Country music history boasts many fruitful collaborations among family members: The Louvin Brothers, the Carter Family, the Stanley Brothers, Bill and Earle Bolick (the Blue Sky Boys), the Monroe Brothers — the list is long and fabled. You might never have heard of the Good family, depending on how deep…

California-born, Phoenix-bred Al Casey is part of the vast secret history of rock and roll, one of a legion of “session men” — though the term is insufficient to describe Casey’s amazing body of work — who contributed to the very formation of the sound in its earliest days. The…

My Morning Jacket is sort of like a Louisville Ween: Playful but heartfelt, artsy but unpretentious, and capable of shelving bizarro freak-tunes alongside evocative and nostalgic songs. It’s a toss-up as to how 22-year-old Jim James, the Neil Young-channeling singer and songwriter for MMJ, would take to that comparison, but…

On contemporary maps, Teoc, Mississippi, rests as far off the path as it did in the twilight years of the 19th century. Located almost exactly between Texarkana, Arkansas, and Birmingham, Alabama, Teoc lies several miles from the nearest U.S. Route. And there wasn’t a single paved road anywhere near it…

“Oh, man, don’t ask me. I don’t know where the fuck we’re headed next. We had plans to go off someplace else on the next part of the actual tour, but our cuckoo label decided to send us out to play for some distributors’ thing . . . in Washington?…

It’s a late Friday night at Modified, the tiny art/performance space on Roosevelt Street in downtown Phoenix, and everything is going to hell. Youthful noisemakers Thee Apologies, who come on like a bunch of hyperactive teenagers playing in the basement while their parents are on vacation, are forgetting words and…

Mogwai had barely made it to Detroit before drummer Martin Bulloch’s heart started skipping. He felt the off-rhythms in his chest that told him his pacemaker was acting up — his body even rejecting it, maybe, as he’d been warned. Nobody wanted to take any chances, so Bulloch made his…

David Byrne’s post-Talking Heads career, like that of his fellow Heads, has been uneven, and decidedly low-profile if not strictly uneventful. But you gotta hand it to the guy: Never once does a Byrne album come off like he’s pandering to the popular taste. You might think he fell flat…

As the plane broke cloud cover over Uruguay, 13-year-old Alex Han tightened his grip on the armrests.Sitting in his home two months later, Alex recalls the moment vividly; his body goes stiff, his thin fingers curl into claws and he arches his back slightly as he digs into the soft…

All right, now, this bullshit has to stop. First Joey Ramone dies. Then comes word from E! Entertainment that Duran Duran is re-forming, in its original lineup. And a week after that, New Jersey’s Monmouth University gives Jon Bon Jovi an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. (To be honest, I’m…

At the risk of stealing an intro, let me count it off. How it happened was like this: Five years ago there was this club in Los Angeles called the Underground Cafe. The Underground hosted a once-a-week funk night dubbed “The Breaks,” at which a young hip-hop aficionado named Miles…

Henry Gray, born in Louisiana in 1925, pulled a stretch in World War II and then migrated to Chicago, which was where Howlin’ Wolf found him. Gray had been honing his piano chops for years in a variety of barrelhouse and back-room settings throughout the South, but it was Chicago…

Emerging from the tactical fumbles of its Frampton Comes Alive! and Blind Faith rereleases, the juggernaut that is Universal Music’s “Deluxe Edition” series has taken a rapid and happy turn for the better. Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On received a loving treatment in February, and now comes 1973’s Catch a…

In the late 1960s, California-born composer Terry Riley went by the sobriquet “Poppy Nogood.”The name sounds far more bellicose than Riley’s soft, almost courtly manner of speech might suggest; but Riley’s work, after all, encompasses a tangle of styles and influences that politely disrespects generic conventions of all kinds, melding…

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind, Medeski Martin and Wood bassist Chris Wood remembers. This was the album that was going to get them booted from Blue Note. “That was one of the reasons for the title,” Wood explains from backstage, a few hours before MMW’s show at House…

Wouldn’t you know it; no sooner do we muse idly about the relative dearth of double-CD/triple albums of new material by women artists (review of godspeed you black emperor!’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, October 5, 2000) than Ani DiFranco comes along with a double-disc collection of…

For the listener, it’s a genuine high finding a ferociously creative talent that few of your friends know about. You fetishize the records, play them for your friends (“You gotta hear this”), and, if God is good and the ferocious talent rolls through your town, you drag all your like-minded…

Somewhere in north Tempe, tucked away behind the corrugated door of an industrial park storage space off Smith Road, Brandon Lawson, a.k.a. MC Mesi, lifts his head. The smell of stale smoke is heavy in the rehearsal space. There are half-packs of Parliaments and Marlboros littering the floor and scattered…

To begin with a small caveat: The next time any contemporary folkie writes a song about how you fell asleep in the passenger seat on our all-night drive across the desert and I looked at you in the dashboard light and I felt us growing farther apart, I swear to…

When the joke is working — witness the spot-on reconstructions, down to the album art, of KISS’ ego-stroke solo records — Seattle’s Melvins come off like the idiot bastard offspring of Black Sabbath and the Bonzo Dog Band. But the Melvins’ love for unreconstructed heavy metal power chords and guttural…

Good morning, and welcome to the final class period of Contemporary Musical Aesthetics and Political Theory. In front of you is a booklet containing your semester exam, which will count as 35 percent of your final grade. The semester exam will center upon a single group or performer. You will…

To say that this is Rocket From the Crypt’s strongest outing since Paint as a Fragrance is both true and a little misleading. If you were a fan of the band’s guitar-and-horn-heavy rave-ups from the mid-’90s, and felt a little disappointed by 1998’s RFTC, which was a slower and softer…