Frank Black and the Catholics Frank Black and the Catholics (spinART Records) Frank Black’s fourth CD begins with a brief guitar goof on the Green Acres theme, followed by a messy false start. His band then lunges into one of those absurdly speedy tempos that Black uses, not to convey…
When it comes to hip-hop artists, nicknames are the norm, but “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” are not rappers. The Manhattan Project was the code name for the U.S. effort during World War II to produce an atomic bomb. In 1942, four scientists convened in New York with calculations and…
Tom Anderson has seen a lot of DJs over the years. Many of them have spun for him over the past 16 years at his Scottsdale dance club, Anderson’s Fifth Estate. But he says he’d never seen anything to prepare him for what he experienced a few months ago, when…
How do you build a record store in six days? That was the tough question Steve Wiley and his partners, Lloyd Hummel and Kristian Luce, surely asked themselves a couple of weeks ago. Wiley, until recently the general manager of Zia Enterprises, had put together a proposal for a record…
“I got this crazy-ass offer from Jason Priestley, 90210, y’know, to be on the show. It really mind-boggled me, y’know, ’cause I don’t know if I wanna do that kind of thing,” Mixmaster Mike says on the phone from New York City, where, in a few hours, he’ll be playing…
Legend has it that the day George Gershwin’s parents brought a piano into the house, the untutored 12-year-old plopped himself down in front of the keys and a flood of music came pouring out. If the story has long carried with it the ring of Hollywood exaggeration, it still helps…
Elliott Smith XO (DreamWorks Records) Elliott Smith doesn’t sound very happy. In the few years since his first solo release, Roman Candle, Smith has honed the art of sad songs to a gleaming point, a point where, despite the depression and bitterness, the songs’ ingenuity and honesty leave you smiling…
Various artists There’s Something About Mary (Capitol Records) The Farrelly brothers are carving out a unique niche for themselves. These are the guys who are making rude, crude, socially unacceptable and screamingly funny movies. The kind of movies that make you laugh really hard at the same time you are…
About halfway through the after-the-fact Seattle music-scene documentary Hype, there’s a piece of footage that has the authentic feel of history. You see Nirvana ripping into “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” for what the subtitles proclaim to be the first time ever. The hand-held camera work is amateurish, the picture is…
DWI/I can make it if I try –Handsome Dick Manitoba The heady mix of sleep deprivation, speed and booze has given me an eagle-eye vision, and tonight the city reveals itself in painful clarity: The cheerless repetition of manicured lawns is even more bleak, the awkward, oversize grasshoppers have become…
The Spice Girls don’t do a lot of talking onstage, but about 20 minutes into the second half of their August 22 show at Desert Sky Pavilion, Emma Bunton, known to the world as Baby Spice, looked like she had something important to say. “We all know about Girl Power,”…
R.L. Burnside just took a swig of Jack Daniel’s. He’s sitting under the sweltering Mississippi sun on an August afternoon, listening to a fellow Delta bluesman. Again, he twists the cap off the plastic water bottle used to disguise the whiskey. Another gulp. “Yeah.” A few hours later, the 71-year-old…
Dave Alvin Blackjack David (HighTone Records) Before radio defined formats such as AAA and Americana, musical styles such as folk, hillbilly and blues seemed to sprout from the soil. Dave Alvin digs deep into that soil to embellish the stories that form the heart of Blackjack David. Alvin abandons the…
Was it Debora Iyall of Romeo Void who once crooned “never say never”? Well, apparently, the chunky songbird knew what she was singing about, ’cause in the fast-paced world of rock ‘n’ roll, nothing is permanent. Best friends are liable to sue each other one week and share the mike…
Bob Jacks knows what’s important, and what’s important isn’t carrying high-interest revolving credit debt on his back. In fact, Jacks doesn’t carry much at all. The Hammertoes guitarist and self-described “American gypsy” understands that enjoying the freedom of moving at a moment’s notice means denying himself material goods some consider…
Liz Phair whitechocolatespaceegg (Matador Records) In a way, it shouldn’t matter that Liz Phair took four years to put together her third album, whitechocolatespaceegg. Sure, Bob Dylan released his first seven albums in the time it took Phair to craft this set of ditties, but times have changed since those…
He’s been up close and personal with Cher’s rear end, escorted Johnny Rotten around the Valley and entertained Fats Domino in his New Orleans living room. Yet Charles Levy–the man who single-handedly turned an anonymous roadside tavern into a hub of cutting-edge music, and manages Gloritone, the Valley’s best chance…
Jim Adkins grins and looks up from his Pilsner while perched on a stool at a local brew pub. “Seriously, the last four months have been the best time of my life.” Anyone familiar with the life and times of the 22-year-old singer/guitarist for Tempe-based Jimmy Eat World wouldn’t be…
Whenever rock is in the doldrums, it usually revives itself by looking to foreign sources for a fresh infusion of energy. These days, with American alt-rock a joyless mountain of mediocrity, it’s easy to see why pop-music critics are getting so hot and bothered about the movement known as Rock…
Poetic Justice, a 1993 film depicting urban poetry and peril, could serve as a metaphor for the current plight of the hip-hop music genre. Behind an attractive facade (Janet Jackson and the late Tupac Shakur) is a story overwrought with drama, gunplay and no sense of direction. Hip-hop today is…
Local jazz drummer Dave Cook has three bands, and he plays a variety of different venues around the Valley. But for most of his fans, this 39-year veteran of the local music scene has long been defined by the Monday-night jams he hosted for almost a decade at the Melody…
‘Rock ‘n’ roll–real rock ‘n’ roll, not some prefab Bush/Marcy Playground/Eve 6 bullshit–is an inherently dirty business. Anyone not convinced need only check out a Makers show or talk to one of the Makers. Though they may be swathed in leather and zebra stripes, the Makers embody the raw, concussive,…
