The Music Geek has emerged unscathed from a second season on Comedy Central's "Beat The Geeks." Did 14850 want to hear about matters Geekerific with our old pal (and Cornell alum) Andy Zax? You bet your Geek we did. So with Andy in what he calls "show limbo" - not knowing at press time if "Beat The Geeks" will be back for a third season - but with possibly maybe a college tour in the Geeks' futures, we thought it was time to talk about the show, talk about music, but mainly to torture the poor soul by trying to make him pick any band over any other band.

So once more delve into the fevered brain of Andy Zax, the Music Geek. In this all-new updated interview, you'll find out more than you ever wanted to know about many things: the worst movie title of all time, the worst band name if you're actually a good band, the best candidate for a James Bond anthem, and all kinds of other uesless trivia.

Zax: I can hear you, but there's a lot of static. It's like the Jesus and Mary Chain version of you.

14850: We have to know: what's the three most recent slabs of music to come your way, and should we care?

Zax: Well, caring is always optional. Let's do the classic "Look around on the debris of my desk and see what's here". On top of the stack is a CD by a band that I just saw on Saturday, a very ethereal goth-y band who were really fantastic, They're called Mors Syphilitica, which, from a marketing perspective, has to be one of the worst names ever for a good band. It's hard to remember and difficult to spell and I think it translates from Latin as "Syphilitic Death." I don't envy whoever's job it is to try and get that on the radio.

14850: We're trying to get Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever voted in as the worst movie title of the year.

Zax: Oh, it's the worst movie title of all time. I've been ranting about it to people for the last three or four weeks. It's awful. It's hideous. It comes out of your mouth wrong. It's just an ugly- sounding string of phonemes. You get no argument from me on that. Let's see, what else is sitting here on the desk? The new Suede album, "A New Morning"...the new Damon and Naomi record, "Song To The Siren". They're probably best known for having been in a wonderful band called Galaxie 500 about a dozen years ago. But they've made a string of increasingly lovely records since - records which I actually think are better than Galaxie 500's records. They're kind of dreamy-folky-psychy, with wonderful songwriting. This new thing is actually a live record featuring a great Japanese guitarist named Kurihara who went on tour with them; he's part of the band Ghost. In general, I don't like live records very much, but this one is a major exception to the rule. So there. That's three.

14850: Okay, we'll admit it: we were too self-conscious to ask you this the last time, but really, now: what's with the hair?

Zax: [Laughs] I don't know. It's a big blob of dead protein. It's all mine.

14850: We're not doubting that. A little birdie told us it was contractual.

Zax: Not precisely. But the executive producers would have heart failure if I were to cut it.

14850: Who are your hair influences?

Zax: [Laughs] None.

14850: What musical reference books should no true Music Geek be without?

Zax: You need the Joel Whitburn books, which compile all of the Billboard magazine chart data, and tons of other information as well. There's "Top Pop Singles- 1955-1999" and the other one is "Top Pop Albums 1955-2001". They are both enormous hardback books, they each cost about a hundred bucks, and they're obviously for professionals. But as information sources, they're completely indispensable - the ultimate barroom argument settlers. Apart from reference works like the Whitburn stuff, there's an equally important category of books about music, like the great Lester Bangs anthology "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung." An even better companion piece is collection by a guy named Richard Meltzer, who was one of Bangs' comtemporaries. It's called "A Whore Just Like The Rest: The Music Writings of Richard Meltzer". It's almost less about music than it is about picking through the brain of the greatest writer in North America that most people have never heard of.

14850: Meltzer wrote as himself, not to mention pseudonyms like Borneo Jimmy and (Not The) Audie Murphy Jr. in Creem magazine's early years. Jim DeRogatis' book on Lester Bangs pays homage to Meltzer, specifically that "Goddamn is he a good writer!"

Zax: Meltzer wasn't really a part of that Creem crowd so much, although he did write for them - he'd write for anyone that paid him in the '70's. But it wasn't until he moved from New York to L.A. and began writing out here that his art kicked up a notch. His stuff is hilarious, and an interesting example of a serious "rock n' roll" sensibility in writing, even though he's not always specifically writing about music. He could be writing about wrestling or golf or architecture or something like that, but the energy and the attitude is there. Even more so than with Bangs, I think. I mean, I love Bangs, but Meltzer is the better writer.

