Like their most obvious model, Blondie (sexy female singer + trend-hopping pop-rock band = airplay), Garbage’s greatest virtues are all on the surface. It wouldn’t be fair to call either of them shallow, exactly, it’s just that they tend to celebrate pop more for its sonic pleasures and attitude poses…
Kimber Lanning likes to keep lists of tasks she has to complete.For Lanning, the owner of Stinkweeds Records and a self-described type-A personality, it’s a way of assuring herself that she’s in control of the numerous roles she juggles on a daily basis: record-store owner, college student (majoring in psychology),…
I don’t know if the Butchies have seen the rock-crit glorification flick Almost Famous, but it’s pretty obvious that they don’t share director Cameron Crowe’s misty-eyed nostalgia for the rock-star excesses of the early ’70s. With the song, “Anything Anthology,” the opening track of their new record, 3, the lesbian-punk…
Just as in World War II, France has spent much of the rock era standing on the sidelines. While England and America carved up most of the Western pop empire between themselves, France was a musical irrelevancy: a land of accordions, Maurice Chevalier, rich cuisine and Jerry Lewis fanatics. But…
During a 1993 MTV special on Nirvana, Dave Grohl took a shot at Tori Amos’ melodramatic, piano-ballad version of the band’s breakthrough hit, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Amos had surely intended the cover as a tribute, a way of letting those with refined tastes know that this unwashed Pacific Coast…
Angry Dirty Sanchez used to be the toast of Central High School. The teen punk trio, which consists entirely of 16-year-old Central High sophomores, was so popular with administrators that its weekend all-ages gigs at the Mason Jar and Nile Theater were regularly plugged over the intercom as part of…
The Amor Belhom Duo is the kind of group that people need to see about three times before they’re fully converted.The first time, audiences simply try to find an applicable category for music that wanders from ambient, somnambulant instrumentals to seductive French-pop balladry to noisy avant-punk to hints of Dick…
The members of Rocket to Russia are playing a gig in a week, and they just met a few minutes ago. It’s not the kind of timetable most bands follow, but Rocket to Russia is not like most bands. The one-off local supergroup of sorts has gathered on a Wednesday…
One of the most encouraging developments in pop music over the last few years has been the emergence of a mini-movement of artsy, bohemian, female R&B singers. This club — which includes Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill and Macy Gray — is fairly disparate, but it’s united by a…
When hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon last week, M.R. Diaz was as horrified as anyone.Diaz, president of the Chandler Coalition for Civil and Human Rights, was busy at the time, making arrangements for the third annual Chandler Mariachi Festival, scheduled for September 15, when he…
Raul Monreal was only trying to inspire his students when they turned the tables on him. In the spring of 1994, the soft-spoken Monreal was instructing a teacher-certification course at Paradise Valley Community College. For Monreal, a 53-year-old native of Nogales, Mexico, who grew up dirt poor and fatherless along…
These are heady days for Bob Dylan. It seems that everywhere the legendary song-poet turns these days, he’s being showered with a new round of industry honors and gushing career overviews. In the last four years, he’s received his first-ever Best Album Grammy Award (Time Out of Mind), his first…
John Unger couldn’t believe his first assignment as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut. It was April 1999. A few days earlier, he had spotted an Apache Junction newspaper ad touting delivery jobs at the local Pizza Hut, with pay starting at $12 an hour. He had just spent the…
It’s hard to imagine a more self-effacing guitar hero than Doug Martsch. The leader and driving force of Built to Spill — Boise, Idaho’s greatest claim to musical immortality — Martsch brings to mind Robert Christgau’s old line (in reference to T-Bone Burnett) about being unable to resist a humble…
Ramon Gomez isn’t used to being on the defensive. Gomez, Chandler’s most strident Latino activist and the self-appointed president of an organization called the National Civil Rights Movement, has spent the last four years in a perpetual pit-bull snarl. Along the way, he’s annoyed and embarrassed local officials with a…
Gladys Nuvangyaoma didn’t plan to buy a car when she and her son dropped by Joe Florek Volkswagen Audi in Flagstaff last September.But Nuvangyaoma, who lives nearly two hours from Flagstaff on the Hopi Reservation, instantly fell in love with a 1998 red Ford pickup she saw on the lot,…
By day, O’Mally’s is a nondescript sports bar, nestled in a strip mall on the west side of Phoenix. By night, O’Mally’s transforms itself into a dance club, changing musical identities from evening to evening the way Cher trades Bob Mackie outfits in concert. Depending on which night you wander…
The Phoenix Suns’ 2000-01 season will be remembered as a year of arrested development, in more ways than one. Not only did the team suffer from debilitating injuries and lapses in on-court intensity, but it also took a severe image hit with the rash of legal troubles faced by Jason…
Marshall Crenshaw doesn’t have much use for self-pity. That’s probably a good thing, since over the years he’s certainly been confronted with plenty of temptation to feel sorry for himself. Inevitably, every article written about the 47-year-old pop singer-songwriter harps on what could have been, on the stardom that teased…
Stephen Malkmus is discussing the high-tech, corporate domination of 21st-century America, and he’s getting righteously indignant about it. That wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that the former mastermind of ’90s indie-rock über-band Pavement has long been celebrated for his detachment, his ability to make an eloquent joke of…
Being an outspoken atheist in America has never been a walk in the park, but these are particularly trying days for nonbelievers.At last month’s inauguration of George W. Bush, the Reverend Franklin Graham dedicated the ceremony to Jesus Christ, and proclaimed Him to be “our savior,” a declaration which probably…
Paul Hernandez sits in a dimly lighted two-room apartment on the west side of Phoenix and prepares for battle. Hernandez has no accomplices. He brandishes no firearms, no blunt instruments. His only weapons are a wooden crucifix, a bottle of holy water on a corner bookshelf, and a hardbound prayer…
