A Few More Things: Lil Wayne, Steely Dan & More

Andrew “Dru” Barnes, who performs with the alternative reggaeton band JOGYO, lost his left eye after being attacked the morning of July 11 while walking home from a friend’s house in Brooklyn.

“Two blocks from our house a deranged man with a hammer came from behind and attacked Dru. Dru yelled out, the man ran, and the ambulance and police appeared quickly and took him to Kings County Medical Center,” Barnes’ friend Gerrit Vooren explained in a Facebook page set up to give updates on the musician’s recovery. The attacker left the hammer behind.

Vooren notes that it’s a miracle Barnes is alive – “and even more so that there’s no brain damage at all.” The musician underwent surgery on his left eye and was discharged from the hospital July 16.    

In a video posted online by NBC 4 New York, Barnes said he doesn’t know what the motive was. Police have released a sketch of the possible suspect along with a surveillance video.  

Click here for the “Dru Barnes Healing Page” Facebook page and here to donate to help with his recovery and cost of living bills.

Everyone knows that you shouldn’t leave your dog in a car on a hot summer day because vehicles can quickly overheat. Well, apparently a 25-year-old Lil Wayne fan didn’t know that you shouldn’t leave your kids in the car while you’re enjoying yourself at a concert.

After attending the July 14 Lil Wayne show in West Palm Beach, Fla., at the Cruzan Amphitheatre, Brittany Nicole Harris was arrested and charged with two counts of child neglect. P

A venue employee found Harris’ children, ages 3 and 5, in the Cruzan Amphitheatre parking lot. After questioning the children, who had been seen near a Nissan for more than two hours, they told the employee their mother was attending the show. Authorities tracked down Harris after the show.

“She originally said her cousin brought the kids here, but then she confessed that she came here and left the kids to stay in the car so she could watch the concert,” the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputy wrote in the arrest report, according to the Palm Beach Post.

The newspaper reports that Harris spent the night, as well as the following day, at the Palm Beach County Jail. She was released at 3 a.m. July 16 under supervision and on $20,000 bond.

In a recent interview, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagan revealed that the group is considering playing Countdown to Ecstasy on its upcoming “Mood Swings 2013: 8 Miles To Pancake Day” tour. Fagan and Walter Becker are already committed to playing Aja, Royal Scam and Gaucho in full during a seven-night residency at New York City’s Beacon Theatre.

“Well, it’s probably better if it’s a surprise,” Fagan told Rolling Stone. “But we did notice that we’re doing all the songs from the Countdown to Ecstasy album. We’re thinking now that we know them, which was kind of an accident; we’ll just bring the whole album out during some of the shows. We’ll probably just wind up doing it randomly.”

When RS asked if the band would do Pretzel Logic too, Fagan said, “I think we have almost all those songs. Maybe we’ll have that one, too, if we add one or two more.”

RS also brought up Fagan’s new book, Eminent Hipsters, which is due out Oct. 22.

“You dismiss anyone born after 1960 as ‘TV babies’ since TV has rotted their brains, but the older ones you dismiss as petrified mummies on slabs,” RS wrote. “You even say you feel that you’re sometimes playing to nursing homes and you should be calling out the Bingo numbers instead of singing songs.”

Fagan said, “They’re good targets and good vessels for my rage.”

(Oh, and don’t worry – Fagan explains a lot of his new book “was done with a certain amount of humor. I was trying to get a laugh.”)

Click here to read the full interview with Rolling Stone, including Becker’s wacky answers.