“Madonna is a Big Mac with extra cheese, wrapped up in the fashionable new brown-paper-bag packaging. Extreme, the heavy-metal band with the light-pop hits, is a McD.L.T.–steaming hot on one side, chilled and crispy on the other. And Gerardo, the rico suave hunk of the moment, is a Breakfast Burrito,…
“Who owns the blue van out front?” The big guy with the short, spiky hair in the “Riopelle ’82” tee shirt hasn’t dropped into Cactus Jack’s, the “Cheers” of Ahwatukee, just to clue some hapless double-parker to move it or lose it. He’s looking around at the shoulder-shrugging suburbanites, wondering…
“You can see it in their eyes,” says Jerry Mele. Searing, seething eyes boiling over with carefully contained aggression. Bright Mack truck headlights mounted on an otherwise placid face. Jerry Mele learned how to gauge the danger lurking behind such ominous orbs during a two-year hitch in Vietnam, where the…
Steve Winwood relaxes in a hotel room in New York City, talking by telephone to reporters in every city he’s about to hit on his current U.S. tour. The 43-year-old rock ‘n’ roll survivor has quietly endured a slew of critical jabs during the last few years for the highly…
Four months have passed since Billboard dropped the bomb in its 1990 year-end issue announcing that rock, for seventeen years the dominant genre on the top album charts, had lost its title to rap and danceable pop. So far, the music biz is still waiting for the other dancing shoe…
Yellow ribbons whip down city streets on the pinned-back antennae of imported Sentras, Camrys, and Accords, wrapping the USA in patriotism like the loosely woven fabric of a giant Ace bandage. On the radio, the premier pop diva of the day belts out the national anthem as if the centuries-old…
Late August 1984. Half past midnight on the haunches of what has been, for most kids, the first day back to school. Up and down the quiet suburban streets, the bedroom lights that burned brightly all through summer vacation have been snuffed out cold. “Not on a school night,” the…
Turtle Power! Bart Rules! Cowabunga! Ay Caramba! Mention the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Simpsons in the same breath on any grade school playground today, and you’re likely to spark the most spirited “Who’s cooler?” duel since the Monkees versus the Beatles. Rat Fink versus the Trolls. Goofy Grape…
With America at war and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a rock concert tour, perhaps one of the touchiest questions that parents toting their tykes to the TMNT extravaganza are having to deal with is, “Why aren’t the Turtles going over to help our soldiers?” It’s a valid question,…
Before getting the call from Paul, session pro Michael Brecker figured he had pretty much squeezed every kind of music imaginable out of his trusty tenor saxophone. Besides recording three highly acclaimed jazz albums on his own and another six with his brother Randy under the moniker the Brecker Brothers,…
For sixteen years, fans of heavy-metal band Judas Priest have been accustomed to seeing lead singer Rob Halford in his trademark stage dress, a menacing armor of black leather and silver studs that even Attila the Hun might have found a bit too butch. But a few months ago, as…
When the Miller Brewing Company first approached Take 6 about recording a jingle for one of its beers, the company was probably thinking about the exemplary work the Grammy award-winning sextet had already done for other advertisers. After all, the a cappella vocal group’s cool, finger-poppin’ sound–a kind of jazzy…
“Sometimes,” says Jeff Dayton, a Valley musician made good, “I sort of forget who I’m up there on the stage with. You know, after three years of doing it, you can start to take things for granted. And then we’ll be playing somewhere, and I’ll be standing behind him, and…
Doug Boyle has the kind of job most aspiring rock guitarists would give their whammy bar for. Playing behind Robert Plant on the former Led Zeppelin vocalist’s current worldwide tour, Boyle gets the chance, on the four or five Zeppelin tunes Plant works nightly into his concerts, to rip authoritatively…
Southern Pacific drummer Keith Knudsen likes to imagine what it might be like if the early Doobie Brothers or Creedence Clearwater Revival suddenly appeared on the music scene today. Just picture the double bill, Knudsen suggests: A group of San Jose longhairs singing lazy clap-along ditties about the virtues of…
Ten years ago, Cher was a superstar on the run from her past. Sporting pink leopard-skin skirts and shaggy bangs, the then-34-year-old singer was fronting a new-wave group called Black Rose. In a series of hilariously inept efforts to go incognito, she’d leave her famous name off marquees and pass…
The tour itinerary could belong to any struggling bar band. Nine dates, banged out on a typewriter, covering the entire month of April–a small club gig in Tulsa, a county fair in San Bernardino, a college gig in Douglas, Arizona. The trip culminates, promisingly enough, with a one-night stand-in beautiful…
Nobody stops Bob Hope when he makes one of his famous unannounced “walk-ons” in the middle of whatever talk show he happens to be taping a special next door to. Not even David Letterman bars Bob from playing through. Nosiree, when Hope deems it appropriate to drop in on the…
It was just a quick postshow breakfast for Eric Martin and some fellow Vegas entertainers. A chance to wolf down some grub and talk shop with about half the cast of the Imperial Palace’s Legends in Concert extravaganza before calling it a night. None of the performers were household names…
FRANK STALLONE never had a problem with it. “Rocky’s kid brother?” Hey, absolutely. Shaun Cassidy stepped happily into his TV star brother’s spotlight. Kid Partridge? Sure. Hold a seat on that Day-Glo bus. While the latest actor-turned-singer wails the blues (probably off-key) about the problems of being taken seriously in…
It seems like the dawn of each decade brings out the pied piper in Todd Rundgren. At the sunup of the Seventies, when Rundgren was beginning to make a name for himself as a recording studio whiz kid and veritable one-man band, the Philadelphia-born rocker often ballyhooed the joys of…
In the Eighties, your grandmother listened to enough Eric Clapton to join in any discussion of guitar heroes. Of course, grandma only heard one Clapton song during the past ten years–and that short number was always interrupted at the end by a commercial announcer proclaiming, “The night belongs to Michelob.”…
