Whenever and wherever Junior Brown performs, you can bet your Telecaster that a gaggle of guitar geeks will be standing in front of the stage, their mouths wide open, drooling over Brown’s frenzied fretwork on “Big Red,” his custom-made guit-steel. The hybrid instrument, which combines an electric guitar with a…
Jerry Lawson doesn’t get rattled easily. Lawson, the lead singer of the Persuasions — arguably the finest a cappella vocal group of all time — has experienced just about everything the music biz has to offer over the last four decades: He’s made 21 albums, toured with Aretha Franklin and…
We regard the Breeders as perhaps you regard your no-account, jail-prone Uncle Bob — if he shows up for Thanksgiving dinner at all, you’re happy and relieved. Even if he’s wearing his pants inside out and drooling all over the table. Yeah, savor that image. Title TK certainly embodies it…
The difficulty with keeping it real in punk lies in the danger of repetitiveness. That’s where bands like Sweden’s the Hives come in. Singer Howlin’ Pelle Alqvist has got the squealing, hell-bound, late-adolescent shriek of Johnny Rotten before he went MTV, and the band grinds out a dozen or so…
Purveyors of the myth that trance music germinated in Detroit in the late ’70s or on the beaches of Goa, India, sometime after that had better hope that not too many Day-Glo-sporting members of the trance nation get their hands on Egyptian drummer Mahmoud Fadl’s new The Drummers of the…
It’s a sad testament to pop music that it’s arrived at a point where imitation is regularly mistaken for invention. There is little that music junkies love as much as easy reference points, and it seems the quickest way to curry both cash and credibility is to mine the familiar…
In Phoenix you can more readily measure the passage of time by the limited life expectancy of live venues than by the forward projectory of Valley bands. But there’s a group that started out playing battles of the bands, bowling alleys and matinee all-ages shows at the Mason Jar, where…
The Aereo-Plain cover photo looks like a close-up shot of a grasshopper, though it’s only a wild-haired John Hartford, wearing broken aviator goggles, going nose to nose with the camera. The picture could clear a field of crows, and the music inside — no less jarring — sounds like it…
It’s been three weeks since the artist currently known as Prince helped to christen the Dodge Theatre with a show that left the sellout crowd, well, enraptured. The three-hour performance by Prince and his band — which included inimitable alto saxophonist Maceo Parker of peak James Brown fame — was…
Rule number one for aspiring performers: Always know the room you’re working. After all, Ozzy Osbourne might be the self-proclaimed “Prince of Fucking Darkness,” but when surrounded by high-powered, tight-ass pols at the recent White House Correspondents Dinner, he was dapper and well-behaved, with nary a dove sacrifice all night…
The 1992 opera for which Alice was originally written has yet to reach our shores, but it’s hard to believe it could fulfill the promise of a playwright marrying a musician better than the album itself does. Kathleen Brennan has influenced Tom Waits’ music ever since they met in 1980,…
With Neil Young taking a shot at soul-man sophistication on his new one, someone has to make use of his godfather-of-grunge claim until he gets back to rocking. On his fourth album, Seattleite Damien Jurado, who made a sort of latter-day Harvest with his plaintive 1999 disc Rehearsals for Departure,…
They came out of upstate New York by way of Canada, Arkansas and other newly paved parts of the heartland. Calling themselves The Band, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson arrived fully formed and well-rehearsed in 1968, looking a bit like Jesuit missionaries, and Bob…
David Bazan has always been a soul searcher. As the driving force behind Pedro the Lion, Bazan has made a career of examining the intricacies and shifting dynamics of relationships — between men and women, parent and child, God and man, siblings, and all points between. Initially a stripped-down, acoustic…
Country legend Merle Haggard is on the phone from his hotel room in Tucson. He performed there last night, and right after this interview, he’ll jump on the tour bus and head for another show in El Paso. Despite the decades-long grind of travel and repetitious interviews, the 65-year-old Hag…
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“Most people in bands don’t drink if they’re serious and professional,” Bono testified during Peter Buck’s recent air rage trial — and anyone who understands how absurd the words “serious” and “professional” are in connection to rock ‘n’ roll may also understand why the Replacements — and not U2 or…
About halfway through her new live record, MTV Unplugged 2.0, Lauryn Hill stops to consider her public image. “I don’t know what the press is saying,” she tells the rapt, borderline-fawning crowd, “’cause I don’t really listen to the press too much, but I know the view is I’m emotionally…
If Elf Power had emerged in 1985 instead of 1994 from Athens, Georgia, it’d most likely be lumped in with the (mostly) ill-fated Paisley Underground bands (Rain Parade, the Three O’Clock, Dream Syndicate) or the more general niche of “neo-psychedelic” (the Church, Bevis Frond, Spacemen 3). Fortunately, there’s been a…
Dead of a heart attack at age 52 on January 1, 1997, Texas troubadour Townes Van Zandt can’t enjoy his recent resurrection. He’d surely get a kick out of the recent tribute album Poet, which assembled the likes of Steve Earle, Guy Clark, Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, and the Cowboy…
In 1998, around the time Painted From Memory — his team-up with Burt Bacharach — hit stores, Elvis Costello gave up on the idea of playing rock ‘n’ roll, or so he said. But he didn’t really need to put it in words: Costello had already spent much of the…
Before www.truckersonspeed.com was up and running, all routes of Truckers on Speed Web information led to P.A.T.T. Who’s P.A.T.T.? Parents Against Tired Truckers, that’s who! Ever since Mothers Against Drunk Drivers realized they were M.A.D.D. (cool!), folks have been organizing under any cause, just as long as the initials spell…
