Laurie Anderson recently told the BBC that her wedding to longtime boyfriend Lou Reed last month in Boulder was a frugal affair.

On a whim, they stopped in to get a marriage license. "They said, 'Are you two related?' and we said, 'Not that we know of,'" Anderson recounted. "We paid ten bucks and that's it -- we're married."

Aawwww. Lou has always seemed like a big ol' softie, hasn't he?

Presiding over the "ceremony" in a mutual friend's backyard was the honorable Nick Forster, co-host of the nationally syndicated NPR program etown and member of the long-running bluegrass band Hot Rize. Forster tells the Rocky Mountain News that he was ordained as a minister in the Universal Life Church almost as a joke, online.

He and his wife and etown co-host, Helen Forster, recently bought an old church and set about converting it into the show's new home. But when zoning became an issue, Forster tried to appease the planning board by retaining the building's status as a church. The board told him not to bother, but the ordainment did allow him to read the happy couple their vows.

"The reality is they've been together 16 years," said Forster. In that case, ten bucks sounds about right.

If life exists on another planet, will it have ears? Better yet, what kind of sound system will it have in the spacecraft?

Although you can't hear in a vacuum, music might hold the key to communication with alien life forms. That was the message presented by composer Philip Aaberg, who delivered the keynote address at a recent conference at NASA's Ames Research Center south of San Francisco.

Aaberg thinks the mathematically organized music of Bach is our best chance at soothing the savage little beasts who look like Kazoo from 'The Flintstones.'

"We're not sure if aliens will have the same kind of brain structure or if they'll be able to hear at all," he told the Great Falls Tribune in his home state of Montana. "We figure if you're an advanced culture you will have some kind of mathematics." Enough, at least, to know that a $15 iTunes gift card leaves you with 15 cents of useless balance.

Bach, Aaberg noted, topped the charts on the "golden record" launched on the Voyager probe ships in 1977. The great composer had three tunes on the 90-minute playlist sent into outer space. Beethoven had two; Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong and chanting Navajos and Aborigines, among others, had one apiece.

But as Steve Martin once joked on 'Saturday Night Live,' when E.T.s found the record, they had a long-distance request, and it wasn't for Bach: "Send more Chuck Berry."

Having seen the pile of "newly-discovered" Jimi Hendrix tapes grow to Everest-like proportions over the past thirty-odd years, we couldn't help but stifle a yawn at news that yet another one had been unearthed -- until we discovered that the tape in question was actually a video that gives a whole new meaning to the line "move over, Rover and let Jimi take over."

The fine folks at Vivid Video say that the so-called Hendrix sex tape finds the late guitarist showing off the -- shall we say -- extent of his talents with the help of a pair of unidentified women who are engaging him in a variety of bedroom acrobatics. There's some debate as to whether the man in the video is actually the late guitarist -- one Hendrix expert let his eyes wander to an unexpected place and noted that the gent is wearing more rings than Jimi was wont to -- but Vivid's execs insist that the traipse through Electric Ladyland is thoroughly legit.

We're just hoping that Jerry Garcia sex tape never reaches the market, because if it does, we'll never be able to look at Ring Dings the same way again.

While some may roll their eyes and say "oh, Lord" every time they think about the vocal stylings of Clay Aiken, we think that one of the singer's fans is taking it a little bit too far by insisting that Aiken is "the savior."

According to New York's Daily News, one particularly obsessive Clay-maniac has been lurking around the fringes of 'Monty Python's Spamalot' -- the Broadway musical that's currently paying Aiken's rent -- for more than eight hours a day, paying her way into the show some 40 times. Her reasoning is that Clay is the closest thing we have to a modern-day deity, and that she does, in fact, consider him "the savior."

We'd venture a guess as to what that makes Ruben Studdard, but the fear of getting hit by lightning is too much for us.

Pop songwriters tend to take on the epic subjects -- love and death and cosmic befuddlement. But it's the little things, the daily chores and tribulations, that take up most of our time and energy.

No one's writing songs about the rising cost of gas or commuter traffic. In London, however, headaches over the rampant problems at Heathrow Airport's new Terminal 5 have inspired two sufferers to address the issue in rhyme.

Tens of thousands of ordinary people have endured mass tedium at Heathrow, where the ballyhooed opening of British Airways' supposedly state-of-the-art Terminal 5 has been marked by a colossal failure of a sophisticated baggage-claim system, hundreds of canceled flights and excruciating delays.

Two transplanted New Zealanders saw the occasion as a ripe opportunity for comedy. 'The Terminal 5 Song,' their acoustic rap on the woeful debacle, has become a surprise web hit and may soon be released as a single. When Andy Baynes flew to Italy on British Airways for his wedding, the airline lost his suit and his bride's gown. Baynes, a better man than most, channeled his frustration into creativity.