14850: I have Nick Tosches' new book. Can't wait to start reading it one of these days.

Zax: Tosches is great. Those guys were all friends back in the 70's -

14850: Drinking buddies.

Zax: - Yes, exactly, although Tosches has less in common stylistically with Bangs or Meltzer. He's more of a classical two-fisted Jimmy Breslin-type journalist, only more elegant.

14850: Dino, his Dean Martin biography, was amazing.

Zax: That's a great book. He's also got a really long, interesting piece about the history of Warner Bros. Records in the current Vanity Fair.

14850: Well, we could talk rock books all day, so let's ramble on. We know you have an MFA in Film, so give us your top five rock movies?

Zax: Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man, which I think is completely brilliant in the way it integrates songs as a commentary on action of the film. The music was written by Alan Price, who was the keyboardist for the Animals, and at various points the movie abruptly cuts away from the main storyline to sequences of the musicians in the the studio. Eventually Price and the band wind up merging into the narrative of the film. I actually really like Velvet Goldmine. I think Todd Haynes is an amazing filmmaker, and he kind of captured something about that period of time that really works. It's certainly as good a movie about glam rock as we're ever going to see. The Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury, I thought was exceptional. For punk rock history, it's right up there with Penelope Spheeris's first Decline Of Western Civilization movie. I must have seen D.A. Pennebaker's Bob Dylan documentary Don't Look Back a hundred times. It's endlessly watchable. The musical stuff is really secondary to all the scenes of Dylan befuddling journalists and making fun of Donovan and letting his manager loose on promoters who don't even know what hit them. But the greatest rock & roll film of all time is a 1969 movie called Hello Down There, in which Tony Randall takes his wife and a rock band called Harold & His Hangups--Harold is played by a 19-year-old Richard Dreyfuss-- to live in a futuristic house under the sea. It's got Roddy McDowall as a record executive named "Nate Ashbury" and Merv Griffin as Merv Griffin. It's also got a bunch of ridiculous bubblegum pop songs by Jeff Barry, who wrote "Sugar, Sugar" for the Archies. I've got the poster for it which has an amazing tagline: "A combo of scuba-dupes rock up a storm in a mad pad below the surf!" The whole thing is so brilliantly insane that I can't really do it justice by talking about it. Sometimes, I think it might be the best film ever made.

14850: Maybe "Hello Down There" is the reason Dreyfuss hates rock n' roll so much. On 'Inside The Actor's Studio' he said that a sound or noise he hates is the electric guitar.

Zax: I met Dreyfuss a couple years back. He has a sense of humor about the film, although he remains cranky about the fact that the producers didn't use his singing and chose to dub in someone else instead. We actually sang "Hey Little Goldfish" together; he remembered all the words, I was very impressed. A moment to treasure.

14850: We love Jonathan Demme's concert films Stop Making Sense and Storefront Hitchcock. Has anyone besides Demme made a watchable concert film?

Zax:Y'know, there are very few "pure" concert films � that is, films that are 100% the performers on stage making music. The problem is that a lot of the excitement that goes on at a great concert is kind of inherently unfilmable. The event loses something in the translation to film and so directors try to compensate by adding other stuff. Usually they try to jazz things up by cutting away to interviews or staged bits like those incredibly embarrassing fantasy sequences in The Song Remains The Same. Jonathan Demme's one of the few people who's somehow managed to get past that. He also made a great New Order video a while back that only serves to point out how boring most other music videos are.

Anyway, uh�The Last Waltz is okay, I guess, but concert films mostly suck.

14850: But what about Hail Hail Rock N' Roll, the Chuck Berry film? What about Woodstock? Hail Hail never did anything for me, probably because it overlaps with a genre even less interesting than the concert film: overly respectful tributes to revered elder performers. Yawn.

Zax: Woodstock is an interesting film, but not because of the musical performances, which, Hendrix aside, mostly aren't very good. [Director] Michael Wadleigh was clearly � and correctly, I think � out to capture the thing as an event in social history rather than a rock concert; a good choice, all things considered. Woodstock's inverse is Gimme Shelter, which is a great film, but also not really about the music � although I'll take the Stones and the Airplane over most of the B-listers at Woodstock any day of the week.

