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…
It’s a sound that’s swiftly showing up everywhere, like a suddenly trendy drink embraced by the masses as the perfect tonic for the times. A bracing mix of tough and tender, sweet but street, that somehow makes everybody feel ar-right in these strange, uncertain post-9/11 days. Switch on the radio,…
Martin Sexton is the central character in one of those bootstrapping success stories that Americans love. The performer, who began his career by busking on Boston street corners, has built a supportive fan base of thousands across the nation, yet he remains independent of the machine that perpetuates mediocre talents…
There’s a famous story about Sonny Boy Williamson’s attempt to record with the Yardbirds in the mid-’60s. The band entered the session with the cockiness of emerging British pop stars, almost as though they were doing this broken-down mule a favor just by showing up, but when Sonny Boy began…
If there’s one thing the world most definitely does not need right now, it’s another watery mix CD from some overhyped trance DJ — you know, the ones with the tastefully modernist cover art (invariably featuring a handsome European staring meaningfully into space) and the interminable synth build-ups that eventually…
Top 10 Things to Like About the New Lisa Loeb Album: (10) It’s 100 times better than the new Alanis. And dig: The best track (the dreamy/anthemic “The Way It Really Is”) was co-penned by Glenn Ballard. (9) No “Stay” — none of these dozen tunes is as cloyingly mush-silly…
If hip-hop is indeed “the proverbial sad clown of music,” as New York rapper J-Live proclaimed on 1999’s unreleased and unofficial anthem “The Best Part,” then J-Live himself is quite possibly the art form’s Emmett Kelly. Despite personal and professional heartache, he’s managed to maintain his optimism and love for…
Joy is woefully underrepresented in today’s popular music. Your average rock musician would rather admit to an unironic appreciation of Britney Spears than express something so unfettered — so uncool! — as pure pleasure. So thank God for Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh. On stage, he might come off as your standard-issue,…
