This feels a little like Barnes and Noble offering combined subscriptions to Teen People and Adbusters because they’re both in the magazine section, but I guess I can’t fault the Phoenix Suns and US Airways Center for trying something new: The team is now offering a season ticket package that…
I’m feeling a little guilty about last week’s column, in which I took the crappy popular music of the ’80s to task (High School Music: A Reunion from Hell). Why? It was negative, and generally I like to promote good music instead of baggin’ on bad stuff. I’ve fed my…
Even more than 40 years later, no musical period is more influential to today’s rock ‘n’ roll than the ’60s and early ’70s. Young bands on modern Top 20 radio may not be able to cite a single artist from the 1960s, but it’s still there in their influences from…
Glasspopcorn’s latest video, “My Circle,” features him and his friends buying soda and eating tacos. They stomp on packets of hot sauces, shoot hoops, and ride bikes through Tempe. It’s filled with the inconvenient images he’s known for: He pets a lizard at one point; at another he raps in…
Musician/songwriter Alejandro Escovedo has made a career out of taking chances. His first true band was the San Francisco-based punk outfit The Nuns. Then he joined up with cow-punks Rank & File before forming the country-oriented True Believers with his brothers, eventually hacking out a solo career. His music typically…
It’s been almost three months since Latin-reggae-punk-rock troupe Fayuca dropped its stellar new record, Barrio Sideshow. During that time, the band has spread its sound on the radio airwaves and touring circuit, but now the local boys are gearing up to take over dorm room television sets. Following fellow locals…
It can’t be easy being the other members of Sublime in 2013. On a cynical — but very real — level, you reached your peak fame and earning power in 1996, at the moment your band’s lead singer died and ensured you wouldn’t reach it again. On an idealistic –…
I just got back from my 30th high school reunion in Minot, North Dakota. It was great to see so many of my lifelong friends and classmates. Most of us have spread out across the country, and we all commented on how comfortable and familiar it was to be back…
An anomaly is defined as a “deviation from the normal or common order.” That’s a fitting definition of local rockers Anomaly. The band’s sound walks everywhere but the beaten path — it’s a blend of heavy and harmonized vocals, unrelenting chords and structures, and electronic samples and digital beats that…
There’s not much to say about another stupefyingly hot Phoenix summer that hasn’t already been fired in all caps directly onto your Facebook news feed. It’s another year when Circle K Polar Pop cups might fuse with the blacktop if the mercury rises any further. But it hasn’t scorched the…
Located just an hour and a half north of the Valley and home to more retirees than the average small town, Prescott is better known as a premier Christmas getaway than as an arts community. But it’s a town with strong local values and arms open to touring acts and…
Lost in love? Your relationship too weird for Ann Landers to understand? Trying to discover what comes next in your life or your music? Bring your problems to Ask Magic, your chance to ask Arizona’s reigning slow-jam king for advice on whatever life throws at you. (Click here to ask…
Ahhh, the ceremonial first pitch of a baseball game. When it’s done right, nobody in the stands pays you any attention. When you screw it up, you’re on YouTube forever. Often celebrities are chosen to uphold this grand tradition, and often — most recently Carly Rae Jepsen — they fail…
American Idol Live!, coming to Comerica Theatre next week, is a testament to how much smaller American Idol gets every year as a cultural institution. Don’t get me wrong — it’s still big. Season 11 winner Phillip Phillips’ debut single is still impossible to avoid if you are or have…
So this one time, my brother left a large tube of salami under our bunk bed — because he likes to hoard food — and totally forgot about it for three weeks, until it started to smell so bad that we almost called the paramedics. We looked down there and…
One of the most important parts of being a baseball fan is the crushing certainty that you are The Underdogs and your rivals are getting special treatment from ESPN or Bud Selig or New York-biased media outlets. (If you’re a Mets or Yankees fan, your rivals are getting special treatment…
When people hear I’m new to Phoenix, they immediately want to tell me a few things. The first thing is that it may seem hot at that exact moment, but it will in fact get much hotter, so hot that I will surely die. The second thing — well, something-something…
I’ll bet when you read that headline you thought, “Here we go again . . . Some old dude is going to bash on today’s music.” Wrong, Spanky. In my 48 years, I’ve never said “There’s no good new music these days.” In fact, after 26 years in the music…
If David Lowery were allowed only one word to describe his punk, Middle Eastern, folk, ska, Slavic, Indian, Spanish, psychedelic, country, rock band Camper Van Beethoven, it would be “weird.” Weird that a band with a catalog of entirely dissimilar albums has survived 30 years. Weird that influences include hippies,…
So this one time, my brother left a large tube of salami under our bunk bed — because he likes to hoard food — and totally forgot about it for three weeks, until it started to smell so bad that we almost called the paramedics. We looked down there and…
A few years ago, Kid Rock was at a concert, watching T-shirts sell for $40. He had more reason than most stars to wonder why they were charging so much. He has a T-shirt company of his own, Made in Detroit, and he knows exactly how much it costs to…
You heard about all that #FreeJahar stuff after the Boston Marathon bombings, right? Basically, surviving bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — thanks to some combination of his floppy boy-band hair and whatever it is that causes women to propose to Scott Peterson in jail — has become a bit of a sex-symbol-slash-online-community,…
