History, goes the brutal wisdom, is written by the winners. The dead cannot speak; those who come through the other side intact are, by default if not by choice, the ones left to establish and preserve the official record. Culturally, that gnomic truth often manifests itself in the impulse to…
Jay Farrar, reluctant icon of Americana music, pauses to consider his standing in the alt-country pantheon. It’s not something Farrar seems eager to discuss. After all, it’s been more than 10 years since his first band, Uncle Tupelo, helped kick-start the alternative-country movement with an invigorating blend of rust belt…
It’s always the ones who fail in their chosen field of expertise that are the most fascinating. Always. Poverty-wrecked pulp novelist David Goodis counting nickels for booze and sewing couturier labels into cheap suits at the peak of his form is far more interesting than Elmore Leornard’s latest million-dollar purchase…
Even if hip-hop’s been the dominant form of popular music over the last decade, it’s continually encountered pockets of resistance from people who simply don’t get it, or wish it would go away. Clayton Call and Fabel, Arizona State University seniors, college radio-station DJs and aspiring rappers, both know what…
Is our little Cornelius all growed up now? Keigo Oyamada’s newest album, Point, manages to preserve the wide-eyed sense of wonder that made his previous release so precious, but this time he’s clearly on his best behavior. Cornelius’ last album, Fantasma, released in 1998, was one of those universally acclaimed…
It’s hard to tell where Evans is headed at this point, given the many directions in which she’s been tugged throughout her career. She began as a fairly straightforward soul/R&B crooner, but her involvement with the Notorious B.I.G., whom she married in 1995, and the Artist Formerly Known As Puff…
Funny how quick people are to crown Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell as the kings of honky-tonk, that crossbred country-goes-to-city sound that was born in the scant handful of years before Elvis ripped open a hole into an alternative universe. But where’s Webb Pierce in this party? Pierce had 13…
Even if you get along with your parents, you hardly qualify as a red-blooded American teenager unless you make two crucial musical decisions early on: First, you defiantly reject the old folks’ listening tastes as passé, and second, you find music of your own that’s guaranteed to piss them off…
Frankly, if rock writers didn’t have crazed visionaries to waste ink on, you people would get plenty tired of reading about expertly played tambourine tracks and tearful obbligato passages. No, you’d be reading about Bill Clinton’s three-breasted intern in the Weekly World News like the rest of your weak-willed kind…
High is high, low is low/Everybody wants to get to heaven/But nobody wants to die/Nobody wants to die/Nobody wants to do the don’ts/Don’t the dids/Color outside the lines/Nobody wants to try. Ignore the probability that the above paean to transcendence was written under the influence of amphetamines, hallucinogens, or some…
Sometimes Ralo regrets naming her annual music festival the Earth Mother Mind Jam. The raspy-voiced singer-songwriter/bassist, born Lora Elizabeth Heiniemi, devised the idea for the all-day blowout after relocating from her native Minneapolis to Phoenix in the late ’80s with her band, the Fake McCoys. She had spent the previous…
“Infectious” is a word whose dark side is rarely evoked when used to describe music. Ordinarily, it’s a commendation that denotes hooky euphoria, the kind only found in pop music. But that same spiritual orgasm was blamed by the late academic curmudgeon Allan Bloom — author of The Closing of…
It all starts with the butterflies, those giddy whirlwinds in the stomach — the antithesis of nausea combined with dopey smiles and too many hours spent styling your hair. Then the elation that comes with the chemical pheromone combustion of two people falling for one another. The complexities really begin…
Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel are Mates of State. First the back story: They call San Francisco home by way of Lawrence, Kansas. They are married, very much in love, and their music and relationship form a seamless insular loop. And they make a lot of joyful noise for two…
Watching contemporary “punk” bands such as Blink-182 is like witnessing the evisceration of a movement — its essence gutted and reduced to a few standard moves, no different from watching an overripe Mick Jagger, tongue over crusty lips, trafficking teenage rebellion when the closest he comes to it these days…
Second acts in rock ‘n’ roll: Are they misplaced sentimental journeys, uneasily handled unfinished business, or cynical cash-ins? L.A.’s Concrete Blonde formed in 1987 and enjoyed an early ’90s chart run that culminated in the Top 20 hit “Joey,” a heart-stopping pop gem similar in tone to the Police’s “Every…
The Politics of Dancing. For DJ Paul van Dyk, that’s both an album title and the catch phrase of a scene at a crossroads. Since crashing the industry nearly a decade ago, the German native has become an international sensation in electronic music. His name draws sellout crowds in clubs…
Dave Jensen desperately wanted to work with the band Five Speed.Jensen, singer and guitarist for Before Braille, was so enamored of the driving but melodic emo-punk attack of Five Speed that when he helped put together last year’s impressive local CD compilation Not One Light Red (with former Modified manager…
Though the media’s annoying eggshell-walking has started to subside, most of the toothy hosts of these so-called “entertainment shows” are still being careful to watch their P.C. p’s and q’s. (Of course, they were already attempting to put on a kinder, gentler image before September 11. After all, the public…
Last we heard from Nathaniel Merriweather, he and partner Chest Rockwell were handing out the syllabus for their Handsome Boy Modeling School back in ’99. Since then, Merriweather’s been reabsorbed into his alter ego, Dan “The Automator” Nakamura, who piloted Deltron 3030’s spaceship into our galaxy back in the 2K…
Success has its price, and in the case of Creedence Clearwater Revival that price came in the form of the critical beating the band took during its peak years. It seems that the string of hit albums and Top 40 singles that CCR unleashed between 1968 and 1970 triggered a…
Whether he’s playing Austin’s ancient Saxon or Chicago’s Abbey Pub, Monte Montgomery’s mix of pop-and-roots rock always leaves ’em stunned and smitten. The consensus: Montgomery is a “guitar god” (the phrase pops up all over Montgomery’s clip file). Guitar One magazine even declared him one of America’s best undiscovered players…