14850: Speaking of the Stones: Is the new Keith Richards Rolling Stone cover in any way linked to the subconscious desire to buy your Thanksgiving turkey early?

Zax: Only if you're interested in making jerky.

14850: If you were the Queen of England (royalty, not Elton John) and you got to rescind Mick Jagger's recent knighthood and give it to someone more worthy, who would you give it to?

Zax: Let's give it to [Brian] Eno. He'd know what to do with it.

14850: Which artist or band would you recommend to Marc Edward Heuck, the Movie Geek as someone who should really be allowed to record a soundtrack to a movie?

Zax: I'll give you an obscure one. There's a band from Germany that I've been listening to for the last year or two that I'm really fond of. They're called Couch. They're an instrumental group, they do these rhythm-driven soundscape things. They seem to be influenced by early-70's stuff like Neu, but they're quite modern-sounding. The tracks on their records are kinda like these beautifully sculpted sort of mini-travelogues, so I'll bet they'd do a fantastic job with a film score.

14850: With Madonna's dire stab at the new Bond Theme, who would you like to see get a shot at recording a song for 007?

Zax: The only band that could really do it justice in terms of orchestral sweep and general sonic hugeness is the Flaming Lips. It'd be fantastic.

14850: The new slew of freshman, college student shoe-gazers need a hero. Given that Morrissey is long past his expiration date, who do you interview for the position?

Zax: That question assumes that Morrissey was a shoe-gazer, which he wasn't. There are so many heroic figures to choose from, but it's never a bad idea to look up to Sonic Youth, because they've been doing what they've been doing for so long , and they're still the coolest band on Earth. And they've thrown away more ideas than most new bands will ever have.

14850: I'm sorry, we were looking for "Rivers Cuomo."

Time for our Lightning Round, Part Two, 14850's version of "The Geekqualizer". Andy, each of these 15 questions could be worth 10 points each, but there's no time limit. We wouldn't dream of giving you a time limit. Are you ready?

Zax: Do I have a choice? Hit me.

14850: In the Lightning Round spirit, Lightning Hopkins or Thunderclap Newman?

Zax: Oh, they're both fine. That's not even a good choice.

14850: Randy Newman or Gary Numan?

Zax: See, these choices are impossible. I can't pick. I mean, I love Randy Newman because he's a brilliant songwriter, one of the most incisive guys ever to write a song, and a genius arranger. And I love Gary Numan because of his whole cheesy-synth-pop robot boy thing. It's like you're asking me to drown my children.

14850: Gar�on, more water! Lemonheads or Apples In Stereo?

Zax: Orange Juice: Loveable early-80's too-knowing-for-their-own-good Scottish indie popsters , fronted by Edwyn Collins. Orange Juice sound like a weird collision between Television and Motown. Something of an influence on other smart songwriter-types - Lloyd Cole, Morrisey, the Go-Betweens, Felt � who followed in their wake. Collins later got his big break with his hit from the Empire Records soundtrack, "A Girl Like You".

14850: Butthole Surfers or Dick Dale?

Zax: Hmmm. You know, the Butthole Surfers teaming up with Dick Dale might actually be sort of cool.

14850: White Lion or Black Flag?

Zax: Do you even have to ask me that? Black Flag.

14850: Hourglass or the Minutemen?

Zax: [Laughs] The Minutemen, of course.

14850:Fear or WAR?

Zax: WAR were not half as funky or as interesting as people would like to pretend they were. Fear, definitely.

14850: Stereophonics or Hooked On Phonics?

Zax: Well, enunciation has always worked for me. And Stereophonics are tremendously boring. So, Hooked On Phonics.

14850: P.O.D. or OMD?

Zax: Synth pop beats Jesus any day. OMD.

14850: ELO or DEVO?

Zax: Wow, that's tough. Both groups sound equally alien from a "25 years later" perspective, but ultimately�Devo.

14850: Dr. Hook or Wendy O. Williams?

Zax: None of the above.

14850: William Orbit or Georgia Satellites?

Zax: Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

14850: Davy Jones or Rickie Lee Jones?

Zax: Rickie Lee Jones, of course.

14850: Sex Pistols or L.A. Guns?

Zax: [Laughs] You know, I could be really perverse and counter-intuitive here, but there's no fucking way I would. So, Sex Pistols.

