If there were windows in Joe’s Grotto, they’d be steamed up tonight. Almost 400 people are packed into the small Phoenix club, fanning themselves with magazines and ordering extra ice with every drink. The crowd’s getting restless, jockeying for position near the stage and chatting away excitedly. Proprietor Joe Grotto…
Last year, in the dead of summer — you know, the time of year when the sidewalks are still too hot to touch at midnight, and the heat sucks the sweat right out of your pores — Robbers on High Street played the very first show of their West Coast…
I’ve been having nightmares lately, populated by drug addicts, orphans, a woman with her mouth sewn up, and occasionally two skinny Afroed Chicano guys who whisper sinister things in Spanish. They didn’t go away even after I saw the band that’s causing them — the Mars Volta — play live…
I won’t add my voice to the cacophony of complaints about the gratuitous nudity forever on display at Nearly Naked Theatre, in part because I don’t care, but also because it’s bad form to bitch that the players are undraped when we’ve been warned ahead of time. The name of…
“He’s pretty heavy,” Diane Putnam says of her late husband, Gary. “But I’m used to toting him around.” She’s talking about the big-as-a-brick box containing Gary’s ashes that she’s kept with her since he died six years ago after a brief battle with cancer. But there was a week late…
The Arizona Public Service Company’s sale of a one-acre paved parking lot to Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox and her husband smells like trout left rotting in the Phoenix summer sun. APS sold the land to the supervisor and her husband, Earl Wilcox, at a price several hundred thousand…
Driving defines Phoenix the way surfing shapes Venice Beach. Here, in this blacktop desert that stretches to the horizon, we all share in the drive. Behind every steering wheel slumps a stranger. You look through anyone else’s windshield and a driver’s character is no more distinct than a smudged fingerprint…
No disrespect for co-headliners J-Live and Vast Aire (of Cannibal Ox), but the star attraction and the recipient of any spare ice backstage has to be New York’s rap fixture C-Rayz Walz, who was the only three-time champion of the long-running EOW MC Challenge freestyle contest, and was even banned…
Local jazz favorite Jazzola plays on Friday nights. Saturday night features The Cueball Hamilton Duo. On balmy nights, you can enjoy the outside terrace or escape the heat inside the Bistro. Sample Kokopelli’s large selection of Arizona-grown wines – great with a “nosh” plate of cheese, nuts, fruit, chocolate, olives,…
Mercifully, the work in “Water, Water Everywhere” stays clear of the obvious themes you would expect to see in an exhibition in the desert about water. There isn’t a single piece in this group exhibition of artists from around the world that settles for the simple “water equals life” concept…
Like the late, great Rodney Dangerfield, Buffalo wings get no respect, no respect at all. The name “Buffalo” hardly engenders esteem, as that burg’s other contributions to the culture include Millard Fillmore, Vincent Gallo and the Goo Goo Dolls. Probably doesn’t help that the word can be used as a…
It’s late on a warm Thursday night in April, and William Windsor heads to the checkout stand at the Fry’s supermarket at 20th Street and Highland Avenue, in central Phoenix. Customers and cashiers stare at the 5-foot-11, 180-pound man, who is dressed in a pink bonnet, pink shorty dress, and…
THU 9 We might finally see that “Dancing Queen” pop-up we never knew we always wanted when ABBA showcases its homemade books at . . . oh, wait, wrong ABBA. This ABBA acronym stands for “A Buncha Book Artists,” an Arizona State University student book-builder collective that creates original handmade…
Thursday 9 Anderson’s Fifth Estate: Area 51 with AKA (gothic, industrial) Axis/Radius: “Vote for Pedro” Napoleon Dynamite Tour featuring Efren Ramirez a.k.a. Pedro as party host & DJ (hip-hop, dance) Draft House: DJ Dave outta NYC (dance) E-Lounge: DJ Domenica (high energy dance) Garcia’s: Latin Dance Night (Spanish rock/pop, reggaeton,…
It’s remarkable that after a half-decade of audacity, eccentricity and pulverizing hype, the White Stripes still manage to sneak up and genuinely surprise us. Get Behind Me Satan begins with the blasé Dude We’re Rockin’ Out Dude single “Blue Orchid,” but from there it gets infinitely better, not to mention…
As I Lay Dying was the first hardcore band signed to Metal Blade Records. And with Shadows Are Security, its sophomore effort, the quintet has amped up the metal, utilizing a more classic thrash sound. As I Lay Dying also maintains its metalcore foundation, but unlike others in the genre,…
Mick Collins hails from Detroit, but lives in a parallel universe — one in which a vinyl-collecting goofball can actually make records that are as fun, ripping and powerful as those of his jukebox heroes. This stuffed collection of singles is the document that proves it. Disc one is all…
Craig Finn (ex-Minnesotan, ex-Lifter Puller) has the voice of a semi-drunk punk, or maybe a manic street preacher — an exuberant, phlegmy grumble-stumble in line with such brilliant non-singers as Paul Westerberg, Elvis Costello, Shane MacGowan, and Bob Pollard, spitting sharp, wry, highly charged stories of the sacred and the…
Ever wish New Wave had survived in the mainstream? As long as you were in it for the synth and not the Day-Glo, The Epoxies may give you what you need. The female-fronted band offers an updated version of that early ’80s sound, infusing poppy synthesizer beats, catchy punk flavor,…
Once upon a time, sworn fealty to The Cure meant absolute disdain for AC/DC — and vice versa. Morrissey was Bluto to Axl Rose’s Popeye. Back then, It Dies Today wouldn’t have had an audience. But today, thanks to labels like Level-Plane and Trustkill, kids in black-framed glasses rub shoulders…
SAT 6/11Can you imagine a more popular four-hour television show than Univision’s Sábado Gigante? Now, picture a live version of the program that honors the best entertainers in Latino/Latina arts. Saturday, June 11, will be a good night to set the VCR, because the Seventh Annual International Las Palmas de…
THU 6/9Now that the old school’s all grown up, and seminal rap group Sugar Hill Gang is doing festival tours with unlikely matches like Lisa Lisa and Stevie B., Scribble magazine must look to urban culture once again to find the next innovator in underground hip-hop. On Thursday, June 9,…
