I first approached Mose Allison after a 1997 show at Poor David’s Pub in Dallas. Some mook from the audience cut ahead, tugged Allison’s shirt, and patted him on the back with deadpan sincerity: “Hey, you got an interesting way with lyrics. Very original.” I cringed, but Allison cordially nodded…
Not long ago, Pete Forbes was talking to a Nashville rep for Risk Records. The label rep had called Forbes after hearing the Phoenix singer-songwriter’s thoughtful, well-crafted debut CD, The Gulf Between, which was released earlier this year. “This record is great. I love this record,” the rep said. “Oh,…
When the Rolling Stones staged the first genuine rock ‘n’ roll circus in 1968, they distributed gold-embossed metallic tickets to their fan-club members and lucky NME readers, fed them, gave them 20 hours of music, clowns and amusements and then arranged for buses to take everybody home. All free o’…
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? –William Shakespeare She got a TV eye on me. –Iggy Pop A few weeks ago, I bought a Zenith black-and-white portable TV from a hawk shop for $39. The set came with a fucked-up channel-changing knob, a coat hanger doubling as an…
Candyskins Death of a Minor TV Celebrity (Velvel Records) Born of the same Oxford, England, pop scene that produced Radiohead and Supergrass, the Candyskins were formed in 1989 by the Cope brothers–frontman Nick and guitarist Mark. Along with lead guitarist Nick Burton, bassist Karl Shale and drummer John Halliday the…
You wonder whether Bruce Springsteen knew he was going to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this coming January when he put together Tracks, his new four-CD collection of outtakes, B-sides and demos. If he wasn’t going to the Hall of Fame already, this boxed set…
When Sunny Day Real Estate broke up in 1995, it was a respected but obscure indie-rock band. At that stage, the group would have been happy to pack a club in its native Seattle. Three years later, when the quartet decided to re-form, it found itself generating long lines a…
Tempe Bowl has been a bowling center for nearly four decades. It’s only been a music venue for the last year. But with the bowling alley recently experiencing financial difficulties so severe that its future is up in the air, it’s the local punk-rock scene that has rallied behind this…
There are nasty rumors swirling about Archers of Loaf and their label, Alias Records, and they go like this: A skeleton crew is running the once-thriving indie label, which has sunk to releasing back order and product that’s already in progress; and Archers, the label’s last bastion of credibility, will…
When the surviving ex-Beatles put together their three-volume Anthology series a few years ago, they faced a daunting artistic challenge. On the one hand, they had to satiate long-suffering fans clamoring for a collection of the band’s best unreleased tracks. On the other hand, because the Anthology CDs were conceived…
On January 1, 1988, in Tucson, Arizona, Billy Sedlmayr stepped out of a stolen pickup truck and walked into a Dairy Queen. He had no gun but told the ice cream clerks he did, and they believed him. The lie yielded him $97, a sum small in proportion to the…
Kevin Newell was irate. Halfway through an emotionally charged zoning administrator hearing to decide the fate of local hip-hop club House of Grooves, the head of the Whittier Neighborhood Association was on a roll as he recited a list of neighbors’ complaints against the venue. Some of his points were…
Leftist politics, despite its role in the gestation and development of punk rock, holds virtually no demographic within the record-buying public today (discounting the homeless crusties who sport Refuse & Resist tee shirts and listen to decades-old Crass records). The kids wanna hear artists emote; they want them to bleed…
While it’s probably bad form to inhale a three-course meal and still find it wanting, the Burt box achieves the desired effect if it sends you scurrying to find more Bacharach/David gems not included here. The following are some of the ones whose absence I noticed: “Warm & Tender”–Johnny Mathis…
Lately the words “resurgence” and “Burt Bacharach” are finding their way into a lot of the same sentences. There’s been an avalanche of press coverage on Bacharach and the stepped-up use of his songs in hit movies like Austin Powers, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Forrest Gump and The First Wives…
R.E.M. Up (Warner Bros.) There’s a moment on R.E.M.’s new album, Up (the band’s 13th or 14th release, depending on whether you count best-ofs), that will be instantly familiar to longtime fans. The song is called “The Apologist,” and Michael Stipe nails his point home in the chorus by singing,…
This year the kids just banged on Bill’s door regardless of the fact that the trailer was dark as a cemetery. And the only exterior light on the tin home came from the silver and yellow strains of the half moon and the barren Dairy Queen sitting well-lit across the…
Belle and Sebastian The Boy With the Arab Strap (Jeepster/Matador) Goth can be a many-sided gloom. At its silliest, it’s too much eyeliner on a suburban kid playing make-believe with death and destruction. At the other end are fashion nonspecific soundtracks of honest human entropy: the artist-as-fuck-up documents like Big…
The theme of the night at Arizona Roadhouse was “In Love with Debbie Gibson.” In set-list currency, that translated into each of the night’s four acts scraping together one cover song by the ’80s teen sensation. Near the end of the set by power-pop up-and-comers Crashbar, lead singer Adrian Smith…
When I was 11 years old, my older brother gave me a tape that changed everything I thought I knew about music. The tape was called King of Rock, and it was the second album by the rap group Run-D.M.C. I thought I was pretty hip for an 11-year-old, but…
Geoff Brown is a junior-high science teacher. He’s also a dedicated Christian. He has short, dark hair and is dressed conservatively in slacks and a green short-sleeve shirt. Though he’s only 30, he somehow seems much older. It’s not that he’s aged badly, really, but just that he speaks with…
There’s a famous old skit on Saturday Night Live in which a series of cheesy spokespeople vied with each other to prove that their brand of jam was the best, simply because it had the most vile name. The perverse gist of the mock commercial was that only a wonderful…
