There’s a scene in the movie Tin Men where Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito are hanging out in a smoky, airport-type cocktail lounge filled with Baltimore suburbanites. It’s 1963, and this is the kind of place where you’d expect to be treated to a middle-aged crooner wheezing up Perry Como…

If it’s true that Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberal policies have made a burgeoning Soviet rock scene possible, why is it that we’ve heard so little of this rocknost in America? How come, for example, most of us wouldn’t be able to tell the premier Soviet rock star, Boris Grebenshikov, from Bullwinkle’s…

The year 1979 was a watershed for gloom bands, what with the release of Joy Division’s memorably dark and unsettling debut and the Cure’s less auspicious but equally bleak first album. Still, taking top honors as the dreariest, dirgiest and most all-around depressing disc of that year was Bauhaus’ debut…

Industry wags have dubbed them “this season’s Living Colour” and “The Next Big Black Thing,” but 24-7 Spyz would rather you think of them as just another raunchy rock band from the South Bronx. You see, unlike the members of Living Colour, who consider themselves as much black ideologues as…

Gordon Gano, decked out in baggy plaid Bermudas and a white baseball cap, sits sipping a soda on a picnic bench outside Mesa Amphitheatre, looking every inch the Baptist preacher’s son that he is. The apple- cheeked Violent Femmes lead singer-songwriter-guitarist downs a Pepsi (you were expecting Jack Daniel’s, maybe?)…

he problem with today’s music, as Throwing Muses’ lead singer-songwriter Kristin Hersh sees it, is simple: too much warp-speed guitar wanking and crotch-grabbing braggadocio and not enough thoughtful, intricate strumming and quiet introspection. Or, in the language of the Chinese cosmology that the singer is prone to spout, “too much…

All the gushing articles on Irish bands we’ve been seeing in the music rags lately have been enough to make Irish-born singer Pierce Turner ashamed of his pedigree. Turner finds these stories, especially the ones calling Hothouse Flowers’ singer and fanzine centerfold Liam O’Maonlai the next Bono, to be something…

In Britain it’s shaken up music, fashion and virtually the whole of U.K. youth culture. In Italy, its synthesis of classic funk samples and trippy techno-beats has been mesmerizing discophiles for almost a year. In cities like New York and L.A. it’s considered to be the hippest thing to happen…

Shortly before their last Valley gig a year and a half ago, the Dead Milkmen did an interview on onetime progressive radio station KEYX that quickly deteriorated into an impromptu bitchfest. “There are three things that I hate more than anything in this world,” groused lead singer Rodney Amadeus Anonymous…