14850: And finally, a music-movie question: Lynyrd Skynyrd or Leonard Part 6?

Zax: You know, I randomly caught the first half-hour of Leonard Part 6 on TV yesterday morning, so I'm uniquely prepared to answer that question. Lynyrd Skynyrd, of course.

14850: And that's 150 points and a morning cup of coffee for Andy.

Zax: Wow, fabulous. I'll take mine with a little soy milk, if it's not too much trouble.

14850: Now that you're all warmed up, it's time for Challenge #1. Tell 14850 all about the format changes on "Beat The Geeks." How did the show change from last season?

Zax: They wanted to bring the Geeks into the action a little bit earlier in the show. So instead of just kibitzing on questions that the contestants were answering, they brought us in a bit earlier by adding a buzzer [now on the show's first round, when contestants get a trivia question right, they must play against the Geek in question for more - or less -points, depending on how fast and sharp they are]. It seemed to work a little bit better. And they changed the opening of the show, so that we make these dramatic entrances through that portal, through all that dry ice, instead of being at the podiums when the show begins. I love those openings. If you watch carefully, you'll see that as soon as I deliver my opening line I sprinting to my podium.

14850: And Tiffany has been dispensing lots of Geek Fun Facts in between the rounds.

Zax: Tiffany was definitely a fountain of information this past season.

14850: We're warming up to Blaine Capatch, and we love the Beatle boots, but frankly, we feel like the little kid at the end of Shane: "J. Keith, come back...come back, J. Keith." Wha' happened?

Zax: The producers decided to go in a different direction, and they felt like Blaine would bring a different energy to the show.

14850: Are you still in touch with J. Keith? Is he still doing his no-televised talk show?

Zax: Yes. I think it's coming back this fall for another run. It's a brilliant show. He'll do them in chunks for four to six weeks at a time. Actually, I owe him an e-mail because I'm a bad, slow correspondent. But yes, we're in touch.

14850: Paul wanted to see J. Keith and Blaine in a "Celebrity Death Match". Opinions?

Zax: Paul was, of course, joking when he said that. [Blaine and J. Keith] are both friends of Paul's. I'm pretty sure J. Keith would win, though; he runs triathlons in his spare time.

14850: Whereas Blaine probably just runs for coffee. Do you like him? Where did he come from? I had never heard of either host when "BTG" started.

Zax: Actually, Blaine had been an acquaintance for several years prior to the show. He's less well known to the general public than he deserves to be, but in show-biz circles insider-types tend to speak of him--deservedly--in hushed, deity-like tones. He's unbelievably talented. He's worked on a bunch of different shows, including "Mad TV". He used to write with another really brilliant stand-up comic named Patton Oswalt. And he is a great, great stand-up performer, one of the best in the business. He's also a really good guitar player and he plays in an excellent garage band called the Buxotics. And his imitation of his cat begging to be let out is so unbelievably funny that it reduces me to helpless convulsions everytime I see him do it.

14850: When you lose on the show, you seem to lose big, to the point where we can't tell where you end and Wolverine begins.

Zax: [Laughs] The difference is that I don't have the adamantium claws.

14850: Yes, but do you fear that possible late-night call from Vince McMahon?

Zax: No, actually, I'd sort of enjoy that. [patiently] You know, the show, it's a show, with the accent on "show", so what's the point of going gentle into that good night? Why be boring when you can be a sore loser? A little drama never hurt no one.

14850: You've had some particularly Shatnerian breakdowns this season.

Zax: Well, he's an influence.

14850: We applaud your lack of interest in Journey, Styx, Don Henley and the Eagles. Frankly, we wish more people had that kind of courage. Any other big memory losses on the job this season?

Zax: You mean the stuff that grinds at me in the middle of the night? There was a question about a Beastie Boys album which I screwed up. The answer was "Check Your Head" but for some reason I blurted out the name of the following album, "Ill Communication." If I'd stopped to think about it for half a second I would have realized that I was one album off. It was just a dumb, slip-of-the-tongue type thing, but it annoys me to think about it.

14850: And you had "Cookie Puss" [the first Beasties single], yes?

Zax: Had "Cookie Puss"? I still have "Cookie Puss!" I love "Cookie Puss"!

