If Brian Grillo had opted to concentrate on a career in dancing, he might’ve spent the summer wearing a double-barreled torpedo bra as one of Madonna’s boy toys. According to the Lock Up singer, the breathless blonde so liked his boogie ability that she asked him to gyrate on one…

At any given moment in Sun City tonight, it’s a good bet that some nightclub act will be playing “New York, New York.” Lou Ives, who has played Sun City with his wife Lou Ann, has worked up a theory on the “New York, New York” phenomenon. “If you go…

Yo! Sun City! Get ready to rock ‘n’ roll! That hip-swiveling sound is bound to move next door any day now, and there’s nothing you can do to keep it out. No, we’re not talking about the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheelchairs tour stopping at the Sundome. We’re referring to the…

A mere two months after the release of her debut album, Tracy Chapman snapped a stadium full of people to attention at a Nelson Mandela tribute concert in England. But not long before Chapman sold the first of her fourteen million or so records, Phoenician Rick Cyge says, the folkie…

Tracy Chapman is not black for the same reason New Kids on the Block are black. In the music industry, cigar-chompers, not chromosomes, decide the ebony-or-ivory question. They’ve determined that R&B–yes, even New Kids’ R&B–is black and that contemporary folk is “un-black.” Of course, if Chapman were to change her…

Where the Heck Is Mr. Fun? (Or Up and Down the Donut With Frank) (Local tape) Galen Herod has always come off like a lovable spaz on stage, regaling audiences with herky-jerky post-new-wave songs and bad jokes. Where the Heck Is Mr. Fun? is a take-home version of Herod, packing…

Besides trading lines with R&B singers and jazz trumpeters, hip-hop acts have been joining up with blues crooners, punk poets and yes, art-rock bands. It was Kane’s ability to hold his own against all those jazz greats that proved hip-hop could compete with any musical form. The primary hip-hop rite…

Celebrities, smoke and sweat clog the Hole in the Wall, a tiny bar just up the road from the legendary Antone’s in Austin, Texas. The Cowbillys, whose members hail from places like Tempe and South Phoenix, are playing the most important gig of their lives–an upwardly mobile showcase at a…

Dear Boss, I’ve gone through an awful lot to get this story for New Times, but what happened to me this morning is the last straw. As you recall, you wanted me to write something about State Senator Jan Brewer’s bill forbidding the sale of record albums with dirty lyrics…

The year was 1967, and the Beatles had just struck it rich with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was an album that pandered mercilessly to a generation of hippies too stoned on acid to realize it was the most globulent, sugar-covered thing the Fabricated Four had ever committed…

On the first Saturday in December, the hip-hop capital of Phoenix–if there is such a thing–turned out to be a hall on a side street near Seventh Avenue and Camelback called Rockin’ Freddy’s. Inside, a deejay spun funk and rap until Shatonya Davis took the stage for a performance that…

In the heavy-metal game these days, it’s hard to tell what’s Spinal Tap and what’s not. When a musician puts a cucumber in his pants, is it hilarious or just painfully true to the genre? And when a group thinks up song titles like “Iron Cock” and “How Delicious She…

As you’re no doubt aware, we’ve been granted Top 10/Bottom 10 licenses by the proper authorities. In other words, these are official lists of what was good and bad about Eighties music. If you see similar lists elsewhere and someone tries to pawn them off as the real thing, just…

1. PRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION Around the World in a Day (Paisley Park, 1985). Prince thought he was making Sgt. Pepper II and forgot he was the world’s premier funkateer. Then again, whenever Prince stepped out of character–witness his acting–it turned out to be a blunder. 2. NEIL YOUNG Trans…

BORN YESTERDAY Ten albums from the Sixties and Seventies that sounded better in the Eighties: 1. THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO The Velvet Underground & Nico (MGM/Verve, 1967). While everyone else was doing peace and love in 1967, Lou Reed and John Cale explored the degenerate, gritty, stinging reality of…

Ten acts that recorded in the Seventies that shouldn’t have gone near a studio in the Eighties. 1. THE RAMONES: Their one-joke, three- chord escapades stopped being amusing sometime around 1979. Dee Dee even went solo as a reborn rapper. What’s the punch line? 2. PATTI SMITH: With 1975’s Horses,…

Ten acts that recorded in the Eighties that shouldn’t go near a studio in the Nineties. 1. R.E.M.: If any band ruled the underground in the Eighties, it was this Athens, Georgia, quartet. But the group’s steady ascent from clubs to arenas has dissipated its energy; all that’s left is…

If you thought it was wacky, cool, normal or stupid when everyone in the world from critics to moshers started liking Led Zeppelin a few years ago, check this out: In the time since, “Zeppelin” has become an entire category of music, and scientists have come up with Zeppelogical studies…

Two years ago, Del Fuegos front man Dan Zanes stood in the place where he was and watched his world spring a major leak. “My band was falling apart, the record company situation was falling apart, and my songwriting was falling apart,” Zanes says. The band that had once thrilled…

Where, in the name of dudehood, is the next Bob Dylan? Why, he’s cowering in the closet, right next to his out-of-tune acoustic guitar, that’s where. He’s been there for more than a decade now, suffering flashbacks of that awful scene from Animal House. You know the one: Pencil-mustached Stephen…