Nestled deep in the Mercedes jungle of north Scottsdale sits a little-bitty ol’ piss-ant country place that has not only survived the region’s creeping hoity-toityism, but has thrived. And so has one of its favorite sons. The Handlebar-J and its previous incarnations have held country court at the same location…
Chick Corea is a certifiable musical multiple personality. The 49-year-old pianist is a jazz Sybil bouncing from one distinct character to another with nearly every album. There’s Chick the Fusion Whiz, Chick the Latin Romantic, Chick the Avant-Gardist and most recently, Chick the Conservative Standard Bearer. Jazzbos of every bias…
Four months have passed since Billboard dropped the bomb in its 1990 year-end issue announcing that rock, for seventeen years the dominant genre on the top album charts, had lost its title to rap and danceable pop. So far, the music biz is still waiting for the other dancing shoe…
They are a loud, crude, Jack Daniel’s-guzzling band, with a lead singer that looks like Meat Loaf on steroids. In their home base of Seattle, Washington, they host a public-access porn show, reviewing slasher films a la Siskel and Ebert. They are serial-killer trivia buffs who adopted notorious necrophile-cannibal Edward…
On the cover of a video documenting Todd Rundgren’s latest recording session is a photo of his hands, each waving a symphony conductor’s baton. It is an appropriate symbol for a man who for twenty years has been his own maestro, conducting one of rock music’s most varied careers with…
When Living Colour steps out onto the stage these days and launches into “Elvis Is Dead,” the lyrics and the attitude answer a lot of stupid questions. The band members aren’t freaks. Rock ‘n’ roll is black. Chuck Berry invented it. And Elvis Presley was never the king. “That `King…
A couple of years back, Sonic Youth singer-bassist Kim Gordon interviewed L.L. Cool J for Spin magazine in an attempt to get a feminist/hard-core perspective on rap’s estimable MC. Early in the interview, it became obvious that the two shared little common ground. Their clashes were sometimes comic, as when…
Anyone with a record collection more than a foot wide probably owns a piece of David Sanborn’s unmistakable sound but doesn’t know it. The Stones’ Undercover, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, and David Bowie’s Young Americans all benefit from Sanborn’s wailing alto sax. He’s backed up James Brown, Stevie Wonder,…
Yellow ribbons whip down city streets on the pinned-back antennae of imported Sentras, Camrys, and Accords, wrapping the USA in patriotism like the loosely woven fabric of a giant Ace bandage. On the radio, the premier pop diva of the day belts out the national anthem as if the centuries-old…
Coming soon to your favorite cable-TV dance show: Anthrax? Don’t be too surprised if you see New York’s greasiest headbangers on Club MTV in the next few months. Anthrax is about to release a dance remix of its rap/speed-metal hit, “I’m the Man,” which the band is hoping will shoot…
Marty Stuart has a lot of names–big names–to drop, and he does. But after all, he’s been picking guitars and mandolins alongside C&W luminaries since he was thirteen. He’s earned his bragging rights. “When I first heard Flatt and Scruggs, it blew my mind,” Stuart drawled during a recent telephone…
A few years ago, Manchester, England, was notorious for its underground acid-house clubs where young Brits gobbled X-tacy and other designer hallucinogens and trance-danced ’til dawn. The Charlatans UK singer Tim Burgess was a fixture at these stimulant-fueled shindigs. But Burgess was less interested in the available drugs than the…
Once upon a time, a Colorado alternative band emerged from the semimoribund Denver music scene and began to create a buzz. Loyal homies packed large and small venues. Locally produced cassettes sold out entire runs in record time. The local alternative weekly began championing their cause. Shows in jaded metropolises…
Don’t blame Johnny Cash for his unusual silence in the Eighties. For ten years, the outspoken Cash searched for a place between the growing neo-country Nashville and the wholesale, creased-denim twang crowd of Music Row. His attempts at balance were met with lukewarm reviews. Finally, in 1988, heart surgery looked…
Late August 1984. Half past midnight on the haunches of what has been, for most kids, the first day back to school. Up and down the quiet suburban streets, the bedroom lights that burned brightly all through summer vacation have been snuffed out cold. “Not on a school night,” the…
When you step from the Tucson sun into the Sidewinders’ darkened practice room, you’re temporarily blinded. Once your eyes adjust, you think you’ve stumbled into some way-hip postmodern rock ‘n’ roll video shoot. Located just off Tucson’s downtown railroad tracks, this sprawling warehouse looks like something Demi Moore and Patrick…
King’s X singer-bassist Doug Pinnick is sitting in a greasy hotel coffee shop on East Van Buren, easily maintaining a low-profile despite his freshly starched mohawk and ten-or-so-person entourage. Then a waitress suddenly comes up and makes a request that’s not often made of Pinnick: an autograph. Not that this…
With America at war and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a rock concert tour, perhaps one of the touchiest questions that parents toting their tykes to the TMNT extravaganza are having to deal with is, “Why aren’t the Turtles going over to help our soldiers?” It’s a valid question,…
Turtle Power! Bart Rules! Cowabunga! Ay Caramba! Mention the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Simpsons in the same breath on any grade school playground today, and you’re likely to spark the most spirited “Who’s cooler?” duel since the Monkees versus the Beatles. Rat Fink versus the Trolls. Goofy Grape…
Before getting the call from Paul, session pro Michael Brecker figured he had pretty much squeezed every kind of music imaginable out of his trusty tenor saxophone. Besides recording three highly acclaimed jazz albums on his own and another six with his brother Randy under the moniker the Brecker Brothers,…
Paul Simon prefers to explain his suburban musical globetrotting this way: “We’re sailing cultural seas that haven’t been charted,” he says in a record-company press release, “instead of merely pursuing popularity.” Okay. Love it or hate it. Hail it as a godsend or damn it as heresy. Whatever you think…
When Steven McDonald sees bell-bottom teens parading down L.A.’s Melrose strip, he can’t help but feel responsible. After all, his band Redd Kross was the pioneer in resurrecting misbegotten Seventies music and elephant-leg flares. And now with the current wave of Me Decade nostalgia, it seems fad and fashion have…
