In 1941, a 12-year-old Rufus Jones electrified his homemade guitar with a piece of fence wire and a truck battery, “to impress them local Mississippi girlies,” he recalls. While showing off by playing the guitar with his teeth — decades before Jimi Hendrix would do the same — his pet…
If a major-label deal is the musical equivalent of being presented with a worldwide soapbox, it doesn’t take Trik Turner long to address the big issues on the group’s self-titled new RCA debut album. Consider the title of the album’s first track: “Existence.” It doesn’t get any bigger than that,…
While Exit Planet Dust’s contributions to the big-beat canon have earned the Chemicals vanguard status, each album since their debut has been, in every sense of the phrase, an industrious exercise in button pushing. They mercilessly morphed one of Dig Your Own Hole’s best and most accessible tunes — the…
Fifteen years ago, Justin Broadrick helped create one of the most intense, groundbreaking death-metal albums ever. Now, he’s co-created one of the most intense, groundbreaking hip-hop albums in recent memory. What gives? Broadrick, who drifted out of Napalm Death after its debut, Scum, to found the dense industrial group Godflesh,…
The following is a sad story, in a sense. Not for its protagonist, former Valley resident and much-ballyhooed turntable artist DJ Z-Trip, because this is the story of his triumphs. It’s a story about the machinations of success in the music industry, the story of a Phoenix boy who moved…
Like all great writers, Jeffrey Hyman used special stationery. “He was always writing lyrics on little scraps of paper — on shopping bags, on cardboard from shirts,” recalls his mom, Charlotte Lesher. “They would be really crazy lyrics.” “Beat on the brat,” he wrote, “beat on the brat, beat on…
Gustavo Angeles had every reason to feel sorry for himself. The sudden closing of the two Altos Bistros last month brought an abrupt end to a nearly yearlong gig for Angeles’ traditional Latin group, Cascabel, the Spanish restaurant’s weekend house band. It temporarily left Angeles without a venue to showcase…
Last September, Roger Clyne organized a gathering at the Sonoita Fairgrounds to celebrate the Festival of the Chubascos — chubascos being shorter and fiercer Mexican versions of the monsoons that Arizonans contend with every year. The part of the chubascos phenomenon that Clyne really loves is that people in Mexico…
It’s impossible to listen to Kasey Chambers without imagining the vast expanse of the Australian plains, the thousand and one nighttime noises, a train wailing across great distances — although I have no sense of whether that’s an authentic view or a projection based on press releases and interviews. Chambers…
These days, Bill Doss, a key member of the Elephant 6 collective and a co-founder of Olivia Tremor Control, likes to refer to himself in print as “thebilldoss,” or, when he’s in a hurry, “tbd” — both good examples of how he’s able to freshen up familiar ingredients by giving…
At its best, the music of Texas has an openness and quiet intelligence unlike any other state’s. These Texan qualities seem unrelated to style or subregion — it’s evident in Doug Sahm’s border rock, Joe Ely’s flatland rockabilly, and Townes Van Zandt’s wandering folk. That same supple wisdom suffuses Jon…
The enduring power of rockabilly is that it’s rock ‘n’ roll in undiluted form. The dark menace and raging lust that early rock only hinted at were the foundations of every rockabilly backbeat and echoey hiccup. But it took a clique of maniacal ’80s rockabilly revisionists like the Cramps, Flat…
At 22, Conor Oberst is probably too young to be locked into the expectations of a fan base. After all, most musicians of his age are only beginning to figure out what they want to express, and how they plan to go about it. But Oberst’s intensely emotional, confessional songs…
Every rising pop star who manages to forge a distinctive personality on the radio and MTV inherits them seemingly overnight. Hundreds of thousands of like-minded — and sometimes like-dressed — individuals are suddenly drawn out of their shells through their instant identification with this larger-than-life representation of their secret, inner…
Remember Napster? Oh, sure, it’s so two years ago now, but remember all the time, energy and money spent by the record labels to beat it down? And how about all the time, energy and money now being spent doing the same to the similar services that sprouted in Napster’s…
Al Singer likes to poke fun at his own habit of running at the mouth. “Ask me what time it is, and I’ll tell you how to make a watch,” jokes the 73-year-old Singer, a lifelong jazz adherent who moved from Michigan to the Valley 11 years ago. But if…
There’s something comforting in knowing there’s a bar someplace where you will always be treated to a smile, a few kind words, and three fingers of your favorite bourbon or scotch. Where seldom is heard a track by Britney or J.Lo. Alan Jackson’s records are like that, and it’s no…
Or, this year’s fresh Brit hit (so the NME tells us, anyway), meaning those of us who purchased January’s I Heard Myself in You last February from Amazon’s U.K. site, figuring them as the next Coldplay, can now file it away with the rest of London’s letdowns. Seeing as how…
Mounting a history of that dysfunctional beast known as rock ‘n’ roll journalism is probably impossible. The field is plagued by self-aggrandizing guru-dom (hallo, Robert “Consumer Guide” Christgau), near-unintelligible academia-speak (Greil “Doctor of Letters” Marcus), perpetual grudge-holding (Richard “I Coulda Been a Contender” Meltzer), and even — not to put…
The first New Order album in eight years finds the survivors of Joy Division banging their collective drum in yet another monochromatic burst of synthetic rapture. Not that Manchester’s most brooding band ever really suffered commercially from picking at the same scab — or from adhering to the same descending…
History, goes the brutal wisdom, is written by the winners. The dead cannot speak; those who come through the other side intact are, by default if not by choice, the ones left to establish and preserve the official record. Culturally, that gnomic truth often manifests itself in the impulse to…
Jay Farrar, reluctant icon of Americana music, pauses to consider his standing in the alt-country pantheon. It’s not something Farrar seems eager to discuss. After all, it’s been more than 10 years since his first band, Uncle Tupelo, helped kick-start the alternative-country movement with an invigorating blend of rust belt…
