After about a decade’s preoccupation with making big noises with the likes of Pearl Jam and perennial collaborators Crazy Horse, Neil Young settles in for the winter of his content. Silver & Gold is an open hearth warming up the cabin while the wind howls outside. Young’s tenor, getting more…
Potential. Chances are, you’ve heard that term applied to yourself at some point. It’s an overused and double-edged word, implying lack of present-tense success and the possibility for future failure. “Potential” is a word that was used, quite accurately and frequently, to describe what the band Mineral had. The group…
Tara Hitchcock, host of Channel 3’s Good Morning Arizona, probably had no idea what she was getting into. It was just supposed to be another band doing another in-studio promotion. But the group in question was the Zen Lunatics. Members of the always eccentric power-pop quartet decided to turn their…
The Arizona Roadhouse Brewery, situated prominently at the corner of Apache and Terrace in Tempe, is an aesthetically pleasing and fairly sophisticated brew pub — copper tanks staring conspicuously out of the glassed façade, an oak bar with brass railing, expensive cigars resting enticingly in a bar-top humidor, award-winning beer…
The white man or woman who plays the blues is often forced to confront a long-standing stereotype: the idea among blues-brained purists that only black artists can truly sing about pain, loss and heartbreak. Of course, music history begs to differ with this notion. Some of the most wrist-slitting blues…
It had to happen. Pop-tart Gwen Stefani — pretty as she can be with a midriff for the ages — celebrated a special birthday recently: the dreaded three-oh. And by industry standards — those sad, governing, youth-obsessed and number-crunching principles — such a cosmic reckoning usually means one thing: Keep…
Bless his heart, but Robin Wilson is a strange guy. It’s not just the Gas Giants front man’s manner of speaking — a tone that has the slickness of a used-car salesman and the perpetual chipperness of a TV weatherman — or his conversation — an unrelenting jackhammer of self-promotion…
Not since his admission in the late ’70s that “dancing about and wearing loads of makeup” was but a dopey career move has Lou Reed uttered anything so classically obvious and stiltedly spot-on as his recent pronouncement: “Artists, like anyone else, should be paid for their work.” Several of you…
Slobberbone is scheduled to perform on Saturday, May 13, at the Balboa Café in Tempe, with the Orphans. Showtime is 9 p.m.
Here’s a snatch of overheard conversation, circa 1983, taking place inside a Greenwich Village record store on Bleecker Street called The Golden Disc. At the counter, two men are quietly conferring like doctors around a malignant x-ray. The shopkeeper is holding the sleeve of XTC’s latest import single, “Wonderland,” now…
In the long line of limey trailblazers that couldn’t move unit one stateside, the Stone Roses at least proved themselves predecessors to navel-gazing U.K. teen-a-ramas like the Charlatans, Ocean Colour Scene and the vaguely remarkable Primal Scream, Manics and Oasis. On Brit shores, the Roses’ ’89 self-titled debut was considered…
If you polled a Family Feud studio audience for “reasons people become musicians,” answers like “sex,” “drugs,” “fame,” “money” and even (yawn) “the music” would all be greeted with dinging bells and a deep tongue kiss from Richard Dawson. Just as surely, Greg Sage’s reason, “the appearance of the grooves…
Quarter to five on Sunday afternoon and still in bed. Torn between a desire to catch up on my REM sleep and flicking back and forth from the Lakers’ playoff game and a presentation of The Shining — a Nicholson double bill. So profound was my lethargy that I actually…
It takes an unusually patient hip-hop enthusiast to be a Blackalicious fan. Collectors of the Oakland (by way of Sacramento and Davis, California) twosome’s product have had some serious drought years to deal with, getting through the lean times by putting stubborn faith in the maxim “quality over quantity.” Over…
“Reggie and the Full Effect Promotional Copy was never intended to be released. We have only an unidentified person to thank for the recovery of the master tapes.” So reads the succinct liner notes on the reverse of Promotional Copy’s cover. Every great, posthumously bemoaned band needs a rock ‘n’…
“We got a whole lot more ass coming up,” chirps the frat-perky host who’s standing on some sunny South Florida beach. All around him is a seemingly endless cache of fab booty, the natural-bodied kind romanticized in travel brochures with pictures of Mozambique beaches or any one of John Stagliano’s…
Like many roots-oriented idioms, the parameters of what is considered “true” reggae music are often dictated by stringent dogma. It’s a sort of musical fascism that frequently ostracizes bands that don’t toe the strict ganja party line. Unfortunately, such narrow dictates usually result in groups that either come off like…
Robert Schneider takes the small stage at Austin’s Waterloo Records looking as if he’s just wrapped up a brisk game of Frisbee golf, a shaggy beard twice as long as his thinning thatch of hair almost obscuring his face, a pair of flip-flops on his feet. Tuning up his beat-up…
Jangly, quickly strummed, hard-edged guitar lines and popping bass riffs shuck and jive over stuttering, nearly danceable beats in the song “Buckle Down,” off the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ eponymously titled 1984 debut. The voice of lead singer Anthony Kiedis is distinct: “Hah/On the ice/No holdin’/My soul/I want men/Not mice.”…
She was a junkie when I married her. I knew this. But I was sure I could fix her. We were kids, really, why else would a beerswill and a junkie marry? We shared an apartment in Hollywood on the top floor that offered a little view of the town…
In place of a bio, Elliott Smith’s press kit features two documents: a time line of important events and a selection of his own sound bites from articles written about him. This much we know about Smith: He moved to Portland at age 14, made his first solo album in…
Christianity and rock ‘n’ roll have never been comfortable bedfellows. Though attempts to reconcile the two have been made repeatedly over the years, no act has successfully bridged the gap between Christian and secular music. There’s a long list of those that have tried, but, whether it’s Stryper or Jars…
