The Beat Angels at Long Wong’s? Unthinkable? Impossible? Perhaps, considering the bile that the Angels’ fey, puckish singer Brian Smith has spewed on the Mill Avenue “scene” in these very pages. But apparently, Smith and the boys’ insatiable need to simply “entertain” won out; last Saturday, “bile” turned to “smile”…
The homemade silver cross hanging from the dash-mounted compass swings back and forth as America’s Polka King barely keeps his Olds Cutlass within the white-lane lines of a road in Mesa. Frank Yankovic, 80 years old this July, is weaving tales from his 65-year reign (well, he wasn’t officially crowned…
Morrissey World of Morrissey (Sire/Reprise) Back in the Sixties, patchwork albums like Magic Bus: The Who on Tour or the Rolling Stones’ December’s Children and Flowers were the norm. Part rip-off, these collections of B sides and unreleased-in-the-U.S. tracks were often padded with selections already available on other albums without…
It was Billy Joel who wrote the immortal line “Only the good die young,” but I’ll bet even B.J., as wise and talented as he is, would have a hard time fitting Bob Stinson into that equation. Bob, late of the Replacements, late of planet Earth (he died of an…
I hate musicals. And I will continue to feel contempt for the genre until the audience stops clapping after every damned song. It’s an infuriating habit. It means that most of us consider a musical a mere collection of tunes–at best, a happy diversion, a pleasant spectacle. We don’t expect…
It is a strange breed of rock ‘n’ roll band, this Coctails. The six-year-old quartet’s ethos does not include anything to do with sex, drugs or even booze. The members don’t care about getting famous, and they’re not in it for the money. “When we started, we were all visual…
Throwing Muses University (Sire) Throwing Muses used to be an easy band to loathe. Chief Muse Kristin Hersh wrote wildly inconsistent songs and sang them with the vocal equivalent of buckshot on broken glass. Rock critics from the indie underground drooled ecstatically over the Muses in part because the noise…
Dag, and Mother May I Neeb Hall, Arizona State University campus, Tempe February 22, 1995 If you ever thought that being signed to a major label was the ticket to Easy Street, you should have made it to this show, a double helping of rising acts recently inked to majors…
Now the stage is bare and there’s emptiness all around. Facing his audience after almost seven years in the wilderness, it’s only natural that this beloved performer should be wracked with fear. Will the old magic work again? Will this crowd get fidgety and have to go to the bathroom…
For years, the crumbling of the British Empire has been mirrored by the shrinking chart fortunes of British bands in the colonies. Sure, at one time Britain gave us the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Sex Pistols, the Police and the Smiths–but…
God knows what I was thinking. I’m no rap fan, I hate Candlebox, and I hate sports. I know even less about sports than I know about music. Yet for some reason, I allowed myself to be talked into going to that live MTV/All-Star broadcast thing at America West Arena…
Russell Sepulveda wears a cowboy hat and sings with a twang. His songs leave room for pedal-steel-guitar breaks, and his bands–both of ’em–cover C&W tunes by the likes of Buck Owens and Gram Parsons. Sound like a country boy? Not quite. “Country music today is so far from its roots,”…
Many times over the last four decades it seemed like Ronnie Dawson was on his way to being somebody. At the ripe age of 17, he was picking and yelping his go-to-hell rockabilly on American Bandstand. He was part of seminal rock impresario Alan Freed’s stage shows. He played on…
A frog? “Yeah,” confirms Emo, tour manager for G. Love and Special Sauce, “last night they played so long, somebody threw a frog up onstage.” A live frog? “No” he says, voice turning thoughtful over the phone. “They must have brought it from a high school or something. It was…
Let us now perform a general dissection of the various forms of rock ‘n’ roll music being performed in the Valley of the Sun. There are the pop guitars on Mill Avenue that go jingle jangle jingle; there is the bouffant metal of Phoenix; you’ve got your neohippie groove funk;…
The box is full; time once again to throw the tapes in the machine and let the opinions spew out. But first, this: Apologies to Spinning Jenny; the title of the band’s new CD is not Piata Full of Beans (as I wrote last week), but Piata Full of Bees…
“Should I get into the fact that producers and rockers really love Arizona because of the tit bars?” asks Jon Harris, owner of Phase Four Studios, a 24-track Phoenix recording facility. “And golf, too. I haven’t met a musician who doesn’t play golf. All these cats into heavy metal saying,…
Of the 43 bands from the Valley that applied for the South by Southwest music conference this year, guess how many were accepted? I’ll give you a hint: No, I won’t. I’ll just tell you. Other than the Refreshments (who are attending under a business arrangement between New Times and…
Texas singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston’s either a nut or a genius. Singer Kathy McCarty says he’s both, and she should know; McCarty’s seen Johnston battle terrifying cycles of manic depression, replete with periodic stays in mental hospitals. She’s also seen Johnston write and perform some of the most honest and aching…
You may not believe this, but I went to church on Sunday. The Electric Church, that is, to worship at the altar of Jimi Hendrix. Actually, I was at Tower Records to check out the latest batch of releases from Loompanics Press–slim, fascinating volumes on stuff like lock-picking, surviving in…
It’s a Saturday night in 1980 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Chelsea, the Dead Kennedys and X have all come and gone, disgorging an awesome load of punk rawk to the dripping crowd that packs the hall. These are three groups at the height of their…
You do not want to be Dick Dale’s guitar. The Undisputed King of Surf Guitar does not merely play his instrument, he punishes it. Forget about the word “nuance.” He breaks heavy-gauge strings like they were bands of saliva, wrenching a nonstop, high-speed onslaught of reverbed, staccato licks that shred…
