You could argue that the Rock 'n' Roll Arizona Marathon is as big an annual event as the East Valley has.Especially for the formerly important town of Tempe, which saw Glendale steal away the city's BCS bowl game in 2007. Since then, the East Vall...

I walked into the Rhythm Room on Thursday evening for the Yeasayer show and surveyed the crowd. Immediately, I saw signs of potential trouble: The joint was lousy with hipsters. There were three Ben Gibbard look-alikes within 10 feet of me, and be...

Yeasayer frontman Chris Keating's tongue-in-cheek claim that the band's sophomore release, Odd Blood, was designed to "sonically challenge Rihanna in the clubs" might be overly ambitious, but it's a good description of the band's departure from it...

One song into Richard Cheese's Saturday show at Celebrity Theatre, I was ready to believe I'd been wrong. Sure, a guy who for nearly a decade has made a living performing sleazy lounge covers of popular songs might seem, at first glance, to be a n...

"Huh? The Toadies are back together?" was pretty much my reaction last week, when I heard a radio ad for Wednesday's show at Martini Ranch in Scottsdale. Clearly, I'd been out of the loop, since Todd Lewis had reconstituted his Dallas-Fort Worth b...

It's been 15 long years since The Toadies scored a big hit with "Possum Kingdom" -- possibly the most popular song ever written about murdering somebody behind a boathouse. The nationwide popularity of that song, and the success of the Dallas-Fort...