Just yesterday it came out that Madonna was the music artist who made the most money in 2008, nearly a quarter-billion bucks, and now a nude photo of her has prompted an unnamed European to plunk down $37,500 for a photo of her nekkid. The photo session was in 1979 when she was 20. The full-frontal shot previously appeared in Playboy in '85.

I looked around online in hopes of presenting you the photograph in question, but no luck. I can just see hundreds of middle-age men rifling through the box of old Playboys in the attic.

Read more.

This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...