South by Southwest. What does it all mean? Does anybody get anything accomplished there? Are careers made? Boosted? Ignored? Is it an invaluable chance to meet industry insiders and enhance one’s working knowledge of the music business? An opportunity to see the latest groundbreaking pop, rock and roots acts while…
Chuck Cleaver of the Ass Ponys has stories to tell. Some of the stories are about himself growing up in a small Ohio town. There’s the one in which Cleaver found a dead body on his way to high school. Cleaver says it was really no big deal. He was…
If 1994 was the Summer of Punk, what gives for 1995? The Spring of Spunk? The Fall of Funk? John Brannon would go for something like the Year of Junk. Brannon’s the lead howler for Detroit’s Laughing Hyenas, a band that incorporates the kind of junky, blues-based mayhem that inspired…
If they gave out Grammys for ingenuous songwriting, dazzling lyrical word play, supreme originality and courteous telephone manners, Robyn Hitchcock would need a moving van to haul home his trophies. The Grammys being what they are, though, Hitchcock needn’t be reserving shelf space. But that shouldn’t stop you from rushing…
Quick–who did more for rock ‘n’ roll, Martha and the Vandellas or Peter, Paul and Mary? Your first instinct is to go with the girls from Detroit. Martha and the Vandellas’ biggest hits–“Heat Wave,” “Dancing in the Street” and “Nowhere to Run”–were driven by heart-pounding rhythms and what sounded like…
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,…
