can be done. He has worked with a fairly wide variety of musicians and with some really famous ones… on this record alone he is credited along side Sam Phillips, T-Bone Burnett, and Michael Penn. Not to mention the Roger Manning connection (he’s been on lots of stuff too) Spilt Milk is like the JFK of the Kevin Bacon game… “
The game hasn’t really kicked off on the list yet, but I can’t wait, so I’m issuing a challenge. If we get stuck, you’ll probably want these workarounds for the recently redesigned Allmusic. I worked out Jon Brion to Kevin Bacon, via movies (In two steps!):
- Jon Brion was in “Boogie Nights” with Burt Reynolds (Brion played ‘Awards Ceremony Band Member’)
- Burt Reynolds was in “Starting Over” with Kevin Bacon!
The challenge is to get from Kevin Bacon (Who records music with his brother as ‘The Bacon Brothers’) to Jon Brion, in six steps or less, using only albums they’ve worked on. It looks like the Bacon Brothers have had some high profile guest appearances (ie Jon Bon Jovi), so it should be doable. Incidentally, in piecing this entry together, I googled for six degrees of Kevin Bacon a bit. Given the state of geekery on the web, I’m AMAZED that no one has attempted to write some sort of Kevin Bacon Game php script using the imdb php class. So I guess that’s a bonus challenge. Write that.
UPDATE! I don’t know how I missed the Oracle of Bacon on first googling, but I did. So yes, someone has written such a script.