Bruce Hamblin, 1950-1996 The common wisdom among members of the Valley’s rockabilly, blues, roots and country music scenes last week was that some band in heaven just picked up one hell of a standup bass player. Longtime Valley musician Bruce Hamblin died September 18 of liver failure. He was 45…
Tom Morello, 31: a leftist radical with a seven-digit savings balance. A Harvard graduate (1986, with honors) who plays guitar for a platinum-selling band with hit songs that advocate class warfare. A reformed metalhead who was born in Harlem. A public supporter of both Amnesty International and the Shining Path,…
WORST REVIEW OF A LOCAL BAND PRINTED OUTSIDE THE VALLEY Review of Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy June issue of Grid The Refreshments continue to bubble along nicely–with a new video in rotation on MTV and a recent glowing write-up in Rolling Stone–but the Tempe outfit took it on the…
Tim Coomer woke up September 11, picked up his morning newspaper, and thought he’d scored a miracle. A short article headlined “Write-in pops up to challenge Arpaio” that ran in the Arizona Republic’s “Election ’96” special section reported Coomer had received enough write-in votes in the primary to put his…
I woke up and winced into the sun. Strange sounds were all around me. Vroom, vroom. “Kill Barney!” “Kill Barney!” “Kill Barney!” Whump! “Yeaaaaaaah!” I sat up, took a long pull from a water bottle and, crouching on all fours, stuck my head through the tent flap to see what…
Ex-Phunk Junkeez rapper Kirk Reznik says he has a nagging pain in his back from the knife his longtime partner and co-MC Joe Valiente stuck there in late August, when Valiente conspired with the crew’s deejay and stage band to kick Reznik out of the group the two of them…
Let us probe the magic, the mystery that is Ariel. The name means “Lion of God” in both Russian and Hebrew. And Ariel the pop piano man claimed it years before that little Disney hussy in The Little Mermaid. It was 1985, to be exact. The year Arkadi Efimovitch Bogoslavsky…
KISS America West Arena August 21, 1996 “Dude, didja go see KISS last Wednesday?” “Oh, hell, yeah. You see Gene’s boots, dude?” “The dragon heads?” “Old-school, bro. Straight offa the Destroyer cover. Six-inch metal teeth for platforms, red eyes that shoot laser beams and shit. Now that’s rock ‘n’ roll.”…
According to the kids who were inside the Inclusion Art Space the night it got raided, it’s hard to say what gave away the scout team of undercover cops first–the fake nose rings, the advanced age, the silly clothes or the ill-informed attempts to score drugs at a straight-edge punk…
Prologue You stand accused of violating a national park closure and bicycling in a prohibited area–how do you plead? Rama Jon: “Guilty.” Long Tall: “Guilty.” Wheeze: “Guilty.” Forest: “Guilty.” Dangerous Dave: “Guilty.” The Honorable Steven Verkamp glared at the five men before him. The U.S. magistrate for Grand Canyon National…
One of the first things you notice about Simone Grey is the violet eyes. They’re contacts, of course, but set against her black hair and beautifully sculpted, unmistakably Middle Eastern face, the effect is still striking. And, like a lot of things about Simone, carefully calculated. There are the black…
Here’s my variation on Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck if . . .” routine. Call it “You might live in the Valley if . . .” The kickoff item: “You might live in the Valley if . . . you go to a yard sale where people are…
One summer day A.D. 525, a Buddhist monk from India named Ta Mo arrived at the base of Mount Shaoshi in what would later become the Henan province of central China. He took in the scenery, thought or said something to the effect of “This is the place,” and promptly…
Skinheads in a mosh pit are like barracudas in a swimming pool–they ruin all the fun, and if you see them coming, the wise move is to hop your ass out of there pronto. I knew better than to stick around when I saw a pack of skins pop from…
I didn’t have a very patriotic Fourth of July. I burned most of the morning on a quest for a smut video and the rest of the day flaying my ears with punk rock and dodging skateboards. Let me explain. About a month ago, publicists in L.A. started asking if…
“I’m stripping it down,” says Laurie Anderson from her Manhattan studio. “I’m going to be the avant-garde of the technological backlash.” Anderson speaks of her new live performance piece, “The Speed of Darkness,” a program of songs and storytelling she is about to take on a minitour of Western cities…
This year of our Lord is just more than half gone, and what does American pop music have to show for it? The Fugees, a superb second effort from Porno for Pyros and the return of Patti Smith. Those are the only three standouts in my “pro” column. Under “so-so,”…
Tori Amos Symphony Hall, Salt Lake City June 21, 1996 I’ve got trouble. Southwest Airlines flight 1787 is scheduled to depart Salt Lake City for Phoenix at seven o’clock on a Monday morning. The departures monitor just inside the door reads 6:53, and the status message beside my gate flashes…
Maybe it’s the alien radiation emanating from Hangar 18 at nearby Wright Patterson Air Force Base, or maybe there’s just not a whole helluva lot else to do there. For whatever reason, Dayton, Ohio, has burst into one of the most prolific and unlikely hotbed rock scenes of the decade…
Metallica Load (Elektra) Nice haircuts, guys. You and Soundgarden better not get your wardrobe trailers mixed up, or things are gonna get a bit confusing on the Lollapalooza main stage this summer. Whose idea was it, anyway? To gussy yourselves up like a Josta marketer’s vision of a grunge band…
“What do you mean I don’t know metal? Hell, back in the day, I butt-rocked with the best of them.” Well, that’s what I would’ve said to the irate Crushed fan if she’d bothered to leave a name and number earlier this month when she called to dress me down…
Before death metal hacked into the fray with its thesaurus-straining scenes of “multifarious carnage,” heavy-metal librettists generally confined themselves to four primary topic areas: vixen sex, war visions, trick-or-treat occultism and blue-faced teenage rebellion. The stuff of dreams for 15-year-old Reagan-baby boys, slipping into their headphones and away from the…
