Bash & Pop Friday Night Is Killing Me (Sire) Chris Mars 75% Less Fat (Smash/Island) How do we miss the Replacements? Let’s count the ways. Not to get gooey, but if you miss the Mats and are tired of playing “Bastards of Young” or “I.O.U.” to death, cheer up. Uncover…
A few years ago, “grunge” could be defined as a persistent fungus found in shower stalls, or as the flannel coating that forms on the teeth of drunks who collapse without brushing. Today, of course, Seattle artistes and rat-pack journalists have turned “grunge” into a revolution. Soundgarden, Mother Love Bone,…
Various Artists The Genius of Dave Bartholomew (EMI) Smiley Lewis The Best of Smiley Lewis: I Hear You Knocking (EMI) One listen is all it takes to understand why New Orleans music dominated the R&B charts in the mid-Fifties. With its steady backbeat, wailing sax breaks and bluesy vocals, it…
One Foot in the Grave Lookin’ Good! Who’s Your Embalmer? (Triple X) Move over, California, Arizona now has the dubious distinction of being the novelty-rock-act capital of the world. We’ve even got both ends of the age spectrum covered–tots (Litl’ Willie) and the tottering (One Foot in the Grave). In…
One night last year, Def American founder Rick Rubin strolled into L.A.’s King King Club. Onstage that night was a revamped version of longtime L.A. blues band the Red Devils. Having proved his “Midas touch” on rap, metal, tasteless comedy, grunge and alternative, it suddenly occurred to the recording industry’s…
To guitarist Dave Alvin, the Pleasure Barons mean a brush with a deadly, communicable disease. “During the first Pleasure Barons tour in 1989, I drank out of somebody else’s beer bottle at an after party,” Alvin says from Village Recorders, where he is working on his next solo recording. “Next…
Just when you thought it was safe to go near the water . . . there’s a slimy new connection between aquatic life and party rock. It began with Jimmy Buffett’s “Parrotheads”–scrambled adults who suck down margaritas and totter into Buffett gigs with large, plastic shark fins strapped atop their…
Country music is more popular than it’s ever been. CDs and concert tickets are selling like never before. The names of Garth, Clint and Reba now carry the kind of global recognition once reserved only for Sinatra. Black cowboy hats have become the most nauseating pop-culture symbol since disco’s platform…
First the eight-track tape withered and died. Then the vinyl LP fell from favor. Next on the decaying-forms-of-playback-technology hit list is the cassette. One of the most visible signs that the cassette is beginning to wane is that local acts are turning more and more to CDs. They hold more…
As nightclubs go, Nino’s in Tucson was one of a kind. Loosely defined as a steak house, the club’s food was an afterthought, being both cheap and bad. But no one went to Nino’s for the food. What drew people was music. A crazy idea–booking bands in a checkerboard-floored side…
“Do you have Flaco Jimenez’s new solo recording?” The clerk at the west-side record shop responds with a blank stare that says he’s never heard of it, then rifles through the section marked “Norteno.” After 30 years of recording jukebox 45s for fly-by-night south Texas labels, Flaco, undisputed “El Rey…
After 365 days and nearly that many albums listened to, the Sun Tracks staff (with a little help from their friends) gets serious and decides on the best of 1992. Robert Baird Sun Tracks editor 1. Jimmy Scott, All the Way (Reprise). Album of the millennium. Lured out of retirement…
Perhaps it came upon a midnight unclear, but somewhere along the way, I became a Christmas-music fan. Everyone, even those responsible for it, admits it’s the most annoying genre of pop music ever. Individual Christmas tunes have been known to routinely engender as much pop revulsion as “Billy Don’t Be…
Asked what guitarist influenced him most, Duke Robillard doesn’t hesitate: “T-Bone Walker.” Some of the first licks Robillard learned were from 78s of T-Bone classics like “Stormy Monday.” Robillard said in a recent Guitar World interview that by the mid-Seventies he was “too into T-Bone” and was in danger of…
genepool Time & Place (Soft Shoulder) The owners of Soft Shoulder Music, Connie Mableson and Ted Bulger, say they are guided by the idea that there’s an identifiable “desert,” or “Southwestern,” sound to the alternative scene here. It’s a sound they want to document with their new record label. It’s…
When the history of pop music is written, the chapter on Canada will be a strange one. Ignoring Bryan Adams (what else?), the biggest names in Canadian pop-rock music are the Guess Who and its more famous Mormon offshoot, Bachman-Turner Overdrive. From there Canadian pop history devolves to Rush, a…
Sex Madonna (Warner Books) Give the woman credit. She pushes our buttons and we open our wallets. It’s that simple. Never mind that Erotica, the album that goes with the book, is a dance-beat stiff. That’s not a concern, because money, not music, is Madonna’s muse. Despite the hype, this…
It usually begins with a wicked smile and a line like, “You know, I slept with Joe Ely at the Holiday Inn in Waco.” From there it’s always the same–no birthmark disclosures, no pillow talk, just the inevitable summation: “He was great!” It’s the “I Had Joe Ely” club, and…
It was the eve of the final day of the 1991 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The Maple Leaf Bar was so crowded one could scarcely breathe or get a beer. Blazing a trail to the bathroom was out of the question. Onstage, the inestimable Earl King was celebrating…
Bruce Springsteen America West Arena October 2 and 3, 1992 For two hours, it sounded like Bruce Springsteen was finished as an artist. Refusing to play a single old tune, he piled on the weak new material from his bloated, two-album mistake. Flat and uninspired on record, the recent songs…
Shot from a rooftop, one of the first official band photos of the Gin Blossoms shows the Tempe band scattered around a backyard, cigarettes and drinks in hand, displaying that grim, “we bad” visage all serious white guitar bands feel obliged to affect. Only two of the people in the…
Until a year ago, Roger Seibel hadn’t even heard of Sun Ra. Now he’s wondering if the jazz world’s leading extraterrestrial is going to make him famous. As the owner of SAE Mastering, a Phoenix company specializing in making master CDs and doing tape restoration, Seibel is the man responsible…
