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…
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…
God bless L.A.’s the BellRays, for they — more than any other band in the superficially inseminated “Entertainment Capital of the World” — know what it means to rock. No, not “rock” in the same way as those bands slugging it out at the Coconut Teaszer every weekend that think…
Aaron Blount, lyricist and guitarist for Austin-based Knife in the Water, is but two degrees of separation from president-elect George Dubya, kind of. “He used to be my dad’s next-door neighbor, years back,” Blount laughs. “It’s really weird to see him on TV now. My dad spoke to him a…
It was the best of years; it was the Durst of years. Of the latter, well, Jim Dandy once had his moment in the sun, too, and the critics were right all along: Black Oak Arkansas sucked, the stoned morons who were into the band eventually grew up (or died…
Thirty-six years ago, at the height of Beatlemania — the phenomenon, not the stage show — some cynics pooh-poohed the notion that the unprecedented hysteria around the Four Lads from Liverpool would endure. (“What are you going to do when the bubble bursts?” a smug, apparently drunk Tallulah Bankhead sneered…
Historically, the tango has been at least as resistant to change as church music — odd, given that the former was born in the whorehouses of Argentina, the one place you’d think anything goes. Not so, as Astor Piazzolla discovered in the ’60s when tweaking the rigid dance music’s format…
During the five-year period he spent in seclusion at his home in New York’s Dakota Building, John Lennon periodically issued dispatches to the outside world confirming that he was content to be a devoted bread-baking husband who never left the house. The reality, as author Robert Rosen tells it in…
Listening to this new collection of John Prine’s sparse, gravel-and-molasses renditions of his own early material, it brings to mind how popular music has changed during the past three decades. When Prine first recorded most of these songs, serious-minded “singer-songwriters” were everywhere, soothing the battered spirits of aging hippies with…
“I’m not a musicologist,” Dave Alvin insists for the third time in 15 minutes, “but let’s say you have a certain amount of knowledge that there was a higher percentage of, maybe, Africans from the northeast quadrant of the continent in a particular section of the American South, as a…
TV’s Seinfeld may have shone an unflattering light on the notion of “regifting,” but that shame doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on the music industry. Every year the surviving major labels extract a dozen songs from previously released or newly deleted Christmas albums, slap them onto new “Various Artists”…
The great major-label mergings and purgings of the last several years have cost hundreds of people their jobs — but another tragic result is that many artists have been trapped in record-release limbo. The rootsy rock band Whiskeytown is one of them, and that’s left rock fans unable to hear…
Truly original albums are pretty thin on the ground these days. Everything has a genre, everything has a formula, usually in the form of a very tight, narrow sandbox in which steroidal young men fling themselves about and complain about their mommies. Poor dears . . . Once again, pop…
While the sounds of seven Harleys revving, six angels leaping and, of course, five pool cues to the head won’t necessarily ensure that consumers will pay good money for the “experience,” they are attention-getters. In the case of British bikers the Alchemysts, Zero Zen’s opener, a feedback ‘n’ splatter instrumental…
If you’re like me, you tend not to pay much attention to the actual CD itself; you just tear the plastic wrapping and peel off whatever annoying adhesives the company has seen fit to slap all over the case, take the disc out and pop it in without really looking…
The Joshua Tree home of musicians Victoria Williams and her husband, Mark Olson, is not easy to find. Situated on 10-odd acres, a mile or so off the main road on an unmarked, unpaved street — trail might be a better word — the home rests in the middle of…
As we approach the twilight of each calendar year, it seems music critics are overly eager to proclaim the preceding 12 months as the “Year of” something. You know, “The Year of Grunge,” “The Year of Women in Rock,” “The Year of Electronic Music” and on and on. But if…
Gumbo has queried the finest psychics to be found at the Valley’s swap meets, seeking predictions regarding the state of music in 2001. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Jazz, 2001: The heavy influence of conservative egomaniacal trumpeter Wynton Marsalis on egomaniacal director Ken Burns’ highly viewed epic documentary, Jazz, will…
