The Valley may not be hyped as one of the great jazz meccas on the planet, but it has long had something that more ballyhooed areas don’t have: a genuine scene, a community where jazz players intermingle, exchange ideas, and sit in with each other’s bands. For years, the command…
Technology has advanced exponentially since my birth nearly a quarter-century ago. These days, computers ensure that the first letter of each sentence one types is capitalized, the Internet provides information and pornography to anyone capable of clicking a button, one space station is nearly used up and another one is…
The Prissteens Scandal, Controversy & Romance (Almo Sounds) If you ever wondered what the great girl groups of the early ’60s would do in this bolder, more sexually frank era, an answer comes in the form of the debut album by New York quartet The Prissteens. This three-quarters-female band (drummer…
Speedo. Petey X. Atom. Apollo 9. N.D. J.C. 2000. Who are these impressive, vaguely dangerous-sounding men? Gang members? Comic-book heroes? Members of one of the greatest rock bands of all time? Well, if you picked the last, then you should feel pretty clever. I’m talking about the mighty Rocket From…
If matchbox 20 is the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of McDonald’s, then Todd Snider is the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of El Fronterizo bar down at 14th Street on Van Buren in Phoenix. It’s where the smell of stale cigarettes, unfulfilled dreams and a thousand midnights of being drunk all…
Jeff Buckley Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk (Columbia Records) When singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley drowned in the Mississippi River last May, the media treated it like a pop-culture footnote, of little interest to anyone but his rabid cult. Years from now, when the dust finally clears, informed music fans may…
For most of the night, America West Arena was merely the picture of reverent adoration. But there were moments during Eric Clapton’s May 25 Memorial Day show when reverence turned to fanaticism, when Slowhand’s piercing Strat seemed to lift whole sections of people out of their seats. It happened during…
In an age when program directors are less inclined to stick their necks out than a turtle, the creators of Radio Free Phoenix–Dwight Tindle and Danny Zelisko–have launched a radical Sunday-evening show (7 p.m. to midnight) that they hope will shake up mainstream radio or, at the very least, air…
Tori Amos From the Choirgirl Hotel (Atlantic Records) It’s easy enough to understand the cult of Tori Amos. In an era dominated by literal-minded rockers in baseball caps and baggy shorts, she dares to plunge into the mystic, to use songwriting as a vehicle for escape from mundane reality into…
Talk about your double-edged compliments. For six years now, the Piersons have patiently nodded while fans tell them how much their tough-but-tender songs and whiskey-soaked roadhouse punk call to mind the Replacements. There are worse things in the world than being compared to one of the greatest bands ever to…
You’re flying high in April–shot down in May! Ah well, at least Frank squeezed an extra nine months past the Sinatra Death Watch. For 10 months, the National Enquirer, The Globe and The Star held their ravenous vigil waiting for “The Voice” to give out. “Sinatra: The Last Sandwich! The…
Garbage Version 2.0 (Almo Sounds) If a mad scientist tried to build the ultimate alt-rock band for the late ’90s, it would probably sound a lot like Garbage. This unlikely musical marriage of three placid American studio graybeards and a fiery Scottish femme fatale vocalist couldn’t cover its bases better…
Typical Tempe guitar-rock isn’t so typical anymore. Not if a recent twin bill featuring Gloritone and Sleepwalker is any indication. The Saturday-night Nita’s Hideaway show on May 9 was an eye-opener in a variety of ways, a series of mini-epiphanies that featured some of the same, a lot of the…
There’s a lovely little girl a few trailers down from me who has that guard up. That barrier of self-denial that is inevitably raised in kids when unnatural things occur. A self-defense mechanism used before all the misfires accumulate and things like alcohol and meth grab them by the throat…
Everyone knows that progressive rock died in the late ’70s, right? The only question is when the patient actually expired. Was it the moment that Johnny Rotten first leaned into a microphone and howled, “I am an antichrist”? Or was it the day that Yes buckled to the winds of…
Sonic Youth A Thousand Leaves (DGC Records) Like Karl Stockhausen or John Cage, Sonic Youth has always exerted more power as an influence, name-dropped by other musicians, than as an act actively listened to and enjoyed by real people. Perhaps for this reason, the veteran avant-rock foursome has long had…
Corky Siegel tends to choose his words carefully. For instance, when asked for his opinion of other artists, like himself, who’ve made the leap from popular to classical music, the Chicago native judiciously avoids any critiques because he thinks that such talk is detrimental to his own creative flow. And…
Modest Mouse just does not give a fuck. For two weeks, the tape recorder jacked into my telephone has been sitting still, waiting for singer/guitarist Isaac Brock’s voice to come through the line and answer a few simple questions. The Issaquah, Washington, threesome is somewhere on the East Coast, playing…
College towns tend to spawn millions of bands, most of them worth slightly less than shit. Take Tempe, for instance, where I live. A hundred cover bands vying for frat-boy dollars at strip-mall bars, and another hundred grabbing at the coattails of a sound that was curiously successful half a…
Eddie Kelly likes to say that he reacts with extreme emotion to everything. Half an hour into an interview at Chez Nous–where his snaky hair braids, chin piercing, elaborate right bicep tattoo and dark lipstick make him stick out like Trent Reznor at an Up With People show–I’ve seen little…
Twenty years ago, Elvis Costello gleefully sang that he wanted to “bite the hand that feeds me.” Costello’s attack on timid radio programmers was hardly the first or last example of a rocker spewing venom at the industry that provided him with a living. In fact, the music-biz diatribe song…
Jorge Hernandez was an 18-year-old accordionist, a Mexican immigrant, when one night in a Los Angeles club he heard a woman sing a song about two drug smugglers. The song unfolded like a film. It told the story of a man and woman–he an illegal, she a Chicana from Texas–smuggling…
