Music

First time I saw the Go-Go’s: early 1980s, at a local punk-rock club. Belinda Carlisle, girl of my teen-cream dreams, was chubby back then — soft and round and pretty. A girl flirting with being a woman, the angles in her face still obscured by baby fat. She couldn’t sing,…

Since it first started out in 1993, Quasi has made a career out of wedding catchy, up-tempo pop music to some of the gloomiest lyrics around. Its new album, The Sword of God — and first for the Touch & Go label — is no exception. Songwriter/keyboardist Sam Coomes and…

Not only does this CD feature the hit song “Sugar,” but it’s endorsed by Radio Disney, and the Disney Channel. Plus there’s a free AT&T Calling Card inside! It’s good for five minutes — billed in one-minute increments. There’s a surcharge for calls made from pay phones, but you can…

It probably never comes up in Tom Brokaw’s franchise, but the men who whipped the Depression at home and fascism abroad and gave us the baby boom, the Cold War and the trillion-dollar military-industrial complex also nurtured a pretty robust appetite for lurid sexuality. Witness the innuendo that seeps through…

Sometimes talking a good game will get you out of trouble. Sometimes it’ll get you famous. Sometimes it’ll get you dead. Ferdinand Morton (1891-1941), known to musical history as “Jelly Roll,” was, to judge by jazz buff Phil Pastras’ intriguing bit of cultural archaeology, one of the world’s great talkers…

Once upon a time, when Jane’s Addiction reigned as one of rock music’s most potent forces, Perry Farrell seemed the most deserving heir apparent to the crown of the Lizard King. But after the meltdown of two counterculture festivals and Porno for Pyros, those days seem very far off indeed,…

You will, no doubt, think you know where this is going: Three guys, dressed in black, maybe a little eyeliner on just for effect, definitely some secondhand suits, hitting creepy chords on some old piano, peeling off a fuzzy guitar solo, the singer mewling like a sexed-up absinthe fan. Simple,…

It’s Buck Owens month. Like daylight, it’s always Buck Owens month somewhere, leastways it ought to be. Driving down one highway or another, you can see the giant red, white and blue guitar that advertises country radio — that’s Buck’s old custom-made Mosrite. The stations may not play his music…

The Doggfatha is too, too generous. He hit with two solo CDs last year (one a sort of preliminary revenge blow from estranged former label Death Row), plus his debut with new brothers Tha Eastsidaz, and still he managed to keep up his usual busy social obligations as every rapper’s…

It’s embarrassingly easy to poke fun at journeyman belter Eddie Money. I mean, what’s not to yuk about him? There’s Ma Mahoney’s kid Ed’s dumb stage name, of course (Buck Dharma was taken). That well-worn Quaalude story always makes for good cocktail-party chatter, too; true or not, urban legend has…

There are plenty of horny chicks who fantasize about getting onstage and grabbing an audience by the balls. But you’ll find only one who styles her hair in an ’80s porn star mullet, dresses in skimpy pink hot pants and slings raps about “a big, gigantic cock show” over hard,…

Never Make It Home, Split Lip Rayfield’s third release in nearly as many years, appeared on shelves in March of this year. The band is one of Bloodshot Records’ quality cadre of insurgent country acts, and a bluegrass kissin’ cousin of Wichita, Kansas, punk-ass country foursome Scroat Belly, whose releases…

Last year, Betty Blowtorch earned $45,000 on tour — not a bad take for a then-unsigned all-chick sleaze-rock band with songs like “Shut Up and Fuck.” Of course, Betty Blowtorch spent $44,000 to earn that 45K, paying the rent with day jobs between two-week touring stints. Reminiscing about a decade…

When you were a kid, and you went to see a magic show, which kind of viewer were you: The one who got utterly swept away and believed that those doves appeared from nowhere, or the one who sat with furrowed brow, trying to figure out how the trick was…

When Philadelphia’s legendary Roots crew takes the stage at Tempe’s Club Rio on Tuesday, it will be a homecoming of sorts. Sharing the bill with a phalanx of fellow hip-hoppers and rappers including Dilated Peoples, Pokafase and Foot Clan, the Roots are making a return to familiar territory. For the…

If you were to meet Adam Carroll at a bookstore or a coffee house, the sort of place where he hangs out when not playing gigs, you probably wouldn’t surmise that he’s one of the most esteemed new Texas singer-songwriters to emerge in some time. A squat, shy and quirky…

With a voice incisive enough to slice through Kevlar and a body that’s more butter than Land O’ Lakes, Bed-Stuy native Inga Marchand fuses equal parts LL Cool J braggadocio and early Boogie Down Productions’ street sagas as rapper Foxy Brown. And with Broken Silence, her third album, Brown shows…

Pop quiz time: Name all the rock ‘n’ roll “brothers” that aren’t technically made up of siblings. Lessee — Righteous Brothers, Dust Brothers, Radar Brothers, Gibson Brothers, Waco Brothers, Brothers Four, Brothers Uv Da Blakmarket . . . maybe Bros . . . Duran Duran and the Dead Kennedys …

Texan (by way of New Mexico) Gilkyson has had many labels, been many things to many people: daughter (to Academy Award-winning folk singer Terry Gilkyson), sister (to X guitarist Tony Gilkyson), New Age thrush (to those who tuned in to her late ’80s records and early ’90s work with Andreas…

When he walked onstage at the 20th anniversary of the Tejano Conjunto Festival in San Antonio’s Rosedale Park in May, Estéban “Steve” Jordan was resplendent in a purple jumpsuit with gold buccaneer sleeves. But what stood out most was how frail the 62-year-old accordion legend looked. Like a skeleton clinging…