For Chrissakes, you wouldn’t buy a car without first dialing in the radio. And you wouldn’t rent an apartment without asking if it came with its own indigenous creepy crawlies. These are high-commitment decisions you could be enmeshed in for months, maybe years, depending on your threshold for self-flagellation. In…
“Success is a wonderful thing but it is very, very tiring.” That was yawnin’ Sir George Martin, recalling how battle-fatigued The Beatles were at the end of 1964. Sure, the Liverpudlians hinted at needing a rest months earlier — you’ll recall the “I’ve been working like a dog/I should be…
You’re in the check-out line at the supermarket. There are two TV Guides with Michael Jackson on the cover; which Michael do you buy? The nappy-haired 13-year-old from Gary, Indiana, who launched his solo career 30 years ago with “Got to Be There” or the 43-year-old from Neverland Valley who…
When Stanley Kowalski mumbled, “What are you, a bunch of queens or something?” in A Streetcar Named Desire, he wasn’t fixing to pay his wife and nutty sister-in-law any compliments. But if he or you or anyone else were to burst in on the very sane women of W.O.M.B. with…
After New Times ran a feature last year focusing on four of the biggest-drawing tribute bands in the Valley, their audiences grew. Even naysayers who pooh-poohed the idea of tributes (read: other musicians) found themselves wanting to form a cover band for any number of bad reasons. But there was…
Friends, be careful what you name your group . . . you just might get called that one day. Anyone who’s tried coming up with an irresistible band handle knows it’s tough sledding — just ask the Unsavory Gastrointestinal Effects! So many odorous, odd and frankly silly band names can…
The packaging for the rerelease of this 1982 West Berlin concert is designed to distract you from the fact that the show was staged in support of Trans, the album where Neil Young’s obsession for Devo spilled into Kraftwerk and Klaus Naomi territory. But the After the Gold Rush-era portrait…
Some say that it really isn’t happening, that Less Pain Forever (a.k.a. Lush Budget Presents the Les Payne Product) isn’t really leaving Arizona, that all this talk about the duo living, recording and touring for perpetuity in a 1983 Chevrolet Southwind RV is just the latest in a series of…
There’s a chapter missing from America’s musical subconscious because we never embraced the Walker Brothers beyond a pair of brilliant ballads. That group’s enormous teenybopper following in Europe made it possible for Scott Walker to release a spate of eccentric No. 1 solo albums in the late ’60s, none of…
What Life of Brian did for Jesus Christ, All You Need Is Cash does for the more popular Beatles. By the late ’70s there had been other fictitious retellings of the Beatles’ story, such as Mark Shipper’s novel Paperback Writer, which had the group reuniting third on the bill below…
In much the same way package tours prove it’s possible to see Paris in a day (“People, we’ve got a half-hour in the Louvre, but if we blitz through the Impressionists, we can set aside 10 extra minutes for the gift shop”), Mail or Muse is taking you on an…
“I found a million dollar baby/In a five and ten cent store . . .” — Billy Rose, 1931 In other nickel-and-dime news, this year, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame shortchanged Alice Cooper singularly and collectively when it again failed to nominate Vincent Furnier and friends into the…
Being a Big Blue Couch fan has been both a source of pride and frustration for a great many local music aficionados. Giving the group props on its musical merits is easy enough. There are few bands anywhere — much less the Valley — with the attitude and chops to…
Do a little bit of arithmetic and you’ll realize that rock photographer Henry Diltz has taken close to a million pictures. Thirty-plus years, hundreds of artists, thousands of rolls of film and the numbers quickly add up. If you believe the old adage that every picture tells a story, then…
In previous installments of this column, we’ve sufficiently covered the mail part of our equation — how the music written and recorded by you good people out there arrives at our doorstep. We’ve discussed in excruciating detail the advantages of certain kinds of corrugated mailers and explained how your parcels…
Quick, name your favorite indoor arena. How about a midsize theater you’d frequent weekly regardless of what bands were on the bill? Now name the best stadium or sports complex to see a concert. Having trouble? That’s because concert ticket prices are too high to venture out even monthly and…
“What the hell was the name of that band?” Nine Volt singer-songwriter Andy Mitchell is stumped. Sitting in a booth at downtown’s Chez Nous lounge with drummer Andy Mendoza and bassist Stevie Flores, the three are desperately trying to recall the name of the national group they recently opened up…
When Kurt Cobain’s mother, Wendy O’Connor, cried to the Associated Press, “I told him not to join that stupid club,” she wasn’t talking about Columbia House. She was referring to the exclusive rock-stars-dead-at-27 fraternity. But membership has its privileges. If you’re one of those die-young elite who lament over a…
It was a couple months back that a musician flagged us down at a club with his band’s new CD in one hand and a list of gripes in the other. Specifically, this aspiring Valley talent was bitching about how we do things here at the Mail or Muse Department…
TV’s Seinfeld may have shone an unflattering light on the notion of “regifting,” but that shame doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on the music industry. Every year the surviving major labels extract a dozen songs from previously released or newly deleted Christmas albums, slap them onto new “Various Artists”…
It ought to be one of those “Where were you when?” questions. You know, like “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” “Where were you when the Bronco chase was under way?” So, “Where were you when you heard the Gaza Strippers for the first time?” Well, where were ya,…
Steve Allen is dead. I don’t think any of us has a problem with that.People who’ve lived long, prosperous and productive lives are entitled to long, uninterrupted stretches of inactivity, punctuated by blissful nada. And the spectacle-sporting comedian, who rose to prominence during the days of live television, certainly knew…
