With all the music that’s out there in this crazy world, any data beyond a band name and song title might seem superfluous. So give credit to local oddballs Fatigo for giving you even less information. Pero los Chivos!! contains no band data, recording information or even a thanks to…

It isn’t every day you get to see a band react to its first piece of national press coverage. Oddly enough, it’s in Zia Zine, a free record store magazine and former local institution now assembled in Pennsylvania. After a friend of the band arrives at bass player Anthony Germinaro’s…

This ain’t the way your brother’s indie band made its way. Don’t indie bands play basement parties and warehouse blowouts until all hours, move a lot of merch to the under-21 crowd and become famous on their own terms? Tonight, Dave Jensen, lead singer of Before Braille, is feeling less…

You’re always told to be nice to the people you meet on the way up, but you can’t expect the same etiquette to be returned in the world of punk rock. Take the closing night of the Vans Warped Tour, which saw a stand-off between the not-so-good folks of Pontiac,…

Giving heads up to a musical hero in a band name is asking for trouble, like a guitarist calling his band Jimi Hendrix’s Pick Guard. But after Johnny Cash went against his own attorney’s advice and gave the Bastards his blessing — and his legitimate heir John Carter Cash produced…

“‘The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down’? Quite a loony selection for a bunch of drunken reprobates!” Christopher Lloyd uttered those lines to said bunch of drunken reprobates as he ripped the gramophone needle off a 78 in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He was referring to that merry melody that launched a thousand…

Now it’s official: America loves its morose anniversary celebrations. Whatever the cursed event may be — the Kennedy assassination, the death of Elvis, the Oklahoma City bombing, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey or the release of Invincible, we’ve come to expect a somber annual reminder and the corresponding media hoopla…

Fifteen years after the group’s first album, the Goo Goo Dolls name is still good for the occasional line drawn in the dirt. Quite a few haven’t yet forgiven the GGDs for wearing their Replacements jones on their sleeve all the way to multiplatinum status, while Let It Be and…

The first time I ever laughed out loud in a rock club? It was in Manhattan, and They Might Be Giants were playing at a little club called Dr. B’s in Soho. It couldn’t have been more than 1981 or ’82, but they emerged on the scene like a fully…

Minimalism. The term has spawned more run-on sentences by pinheaded writers than any other movement. And yet no written word has ever allayed suspicion in this pinhead that there is little more than shuck involved in any minimal installation. In music, when the dread word minimalism rears its head, it…

Your practice space is burglarized. All your vintage equipment is gone. You’ve no secure place to rehearse your music. What will you do? What will you do? If you’re Haggis, you grit your teeth, get the story onto some local nightly news programs as quickly as possible, replace your gear,…

Let’s pretend you’re a club owner — we’ll wait while you yank the necessary hairs out of your skull to make this a more credible performance. And to sweeten this role, let’s say you book the bands at your venue. One day, in walks a representative of Undertoe, a Valley…

There are three standard reasons a rock act would refuse to do interviews: 1. The Freddie Mercury Royal Snub. This occurs after an artist gives unlimited access to a press community that still winds up vehemently hating him. Before the King of Queen stopped doing interviews, he granted an exclusive…

In Phoenix you can more readily measure the passage of time by the limited life expectancy of live venues than by the forward projectory of Valley bands. But there’s a group that started out playing battles of the bands, bowling alleys and matinee all-ages shows at the Mason Jar, where…

Before www.truckersonspeed.com was up and running, all routes of Truckers on Speed Web information led to P.A.T.T. Who’s P.A.T.T.? Parents Against Tired Truckers, that’s who! Ever since Mothers Against Drunk Drivers realized they were M.A.D.D. (cool!), folks have been organizing under any cause, just as long as the initials spell…

If you’d asked me about spite incarnate 10 years ago, I would’ve told you about the Feldman brothers of New Rochelle, New York. Two siblings in the family tuxedo business, they worked side by side for 15 years until someone got too passionate about cummerbunds or expanding the powder-blue inventory…

No one ever sets out to conduct the world’s worst interview, in much the same way every 10-car pileup on the freeway was once just a bunch of guys and gals on their way to work. Certainly Frank Black should make for a fascinating read — he’s a brilliant singer-songwriter…

Believe it or not, there are rock critic circles. That’s where pent-up, penned-in pop music detractors spew their spleens making fun of all the music that you good people manage to enjoy. Mention Chicago™ in such ellipticals and you get a head-for-the-hills reaction akin to Typhoid Mary with horns, and…

The other day I heard someone say, “You know, America is in real trouble.” — Johnny Sea, “Day for Decision,” 1966 All you have to do is turn on talk radio to hear just how much trouble we’re in these days. It’s February and the swell of patriotism that united…

Frankly, if rock writers didn’t have crazed visionaries to waste ink on, you people would get plenty tired of reading about expertly played tambourine tracks and tearful obbligato passages. No, you’d be reading about Bill Clinton’s three-breasted intern in the Weekly World News like the rest of your weak-willed kind…

If 2001 was a maddening, schizophrenic year for America, that goes double for the music that bubbled to the surface in the last 12 months. For most of the year, bland frivolity and mindless chest-thumping ruled the airwaves. Then, as the World Trade Center went down in a monumental pile…

In this threatened Yuletide of 2001, it’s comfort items that are shaping up to be the season’s big sellers. Fluffy slippers. Bubble bath lotion. Comforters. Cozy sweaters. The same goes for music. The charts have gone soft in the head with good ol’ fluff country, airheaded new age, soft-core dirty…