The video he made with partner Tim Soong features the singer lamenting the loss of his bags, shaving in the terminal bathroom and parading around in his boxer-briefs and black socks. Fifteen hours in line, stuck in an elevator with an anonymous groper, and all he can get out of airline officials is a weak cheerio about the fact that the Queen herself cut the ribbon on the terminal.

"They needed a bit of a ribbing," Baynes said, "and we were happy to oblige."

Now if we can only get him to turn his attention to those impossible-to-open little bags of peanuts.

In Jim Jarmusch's 'Coffee and Cigarettes,' the White Stripes appeared in a segment called 'Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil.' They'd long since broken up as a couple; to Jack's dismay, he has a hard time getting Meg interested in his Tesla coil.

In the real world of science fiction, Tesla coils may now be powering up to make the Jack Whites of the world superfluous: A group of Texas science geeks have made two "singing" Tesla coils the focal point of a preprogrammed, artificially intelligent band.

The engineers in ArcAttack have created a 45-minute set featuring the crackling Tesla coils humming singsong melodies, accompanied by a robotic drumkit and a self-playing pipe organ crafted from PVC pipe. "People love it," says Joe DiPrima, a UT engineer. This despite the fact that people are eerily unnecessary to the performance.

One thing this band can guarantee that the living, breathing ones sometimes can't: When they get together, sparks fly.

We've heard a lot of good excuses for taking a day off work -- not that we're going to share them in a public forum, mind you -- but as far as taking off every single day in perpetuity, we have to hand it to Ira Trevisian, the now-former bassist for Brazilian electro-rockers CSS. In announcing his departure from the band, he didn't fall back on the classic "musical differences," but instead blamed global warming.

Trevisian issued a statement saying that he was planning to help combat climate change by opting to fly less -- thus taking him out of the jet-set world of touring musicians. While the bassist's carbon footprint might be impacting mother earth a little less, he is, in fact, being replaced by another musician -- who'll be emitting all sorts of gases while on the road with the band. Maybe Kraftwerk had the right idea some years back when they suggested all musicians be replaced by holograms.

Like everything else in this world, the cost of enjoying music just keeps going up. If you're interested in attending the rock festival outside Naples, Italy, this month, it will set you back five plastic bottles, two glass bottles and four newspapers. We remember when you could get in for just an empty matchbook and an old pizza crust.

The festival is part of a wider cultural movement to protest a garbage crisis that threatens the historic city. With almost four million residents in its greater metropolitan area, Naples is running out of places to dump its trash, and the local Mafia has created illegal landfills that are contaminating the food chain. High dioxin levels in mozzarella are causing panic in the city that invented pizza.

To raise awareness, local musicians have been making music with trash from the landfills, including wash tubs, tires, bottles and old mattresses. Festival organizers came up with the idea of charging recyclable goods as admission. The junkyard style even has its own genre -- Monnezza Sound, loosely translated as "Garbage Sound."
"Naples is an irreverent city," said one musician whose band has released an album encouraging residents to stand up to the Mafia. "It doesn't suffer in silence."

They may be knee-deep in garbage, but it can't be any messier than Woodstock '94.

If you're lining up to experience the Hard Rock Park's new 15-story, six-loop rollercoaster, Led Zeppelin: The Ride, you may not care to be reminded about how the band got its name. As the story goes, Led Zeppelin was tagged when the Who's Keith Moon and John Entwistle joked that a proposed supergroup featuring guitarist Jimmy Page would go down "like a lead zeppelin."

A fiery crash from a great height: Interesting mental image for a colossal rollercoaster.

But then it wouldn't be the Hard Rock without a bit of the old devil-may-care attitude, especially if you can print it on a T-shirt. Led Zeppelin: The Ride is just one of the many attractions at the Hard Rock's new theme park, which is set to open next week. Touted as a family-friendly destination in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the place will feature such fun-for-all-ages attractions as the Magic Mushroom Garden, Slippery When Wet and the Whammy Bar. (Nothing like a tall cold one after explaining to the kids what a magic mushroom does to your sanity.)

One South Carolina woman just paid $1829 for the privilege of seating her family in the first two rows of the Led Zeppelin ride on its inaugural run on Tuesday, when the $400 million park opens to the public. The park auctioned fifteen tickets for the kickoff.

With 64 speakers installed for each 32-passenger train, the ride is accompanied by a top-volume recording of Zep's 'Whole Lotta Love.' By one calculation, the auction winner is paying four dollars per second. Like the transaction described in the song, she deserves every inch.

While we doubt that anyone has ever confused Charlie Daniels with Mick Jagger, the barrel-chested southern rocker has decided to assure the world that he has absolutely no sympathy for the devil -- or, for that matter, his minions on earth. In Daniels' mind, the latter category is currently headed up by the folks responsible for 'Guitar Hero,' who've angered him by festooning the game's recently released third volume with a version of his 'Devil Went Down to Georgia' in which the Man Downstairs actually stands a chance of winning the protagonist's soul.

