Fred Green Groover (Rorschach Records) It’s a common syndrome. Great live party bands, when put in the clinical confines of the recording studio, often just don’t cut it. It’s easy to see why. Live performance and recording require very different skills. Manic energy and fierce commitment can carry a live…
What’s more frightening? Playing drums in a three-piece band in front of 60,000 people? Or singing onstage for the first time at a small club filled with friends, strangers and the occasional 300-pound go-go dancer? It’s an easy question for Tim Alexander. “Singing,” he says with little hesitation. Alexander is…
A few weeks ago, the City of Tempe hosted a battle-of-the-bands competition at Tempe Diablo Stadium. It was a long, thinly attended event with the expressed purpose of “keeping the kids off the street.” One of the few people who did attend–at least for a few minutes–was a local TV…
As a hip-hop DJ, Z-Trip was born with two strikes against him. He’s white and from Arizona. The only things that saved him were his skills, which are mad like the Hatter. When Z-Trip’s at battle stations, the pyrotechnical sorcery, most famously his scratching, reaches Jedi mind-trick levels. Less celebrated…
Vitamin needs a new name. The Tempe trio is in L.A., finishing the mixing for its debut album, and the members are not yet sure what moniker will appear on that album’s spine. They gave themselves a deadline of last Wednesday (August 27) to decide, but blew it off for…
In America, professional wrestling is the province of washed-up boxers, unemployed bouncers and failed actors. In Mexico, wrestling has always been high art, Dada theater on a square canvas stage. Legendary Mexican wrestlers don colorful superhero masks, and carry their personas so far that they walk the streets in full…
Eric Matthews The Lateness of the Hour (Sub Pop Records) Eric Matthews should be a major artist. He has all the credentials for critical deification. He’s a smart, young, classically trained singer/songwriter with an uncommon flair for arranging string and horn sections. Word has it that his mental pitchfork is…
Like your friend whose romances are messier than yours, the Mr. T Experience is back to cry about it with its eighth album, Revenge Is Sweet and So Are You. The MTX is pop punk’s troubadour of love gone wrong, master of the “I loved you but you dumped me…
Although John Fogerty hit many detours in his career, he didn’t expect 11 years’ worth on the road to his current album, Blue Moon Swamp. Fogerty’s music always sounded like it came from the heart of the South. His backwoods shout, the understated acoustic rhythm guitars, percolating rhythms and his…
One day in college I was sitting with a woman friend talking about sex as the local hits radio station pelted us with slow jams. “I wanna lick you up and down now, baby,” sang Keith Sweat wanna-be B5-492 over Casio drum-machine/keyboard hell. For two indie-rock types like ourselves, the…
Thomas Ades Life Story (EMI Classics) Ever wonder who the next big thing will be in the shrinking world of classical music? Didn’t think so. But there’s an encouraging noise goosing the genre’s increasing irrelevance. It’s the sound that comes from the fingers of Thomas Ades, a 26-year-old British composer…
In 1982, Pete Townshend sat down for one of his many lengthy interviews with Rolling Stone magazine. The primary topic of conversation was Townshend’s prolonged battle with the bottle, which had recently sent him to a clinic for treatment. Along the way, however, the Who’s guitarist got on a rant…
Oasis Be Here Now (Epic Records) A couple of years ago, a British writer suggested to Oasis mastermind Noel Gallagher that his obsession with the Beatles might be getting a little out of hand. “It’s not an obsession,” Gallagher responded. “It’s a way of life.” Years from now, pop historians…
A few hundred feet away from the massive stage at the Electric Highway festival was the B.F. Goodrich tent. Stuck out in the middle of an empty field in Chandler’s Compton Terrace, the tent was connected to an open 10-wheeler truck that housed Goodrich reps. In front of the truck…
Sunday afternoon in the middle of August. I come to, ready for the undertaker. I look up at a picture of Jesus, hanging on the faux paneled wall opposite me. The sweat in my eyes makes Him appear all blurry. I am parched, hung over and stinging of cooked flesh…
To commemorate this week’s 20th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, MGM Home Entertainment has just released a video gift set containing all 31 of Elvis’ movies in a guitar case. Maybe it should have packaged them in a coffin, instead, since the balance of the King’s film output has more…
It’s funny how even the most esoteric ideas can reach different people at the same time. Neither the Sex Pistols nor the Clash had heard the Ramones when they launched their own buzz-saw guitar attacks. They just happened to be on the same transatlantic wavelength as the boys from Queens…
Being arrested was humiliating enough. Being hauled off to the police station in full stage attire–which for Eroticide singer Charles Delk means wearing a black leather restraining mask and a latex phallus that would induce penis envy in a snake–was more than he could stomach. “I was dragged off to…
Various artists Beg, Scream and Shout: The Big Ol’ Box of ’60s Soul (Rhino Records) Blame it on The Big Chill. The 1983 celluloid blowjob for the baby-boomer set not only created a mid-’80s explosion of oldies radio (“music for the Big Chill generation,” they called it), it also cemented…
Every music scene is different, but there are some rules that apply wherever you go. Every metroplex worth its salt contains at least one surf band, rockabilly band and ska band. It might not be coincidental that fans of those three genres tend to be among the most hard-core music…
Rainer Ptacek smiles. He remembers the day his doctor gave him the dreaded diagnosis. “You have the best cancer, Rainer. You really have a very good cancer.” The 46-year-old Tucson slide-guitar master seemed to be sailing through life in February 1996. His haunting music–a stark, inimitable kind of postmodern desert…
Super Deluxe via satellite (Revolution Records) Appealing and melodious though it may be, power pop has never been quite strong enough to stand on its own legs. Since it’s essentially always been an attempt to recapture the unpretentious three-minute epiphanies of pre-Sgt. Pepper ’60s guitar bands, its earliest musical joy…
