John Cale’s first solo album, released two years after his bitter break with the Velvet Underground, was something of a shock for those who remembered his final contributions to the band on White Light/White Heat. Vintage Violence, sporting a cover showing Cale staring impassively from behind an opaque mask, was…
Does the world need yet another live Neil Young album? If your response lingers upon shuddering memories of Frampton Comes Alive!, then vacates into the realm of Pearl Jam-does-25-live-CDs abject boredom, you’re probably reading the wrong review. For Young, among all contemporary performers still extant (the Dead don’t count, despite…
When Kurt Cobain’s mother, Wendy O’Connor, cried to the Associated Press, “I told him not to join that stupid club,” she wasn’t talking about Columbia House. She was referring to the exclusive rock-stars-dead-at-27 fraternity. But membership has its privileges. If you’re one of those die-young elite who lament over a…
When the idea was first hatched, no one could’ve imagined that this week’s Scotti-Stock concert — a local music extravaganza to benefit Piersons/Beat Angels bassist Scott Moore, who was involved in a near-fatal traffic accident last October — would have taken on such a profound meaning. Relying heavily on the…
The problem isn’t what to say about Ireland’s remarkable Chieftains, it’s where to begin. And, as Paddy Moloney might say, when in doubt, one simply begins at the beginning. In 1963, piper Moloney, late of the traditionalist folk group Ceoltóiri Cualann, recruited a band of fellow musicians in order to…
On January 10, last Wednesday as I write this, MTV premièred a 90-minute made-for-television movie titled Anatomy of a Hate Crime, based on the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a famous case you might remember. Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man who attended the University of Wyoming at Laramie, was beaten…
The thing about Rush fans — Hello! I know you’re out there, I can hear you breathing through your mouths! Is this thing on? — is that, by definition, they missed the boat, victims of a pop-culture-induced inferiority complex. Y’see, Rush, forming in Toronto circa ’69 by Gary Lee Weinrib,…
In 1989, zoologist Mark Carwardine and author Douglas Adams (the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series) traveled around the world, taking pictures of species on the verge of extinction. Poaching, hunting, industrial fallout, rampant disease and a variety of other influences were cutting into herd sizes and forever altering ecological…
He wanders into the lobby of New Times’ Dallas, Texas, office looking not a little lost and anonymous. It’s little surprise that no one asks him his business or offers him assistance, as his is not a recognizable face, and even when it’s revealed to a couple of curious passersby…
Marketing prowess being what it is, the three surviving Doors, along with impresario/hagiographer/leech/keeper of the flame Danny Sugerman, are seasoned pros at polishing the late Lizard King’s scales, and a current round of activity offers an unprecedented measure of good news/bad news.Stoned Immaculate: The Music of the Doors, of course,…
It’s nearly midnight on New Year’s Eve, and the Arizona Roadhouse and Brewery is packed. The place is filled with revelers and roots music courtesy of the Rustic Record label and its cohorts: the Trophy Husbands, Heather Rae and the Moonshine Boys, Nitpickers, Grave Danger, Mark Insley, Chicken. As the…
If the Spice Girls were the pabulum for our Daughters of the Glorious Revolution, Kittie is the bitchy manifestation of their terminally insufferable adolescence. To a generation of girls who raised their spangly braceleted wrists in the girl power salute when they were 8, this is the rigid digit. Paperdoll…
Life’s little disappointments, parts 68-70: That punk rock turned Lynyrd Skynyrd into the punch line of a thousand bubba jokes; that the Replacements didn’t split up after loony guitarist Bob Stinson left; and that Steve Earle forsook dope-shootin’ and hell-raisin’ for personal sobriety and “serious” art. (Okay, I’m kidding about…
With everyone and his brother shying away from the blitzkrieg of drum and bass (including some of its best known torch carriers; see Photek and LTJ Bukem’s latest albums), dance music producers and fans are finding rekindled fascination in the kinder, gentler 4/4 throb submitted by disco. House, as in…
Philly beat combo Nixon’s Head professes no interest in Britney Spears’ abs, has no stake in the future of Napster, and doesn’t seem very inclined to update the résumé by switching to Clinton’s Head. The six-piece does, however, state clearly for the record (in its bio), “It’s never been a…
Sometimes I feel that it was a higher source that put us together. We just vibe naturally. — Fatlip on his relationship with his cohorts in the Pharcyde, 1995 “Everything right now with this album is basically a hell of a compromise,” says the Pharcyde’s Romye, who also goes by…
It seems fitting that as the curtain comes down on 2000, we should reflect on our personal obsessions. In the same year that saw musical fetishism come out of the proverbial closet — thanks in large part to the big-screen adaptation of High Fidelity — a celebration of those odd…
The last few months of 2000 have proven fruitful for Valley music. With a series of high-profile CD releases and promising debuts from a number of new bands, the scene seems to have escaped the typical year-end doldrums. But it’s also been a bittersweet time, the winter air heavy with…
It was a couple months back that a musician flagged us down at a club with his band’s new CD in one hand and a list of gripes in the other. Specifically, this aspiring Valley talent was bitching about how we do things here at the Mail or Muse Department…
Maybe it’s the Decembral thinning of the desert air, or maybe I just can’t handle my Mickey’s Big Mouth the way I used to . . . but whatever it is, these three EPs are going a long way toward buoying my spirits through the cold winter weeks, and so…
Pete sells out, and then some: Since opening his own Internet kiosk (www.eelpie.com), the Who’s songwriter-guitarist has opened the vaults and introduced American shoppers to the value of buying music by the pound (conversion rates being what they are). Earlier in the year, he finally unloaded the Lifehouse baggage he’s…
Berry Gordy may have run a tighter shop over at Motown, but it was Jim Stewart’s Stax Records in Memphis that was the real heart and, well, soul of 1960s and ’70s soul music. Originally a budget-minded operation founded by a failed white country fiddle player, Stax Records evolved into…