Daniels went onto his website to disassociate himself from the game, which he says "pervert(ed) his song" -- to which he does not own publishing rights -- and left him "disgusted with the result." Well, on the bright side, the 'Guitar Hero' folks didn't manage to sneak in a rendition of 'The South's Gonna Do It Again' in which Yankees manage to overrun Dixie and litter it with Starbucks outlets.

It's one of the great existential questions, posed by that great existentialist Karen Carpenter: Why do birds suddenly appear?

In the case of New York musician David Rothenberg, the birds appear because he brings his clarinet. A jazz man by training, Rothenberg became infatuated with birdsong after a friend invited him to the National Aviary in Pittsburgh and suggested he bring his axe. (The clarinet, people.)

That fine, feathered collaboration led to the 2005 publication of Rothenberg's book 'Why Birds Sing.' Now, having looked skyward for inspiration, he's after a literal ocean of sound. The clarinetist's newest project is 'Whale Music' -- a CD of the same name, and a companion book called 'Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound.' Traveling to Hawaii and Russia to track beluga and humpback whales, the musician dropped a speaker and microphone as deep as a quarter mile below the surface and recorded "live interspecies jams" with the whales.

Getting too close to whales is actually illegal, he notes on his website. Still, for those who "can't be stopped," he offers a diagram of the recording process, as well as a bit of aesthetic advice: "Listen more than you play. If you can't hear the whale, you're playin' too much."

So where was this guy when John Bonham bludgeoned 'Moby Dick'?

When Paul McCartney's relationship with former model Heather Mills first went public, the news made quite a splash. The eternally boyish Beatle was back in the water after being left high and dry by the death of his Lovely Linda just a few years prior.

Water, in fact, proved a useful metaphor when McCartney's album 'Driving Rain' came out in 2001. Noted for its gushing love songs, the record celebrated long drives "straight to the eye of the hurricane," encouraged his new lover to 'Rinse the Raindrops' and imagined their world inside a 'Tiny Bubble.'

Seven years later, the couple's recent, highly publicized divorce proceedings featured an altogether different need for an umbrella. When Mills learned that the judge had decided in her ex-husband's favor, granting her $48 million -- considerably less than she'd been seeking -- Mills reportedly doused Fiona Shackleton, McCartney's lawyer, with a pitcher of water. Eyewitnesses claim Mills all but admitted the episode when she explained that Shackleton had been "baptized in court."

Now the incident has inspired an online game called Splash & Grab, in which players view the courtroom from the perspective of Ms. Mills, trying to douse McCartney and his lawyer as they pop up, Whack-a-Mole style. Each direct hit soaks Sir Paul for a bigger portion of his liquid assets. The catch: if you accidentally hit the judge, points are deducted.

And there's not a dry eye in the house.

Universal Music, home of U2, 50 Cent, Eminem and Amy Winehouse, is about to get medieval on your ass. For real.

Looking to capitalize on the runaway success of the video game 'Halo,' with its Gregorian chant theme song, the label has identified a group of monks from the woods near Vienna it thinks could become the next Singing Nun, or at least Ministry. The Cistercian monks of Heiligenkreuz, a 12th-century monastery, answered the label's open call for plainsong performers by submitting that traditional expression of monastic asceticism on their YouTube video.

A label representative recently said the company was convinced it had to sign up a chant choir when festival organizers began asking "if we've got nuns or monks on our roster." Unlike the '90s electronic group Enigma, who set Gregorian chant to a club beat, the Cistercian monks will record just as they perform, without musical accompaniment of any kind. Proceeds from their advance will be put back into the monastery, which presumably needs computers to keep tabs on its YouTube posts and the latest crusading first-person shooter games.

Still all but unknown to many Americans, to his legions of UK fans over the past half-century Sir Cliff Richard has been the second coming of Elvis Presley. He has sold more than 250 million records and had No. 1 hits in every decade but the current one -- more number ones in the UK, in fact, than anyone but Elvis, the Beatles and Westlife. But Sir Cliff may see himself as the second coming of a certain superstar even bigger than Elvis, if that's humanly possible: None other than the original longhaired heartthrob with the amazing stunts and the truly crazy encore.

According to a sociologist affiliated with Germany's Martin Luther University, the UK's most enduring pop star has a pronounced tendency to present himself as a modern-day messiah. From outstretched arms and a sexless persona to his well-known Christian conversion, argues Anja Lobert in a popular music journal of the Cambridge University Press, the first beknighted British pop star "seems to have established a remarkably consistent public persona which presents him as a friend in need, a bridge to happiness and, hence, a figure modeling itself on Jesus Christ."

Noted among fans for his conspicuous abstinence from the sex and drugs part of the rock 'n' roll equation, Sir Cliff has called himself "the most radical rock star there has ever been." If that's so, well, what would the Jesus of cool do? For starters, he'd turn a few more records into gold and bump Westlife off that list.