Charles Thompson is on his way to see a man about an ax. “I’m on my way to see Toru,” he intones in a stylized, Peter Lorre-esque cadence, “Japanese guitar repairman . . . to the stars.” Thompson, better known as Frank Black, trusts his guitars to L.A. legend Toru…
Perched on a stool at a local watering hole a few weeks back, sitting with a female acquaintance, we’re discussing the state of local music when the conversation inevitably turns to Bleed American, the much-hyped, much-anticipated album from Jimmy Eat World. My companion, a twentyish college grad newly smitten with…
Clay and Jency Rogers bought their East Mesa house when the market was good for young families. It’s a clean, well-lighted place in the middle of a new subdivision, but it’s in East Mesa, to be sure. To the north of it is where Guadalupe Road ends. Just stops. But…
“To me they sound like joy. Like endless lines stretching on forever in parallel. Like being so out of breath you can’t feel your hands. Like when the future looked bright and clean and we’d know what to do if there was a problem. Like all those electric cars I…
Evolution is unpredictable when it comes to music. Melbourne, Australia’s the Living End is a case in point. The band was formed in the early ’90s when guitarist Chris Cheney and bassist Scott Owen met in high school and bonded through their mutual love of rockabilly. Drummer Travis Dempsey solidified…
So your niece thinks world music means the Spanish version of the latest Christina Aguilera album. And your kid brother believes that jazz originated on a Utah basketball court. How do we build an access ramp into the minds of such musically challenged Eminemers? By slapping those Parental Advisory warning…
Japanese underground music has yet to make any serious inroads in this country. Only the Boredoms ever gained any notoriety here, playing with Nirvana and opening Lollapalooza shows in the mid-’90s. But the era’s alternative audiences were ill-suited to digest their particularly uncompromising brand of musical exploration. Enter ROVO, a…
Years ago, singer-songwriter Freedy Johnston said that he thought Chuck Cleaver was one of the best songwriters in America, adding that he had almost dismissed Ass Ponys because of their stupid name. “It’s like they’re daring me to hate them,” Johnston said at the time. Other than the record label…
A few years back, while interviewing a grizzled musician who called Austin, Texas, home, he mentioned a Nashville-based buddy of his who had recently landed a big-time recording contract. He was going to be a star. “The first thing the record label did,” lamented the Lone Star native, “was sign…
Summer 1954. As the rickety Greyhound bus winds down Interstate 10 toward Arizona, the ocean breeze slowly melts into the hot desert air. Sitting in the back of the dusty coach, with tears streaming down his face, is a 25-year-old aspiring songwriter named Lee Hazlewood. Stinging bitterly from yet another…
California-born, Phoenix-bred Al Casey is part of the vast secret history of rock and roll, one of a legion of “session men” — though the term is insufficient to describe Casey’s amazing body of work — who contributed to the very formation of the sound in its earliest days. The…
Country music history boasts many fruitful collaborations among family members: The Louvin Brothers, the Carter Family, the Stanley Brothers, Bill and Earle Bolick (the Blue Sky Boys), the Monroe Brothers — the list is long and fabled. You might never have heard of the Good family, depending on how deep…
Albums like Pleasure Forever’s eponymous release make me think of that great Charlie Parker quote, the one about how there are only two kinds of music: Good and Bad. By which I mean that Pleasure Forever is a genre-resistant beast that works more often than it doesn’t, but having said…
Summer’s here and the time is right for . . . well, not much, seeing as how there’s precious little on the horizon worth anticipating except for maybe the new Joe Stummer LP. Still, that release is a few weeks away. In the meantime, here are a handful of musical…
If the Chemical Brothers represent dance music at its most intelligent — and Daft Punk represents the genre’s cheesy, crowd-pleasing appeal — then Basement Jaxx most assuredly offers the art form at its emotional, sensual, visceral best. Remedy, the U.K. duo’s debut after years of DJing in London, flowed cohesively…
Big in Japan is either a name you own, or one that comes back to bite you in the ass later — particularly if your band’s a power-punk trio in an era when Green Day is now being touted as the “grandfathers” of anything. Big in Japan’s debut, Destroy the…
Most musicians like to shroud themselves in mystery. Cast themselves as enigmas, riddles never meant to be solved. It’s an accepted part of the marketing process these days. That somehow a bit of carefully calculated inscrutability will enhance the lure of the product. For journalists, deconstructing those fiercely guarded walls,…
On contemporary maps, Teoc, Mississippi, rests as far off the path as it did in the twilight years of the 19th century. Located almost exactly between Texarkana, Arkansas, and Birmingham, Alabama, Teoc lies several miles from the nearest U.S. Route. And there wasn’t a single paved road anywhere near it…
On a wickedly humid afternoon in late June, singer/songwriter Billy Sedlmayr sits in the sunken room of his barrio bungalow, cursing to the heavens. He’s battling demons and not faring too well. The bestial horrors lurking in the narrow margins between shadow and darkness move too quickly for him, and…
My Morning Jacket is sort of like a Louisville Ween: Playful but heartfelt, artsy but unpretentious, and capable of shelving bizarro freak-tunes alongside evocative and nostalgic songs. It’s a toss-up as to how 22-year-old Jim James, the Neil Young-channeling singer and songwriter for MMJ, would take to that comparison, but…
As it turns out, Tricky’s been making records even he hates — contract-killers, he might call them, if not audience-killers in the process. (Everything since 1995’s Maxinquaye has been one “fuck-off” record after another, he explains, as in: “Fuck off, I’m not giving people what they want,” he offers in…
