It’s 1997, and rock ‘n’ roll is still a dirty phrase. Once merely synonymous with teenage copulation, the term now embraces a wide array of unseemly images. Your parents doing the nasty on a Monsanto carpet. A guy in his late 40s washing his Buick to the strains of Steppenwolf…

If you think the Sport Model is a mod-revivalist band, you’re wrong–but it’s largely the band’s fault. The Sport Model’s early live-show handbills were festooned with pop-art images, Who guitarist Pete Townshend’s windmill poses, and stills from the Who-derived film Quadrophenia. Kerosene was poured liberally on that fire when the…

Guided by Voices Mag Earwhig! (Matador Records) “Earwhig” is British slang for that loudmouth guy at the end of the bar who thinks he’s the world’s greatest storyteller and just won’t shut up. There’s a metaphor here for Guided by Voices’ way-beyond-prolific leader, Robert Pollard. Sure, he may have labored…

A funny thing happened the last time Spinning Jenny had a CD-release party: The group broke up! At the stroke of midnight! Keyboardist Brett Hinders, who had been in the band only for a few months at the time, recalls how it all came to a head during the show…

Tina Turner, and Cyndi Lauper America West Arena May 7, 1997 You don’t get a double bill like this every night. Here we had two female performers who reached their zenith in the early MTV ’80s–one carefully coifed and choreographed, one klutzy and disheveled by design. That neither Tina Turner…

Sneaker Pimps co-founder and keyboardist Liam Howe is trippin’ on “trip-hop.” “That term was born too quickly without enough thought to what it meant,” he says. “Massive Attack’s Blue Lines was written six years ago and wasn’t called trip-hop until two years ago, when this term popped up and started…

The Boo Radleys C’mon Kids (Mercury) Eggman First Fruits (Creation) The Boo Radleys should have been contenders. Of all the bands on England’s legendary Creation Records roster devoted to reinterpreting the psychedelic ’60s through the prism of the postmodern ’90s, Martin Carr and company had the goods. More forward-looking than…

They ain’t built the CD tower that can hold Joe Myers. Just try slotting any of the Tempe solo guitarist’s three homespun releases into your favorite disc organizer with anything resembling ease. It can’t be done! First, House With Nine Rooms came in a slim cardboard sleeve. Next, each copy…

Tony Bennett On Holiday: A Tribute to Billie Holiday (Columbia) Tony Bennett has nearly always been an anachronism. His career began just as his brand of sophisticated Tin Pan Alley melody was about to get swallowed up by the passionate rhythms of rock ‘n’ roll; a half-century later, with all…

“Hello, hello, how can I reach you–huhhhh??” The isolated voice of Atlantic recording artist Poe resonates over the monitors in DJ-turned-producer Markus Schulz’s cramped home studio, located somewhere in the Mesa suburbs. A little bigger than most pantries, this sonic workshop is cluttered with state-of-the-art sampling equipment, antiquated analog keyboards…

Jill Sobule Happy Town (Lava/Atlantic) Singer-songwriters usually make my skin crawl–tell me one more time how great Jewel is, and you risk serious dental work–but Colorado native Jill Sobule not only soars over that hurdle with Happy Town, she tops her surprisingly fresh 1995 hit “I Kissed a Girl.” Sobule…

Beck Celebrity Theatre February 20, 1997 Beck’s not himself these days. The stage-frightened, rain-soaked, coffee-house kitten has turned into a blow-dried lion in white polyester. The muttering beatnik is now a rock star. This is the new Beck. Hear him roar. “Owwwww! Y’all lookin’ sexy!” Beck was half right. About…

Van Morrison The Healing Game (Polydor) When you’ve put out 27 studio albums, as Belfast’s finest has, your audience checks out every new release to gauge the subtle differences with past work. Here’s how The Healing Game stacks up to Morrison’s past triumphs: 1. Anyone who counted how many times…

1. Mae West–Way Out West! (Tower) 1966 Mae still had an hourglass figure, but the sands of time were quickly running out, if her manglings of beat favorites like “Day Tripper,” “Twist and Shout” and “You Turn Me On” are any indicator. This curio is like kissing Grandma and getting…

Vanessa Daou Slow to Burn (MCA) Virgin Island jazz-pop/dance diva Vanessa Daou and her producer/instrumentalist husband Peter Daou earned the favorable notice of dance-club feminists in 1994 with Zipless, an album that set the poetry and occasionally the voice of Erica Jong to music (the Fear of Flying author is…

Supersuckers Nita’s Hideaway January 21, 1997 “Welcome to the rock show,” Supersuckers singer/spokesman Eddie Spaghetti exhorted a packed house from behind his “rock-star shades.” Looking a lot like Andy Kaufman in a cowboy hat, Spaghetti kept the absurdity level high throughout his band’s roller-coaster set of hillbilly hard-core. “Here’s a…

Despite the bombardment of mediocre Elvis impersonators, the world still largely acknowledges that the Elvis Presley who toppled off his porcelain throne 20 years ago is the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. But now that longtime Elvis handler Colonel Tom Parker has kicked the bucket–Parker died of a stroke January…

Shaquille O’Neal You Can’t Stop the Reign (T.W.IsM.) It took $120 million to persuade Shaquille O’Neal to apply himself on a basketball court (free-throw percentage as of this writing: 46 percent). How much of himself can he be expected to commit to a rap album that returns but a fraction…

So you gotta ask yourself–here are two bands, both clones of the Boogie Knights, who are managed by the BK’s firm, Perfect World, and use the same keyboard samples, play the same song selections (what’s the fascination with “Copacabana” anyway?) and buy their wigs from the same thrift shops. So…

Last summer, blues guitarist Jono Manson passed through Tempe on a national tour. He was booked into Gibson’s, but arrived to find his gig had been bumped to Balboa Cafe, a much smaller venue on the other side of Hayden Square. Between sets, Manson stepped outside for a smoke and…

1. Warrant, Belly to Belly (CMC/BMG) Duh. 2. Great White, Let It Rock (Imago) Long since abandoned by fans and glory, these bloated, balding bozos are still searching for that lost Mott/Bad Company riff and any stripper who still cares. 3. KISS, Unplugged (Mercury) Weren’t the lunchboxes, TV shows, comic…

Van Halen Best of, Volume 1 (Warner Bros.) Warner Bros. has already released volume one in the Van Halen best-of series: It was called Van Halen, and it hit stores in 1978. Volume two, the following year, was called, well, Van Halen II; volume three was 1984 in, well, 1984…