They line up by the warehouse door at Contractor Wire and Cable in south Phoenix like an army of IT guys delivering refurbished computers: 140 mostly white males, most in their mid-20s, clutching big CRT monitors in front of their guts and toting hefty cabinets and bags full of wires,…
Slim Golba cuts a unique figure even walking along freaky Mill Avenue, where his bouncing, loping gait and long graying hair, braided in classic cigar-store-Indian style and falling in front of his button-down shirt, create the image of a mellowed ancient soul much older than his 43 years. On this…
At one of Arizona Bike Week’s vendor booths, sandwiched between tables hawking everything from Screamin’ Eagle performance parts to leather-fringed halters, Beverly Allgood will pass out fliers for Vintages, a planned northeast Scottsdale resort community designed for the new breed of biker — or what she calls the “upscale motorcycle…
Shane Saunders tugs the brim of his baseball cap, pulling it down tighter over his short red hair, and stares out over the row of turbocharged Corvettes, Vipers and F-body Camaros parked behind the high-performance tuning shop where he works. “Nobody I know says they’re racing tonight,” he says, shaking…
Kamal Abdul-Rasheed claims he and seven other workers were laid off from AT&T because of their age. But it may be the group of know-it-all seniors were forced out of AT&T’s youngest division more because of the age of telephone service — and office politics — they represented. “The ones…
When Survivalist became the first Arizona hip-hop group to crack Billboard’s Top 10 Hot Rap Singles chart in 2001 with the aptly named “Bounce,” its members felt they were strapped in for a rocket ride to Ballersville. Instead, when all the big-label contracts the suits flaunted like origami for their…
It’s just after school on a Tuesday, and Jacob, Chris, Sam and Mike are doing what they’ve done for the past 12 years: lying around in Jacob Verburg’s living room playing video games and drinking Coke. “It’s been this way every day pretty much since kindergarten,” says Verburg, a 17-year-old…
“Here, put this on.” Nearly everyone you met in 2003 came with a personal soundtrack. From the little middle school “sevvie” in your car pool who carried a personal mix CD in her backpack to the businessman in front of you at the ATM playing Dido just a little too…
As soon as the Suns game wraps up, they come busting out of the north doors of the America West Arena like a pack of hungry wolves. “The party’s in there,” declares a young black woman in micro-braids and a form-fitting blue dress, checking out the long line that has…
“What Would Jerry Do?” The bumper sticker on the old Toyota Celica, parked outside the Sail Inn, the friendly little Tempe bar that’s quietly become a haven for the local jam-band scene, can’t say it any better. If there’s a guiding principle behind the Saturday night event, the finals in…
“People accuse me of being a pussy. But that’s cool. I don’t care. ” Shawn Harrington sits quietly on the patio of the crowded sports bar McDuffy’s in Tempe, nursing a Corona. He squirms as he searches for the right words to describe his songwriting process, which has enabled him…
Adam Marsland, an indie rock singer-songwriter who, by his own accounts, spends most of his life on the road, discovered KCDX purely by accident one day while riding in his tour bus across the Arizona desert. “I usually don’t listen to the radio because it seems like it’s always the…
Rusty Chiles is halfway through executing a left turn on the corner of Seventh Street and Ash in Tempe when he and his buddy Slipnode, riding shotgun in Chiles’ white Nissan Altima, experience a simultaneous “onosecond” — cyberspeak for that split second in time between decision and consequence when you…
The “slap” comes about three and a half seconds into Jack Johnson’s new album, On and On. The unplugged mellow gem’s opening song, “Times Like These,” begins with a single, perfect Cat Stevens glissando elegantly strummed on Johnson’s guitar. Then the 28-year-old singer-songwriter and, not insignificantly, diehard surfer smacks the…
Rob, a newly divorced, 41-year-old SWM known to the online dating community by his Match.com screen name “phxbuddy,” is 24,000 feet over Pocatello when it suddenly dawns on him: The only piece of identifying information he has on the woman he’s traveling 726 miles to see tonight is her e-mail…
Behind every successful rock star today, it seems, stands a couple of lousy parents who couldn’t care less. From Eminem’s pill-popping momma to Benji and Joel Madden of Good Charlotte’s absentee dad to Staind frontman Aaron Lewis’ neglectful hippie procreators, dysfunctional couples with the poorest of parenting skills have inadvertently…
“Destroy ’em down! Destroy ’em all! Downstroy!” It’s a chilly Easter Sunday night in Vancouver. Max Cavalera and his band Soulfly are onstage churning out a massive wall of heavy metal thunder that, if not exactly powerful enough to raise the dead, is certainly packing enough punch to roll away…
Dwarfed behind the computer monitor at station 37, 12-year-old Mitchell Swift barks out commands to his fellow Counter-Strike players like a Gulf War II commander trash-talking his troops. “No camping, bitch!” he yells at the screen to the character represented by his older brother Josh’s friend Jesse, who’s sitting just…
Like a five-headed Joe Millionaire, Ticker Tape Parade, an average-guy amalgam of pizza deliverer, construction worker, data entry clerk, tee shirt printer and “between jobs”slacker have been doing their best to put together their own million-dollar sound in preparation for attracting the most eligible suitor. For most of the past…
Andrew Ahiakpor has never heard the “explicit version” of star rapper Ludacris’ platinum-seller Word of Mouf and that’s just fine with him. “I think that true talent doesn’t need profanity to shine,” scoffs the 25-year-old UC-Santa Barbara grad from Fairfield, California. “Plus, when words like ho’ and the b’ and…
The poster is not the biggest-selling piece of Rolling Stones merchandise in Import Images’ online catalogue. Actually, it’s not even close. “I think the sense of humor in that one hits a bit too close to home for a lot of their fans,” reasons Patrick Smith, licensing director for the…
In the last place anyone would expect to unearth hipness the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in central Phoenix one of the West’s biggest annual hip-hop cultural events is halfway through its weekendlong stint. In a school cafeteria-size room normally reserved for slimming seniors with herniated disks, nearly 700 kids, most…
