When John Dixon was a 15-year-old student at Tempe High School in the early ’60s, he made pocket money on the weekends by working dances as a DJ. Dixon and two friends had formed a company called Have Records Will Spin, and true to their word, they spun 45s at…
Beck Mutations (DGC Records) When did the release of a new record start to be treated like an election campaign? Consider that the press dubbed November 17 Super Tuesday simply because Garth, Mariah and Whitney were all moving product that day. Even more surreal, a few days later, Garth Brooks…
Okay, so here’s a scenario for you: You’re minding your own business, gamely trying to do your job, when two hostile skate punks come up and stick their stiff willies in your face. What do you do? Well, if you’re Jim Louvau, gamely trying to do your job entails working…
Not long ago, Pete Forbes was talking to a Nashville rep for Risk Records. The label rep had called Forbes after hearing the Phoenix singer-songwriter’s thoughtful, well-crafted debut CD, The Gulf Between, which was released earlier this year. “This record is great. I love this record,” the rep said. “Oh,…
Tempe Bowl has been a bowling center for nearly four decades. It’s only been a music venue for the last year. But with the bowling alley recently experiencing financial difficulties so severe that its future is up in the air, it’s the local punk-rock scene that has rallied behind this…
When Sunny Day Real Estate broke up in 1995, it was a respected but obscure indie-rock band. At that stage, the group would have been happy to pack a club in its native Seattle. Three years later, when the quartet decided to re-form, it found itself generating long lines a…
When the surviving ex-Beatles put together their three-volume Anthology series a few years ago, they faced a daunting artistic challenge. On the one hand, they had to satiate long-suffering fans clamoring for a collection of the band’s best unreleased tracks. On the other hand, because the Anthology CDs were conceived…
R.E.M. Up (Warner Bros.) There’s a moment on R.E.M.’s new album, Up (the band’s 13th or 14th release, depending on whether you count best-ofs), that will be instantly familiar to longtime fans. The song is called “The Apologist,” and Michael Stipe nails his point home in the chorus by singing,…
Kevin Newell was irate. Halfway through an emotionally charged zoning administrator hearing to decide the fate of local hip-hop club House of Grooves, the head of the Whittier Neighborhood Association was on a roll as he recited a list of neighbors’ complaints against the venue. Some of his points were…
The theme of the night at Arizona Roadhouse was “In Love with Debbie Gibson.” In set-list currency, that translated into each of the night’s four acts scraping together one cover song by the ’80s teen sensation. Near the end of the set by power-pop up-and-comers Crashbar, lead singer Adrian Smith…
Belle and Sebastian The Boy With the Arab Strap (Jeepster/Matador) Goth can be a many-sided gloom. At its silliest, it’s too much eyeliner on a suburban kid playing make-believe with death and destruction. At the other end are fashion nonspecific soundtracks of honest human entropy: the artist-as-fuck-up documents like Big…
Reubens Accomplice “Borders” b/w “O’ the Night” (Jerk Records) The four young men who comprise Reubens Accomplice have, over the course of time, developed into high-caliber pop musicians with an immense talent for precocious, intricately constructed pop songs seething with charm and innocence. A glance at the sleeve of this…
There’s a famous old skit on Saturday Night Live in which a series of cheesy spokespeople vied with each other to prove that their brand of jam was the best, simply because it had the most vile name. The perverse gist of the mock commercial was that only a wonderful…
Geoff Brown is a junior-high science teacher. He’s also a dedicated Christian. He has short, dark hair and is dressed conservatively in slacks and a green short-sleeve shirt. Though he’s only 30, he somehow seems much older. It’s not that he’s aged badly, really, but just that he speaks with…
In the booklet for his 1985 career anthology, Biograph, Bob Dylan mused on the differences between his rapturously received 1974 “comeback” tour and the contentious series of shows he had given eight years earlier. On the surface, much was similar about these two tours. In both cases, Dylan was backed…
Maybe it was some need to exorcise the past that sent Roger Clyne and P.H. Naffah hiking through the desert this summer. Clyne, the singer and primary songwriter of The Refreshments, and Naffah, the band’s drummer, had just decided to pull the plug on the group that had brought them…
PJ Harvey Is This Desire? (Island Records) Because PJ Harvey’s music changes so drastically from one album to the next, it’s inevitable that with every new release you find yourself missing something from the previous CD (though I could have lived without the indulgence of 4-Track Demos). When she and…
Anyone shocked by the rampant intrusiveness and utter lack of accountability of Ken Starr and his posse probably has never had a run-in with Arizona’s liquor board. For years now, this group of self-styled morality czars has indiscriminately dropped its wrecking ball of disfavor on any club that chose to…
In times of desperation, people always look for a savior. That tends to explain the music press’ recent compulsion to ordain so-called electronica the next big thing. It’s a bit reminiscent of the old notion that in a world of blind folks, the one-eyed person is regarded as a visionary…
Mike Coatney is smiling, but it’s a smile that betrays frustration. He’s temporarily fulfilling the drum-kit duties for local rock quartet Haggis while the band’s usual timekeeper, Scott McDonald, plans for his October wedding. It is only Coatney’s second rehearsal with Haggis, and in two days he has to play…
Not too long ago, one of Jack Logan’s friends paid him a strange compliment. In assessing the 39-year-old Georgia singer-songwriter’s sophomore CD–the endearingly ragged 1996 Restless release Mood Elevator–Logan’s pal said he liked the album because he could tell that Logan was reading his words off a lyric sheet as…
Big Mama was fuming. The notorious nighttime DJ for KPTY-Party 103.9 FM had come into the station’s office on September 8 to find that Valley parents were calling in to voice concerns about his station’s risque content. So Big Mama responded the only way he knows how. That night on…
