Displaying blog content on an external page

Greetings everyone! I’m new to WordPress and I kind of suck at it. I’m so grateful these support forums exist and are free, and that such nice people seem to roam them offering advice. I could use some…

I’ve done a lot of searching and I realize this is a popular question. I’m sure a lot of the other articles and answers are super-useful, but I’m completely PHP illiterate. I’ve read through every response to similar questions that I could find, and to be honest I just don’t understand them.

So here is what I’m trying to do… I’m putting together a new website for my band, and I want to use WordPress to create a newsfeed on the main page. But I don’t want it to be an RSS feed, I just want the five most recent posts (or whatever) displayed on the main page in full. Basically, if I could find a theme plain enough and it didn’t create general layout problems, I would just put it in an iFrame and be done with it. But failing that, and in small words so I can comprehend, how can I accomplish what I’m trying to accomplish?

(An example of the type of thing I’d like to do can be found at http://www.cursivearmy.com/03/home.html but I think they do their news feed differently. That’s just basically how I’d like it to look.)

The stock response seems to be “use the loop” but how? The information I can find on it seems to require that the code be posted on a page within WordPress, but I want it on a page outside of WordPress.

Some of the topics I’ve read that seem like they should apply but I can’t figure them out:

http://www.bluebreeze.net/blog/?p=11 (actually that did exactly what it said it would but it only gives one post and one line from it, I need the full posts)
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/75485
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/73570 (I think this would work if I understood it)

Thanks in advance, and I apologize for my ignorance… I’m just a musician, after all! Now if you had a problem with a soundboard I’d be on it 😉