14850: That Simpsons Geek is scary good. Never seen him fall.

Zax: He's pretty amazing. He and several of the returning Guest Geeks from last season spent the intervening five months studying like mad. So if they had vulnerabilities when we shot the first season, they were gone in season two. Actually, here's a fabulous Antonio story. When he came back, he was hoping he would be asked about an episode where Groundskeeper Willie has 28 kids, and they're all named in about two seconds. And he had actually gone to the trouble of memorizing the names of all 28 kids, he could rattle them off on demand, [but] they didn't ask, sadly. I actually asked one of the writers at the wrap party about it, and they were like, "Well, yeah, we thought of asking it, but we just figured it was impossible." Wrong. Antonio [the Simpsons Geek] was fabulous, although Holly Chandler, the "South Park" Geek, was statistically even better. I believe she was the only Guest Geek to get through a week of shows without missing a single question.

14850: I wouldn't be surprised. She seems to know her stuff pretty well.

Zax: She spent months studying and studying and studying. She showed me some of the notes that she'd been working off of that she'd constructed as study aids. She worked really, really, really hard; it was impressive as hell.

14850: I'll bet she's got all kinds of family tree diagrams -

Zax: Exactly. Charts. Graphs. Lists. The works. She really worked it.

14850: I think I'd make a better Beatles Geek than the guy you had on the show.

Zax: Many, many people have said that, and most likely, many, many people were right. He was not all he could have been.

14850: It feels like the three of you are really gelling into a nice trio; your creator thinks you're like the Justice League of Geeks.

Zax: It works well. We all have diferent sorts of quirks and personality things going on. People say "Well, I like you, but I don't like the TV Guy" or "I don't like you, but I love the Movie Guy'. There's something for everybody. Think of it as Kirk, Spock and McCoy--three complementary characters.

14850: When we spoke last, you said reaction was mostly positive and low-key. Is the fan reaction getting more heated?

Zax: Sometimes. Being mobbed by twenty 8th graders in a pizza parlor was certainly kind of funny and unexpected. Most encounters I have with people are fairly pleasant. The unpleasant ones tend to be the ones where I'm out in a club and some drunk guy comes up to me and won't stop going [very good drunk impression] "Yer the Music Geek! Yer great! I wanna shake yer hand! You know, you got all the RECORDS!" [Laughs]

14850: That was the Music Geek as Drunk Guy.

Zax: When I went out to see Mors Syphilitica on Saturday, I had two of those people. But that's kind of par for the course. Imagine how many millions and billions of times worse it must be to be Tom Hanks or someone at that level of fame. I can't even imagine what that would be like. I've developed this kind of bat hearing where I can sort of hear people whispering as I go by. Or people tend to think I'm not noticing them noticing me. I walk into places and I kind of hear this low-level "Psst, psst, psst, Music Geek!" Crazy.

14850: What kinds of box sets, reissues or other music projects are you into now?

Zax: I spent a while earlier this year working on a Talking Heads box set, and that'll come out next year in some form or another. [Off the record, Andy told us he's also working on re-releases of two classic late 70's albums by a New York band who were contemporaries of the Heads. Until it's solid, this is just rumor-ville, kids!] I'm doing a bunch of production stuff for Rhino; I'm doing a few packages for the "Handmade" subsidiary, which is their mail-order, limited-edition deep-collector kind of branch. I"m producing a small box set which will have the complete works of the late 60's baroque pop group The Neon Philharmonic. They are spectacularly underrated, I've loved them for many years, so I am now finally going to re-introduce them to the world. That's my goal.

14850: Finally, Andy, all of 14850's cyber-space is yours. Any advice, opinions or brickbats you'd like to tell America about?

Zax: God, that's a sobering responsibility. I would just say to anyone living in the 14850 zip code: Kids, some day you're going to be living in a place that doesn't have a Collegetown Bagels, and you're gonna be sad.

14850: It's hard to get a decent bagel where you are?

Zax: It's hard to get a decent bagel, but man, I just...the brownies, actually. The brownies. Please tell me they still have the cheesecake brownies at Collegetown Bagels.

14850: Oh, yeah.

Zax: I think about them frequently. Foodstuff of the Gods.

Images courtesy Comedy Central. All rights reserved.