There was no doubt in anyone’s mind, Medeski Martin and Wood bassist Chris Wood remembers. This was the album that was going to get them booted from Blue Note. “That was one of the reasons for the title,” Wood explains from backstage, a few hours before MMW’s show at House…
Somewhere in north Tempe, tucked away behind the corrugated door of an industrial park storage space off Smith Road, Brandon Lawson, a.k.a. MC Mesi, lifts his head. The smell of stale smoke is heavy in the rehearsal space. There are half-packs of Parliaments and Marlboros littering the floor and scattered…
“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…
After an eight-year run, local pop-punks Pollen are calling it quits. The group announced its imminent demise from the stage this past weekend, confirming rumors that had been circulating for several weeks. The band — which relocated from Pittsburgh to the Valley in 1994 — has seen its star on…
“Mogwai have done with the post-rock schtick!” blazed a Times Square neon monstrosity near the penthouse offices of Matador Records. Okay, so the cheeky hype was actually a stray sentence buried in an early draft of the Glaswegian band’s latest label bio. But a telling and heroic statement just the…
When Reprise introduced Australian trio The Living End to American audiences by repackaging its two manic rockabilly EPs onto one disc, the group seemed poised to assume the Reverend Horton Heat’s thankless throne, one that requires constant maintenance in the form of touring. However, The Living End’s self-titled 1999 full-length…
Art Pepper’s 1977 autobiography Straight Life is still the most disturbing entry in the ever-expanding library of jazz memoirs. Pepper’s warts-and-all recounting of his own days as a topflight alto saxophonist, heroin addict and convict makes for harsh reading. Even fellow sociopath and occasional bandmate Chet Baker dismissed the tome…
By all rights, the Toadies should no longer exist, and perhaps, in one sense, they do not. Yes, the Dallas, Texas, band that released its second album, Hell Below/Stars Above, last month looks, for the most part, like the band that released its debut, Rubberneck, in August 1994. Gone (long…
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…
Elvis Costello knows what critics and fans will call For the Stars, the album he recorded with Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter: a collection of covers of songs written by Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, Tom Waits, ABBA, Ron Sexsmith and, yes, Elvis Costello. He doesn’t particularly mind that these…
It’s 10 o’clock, the television is on Channel 3 and the NewShow is on, but something is wrong, very wrong. There’s no dancing letters, no familiar theme song, and — gasp! — co-anchor Liz Habib is sitting down. Welcome to the new NewShow. KTVK-TV Channel 3’s nightly broadcast — which…
Weighing in on Frank Sinatra, critic Gary Giddins concluded: “The generosity he wasn’t always able to summon in life is the very marrow of his gift to music.” The same appraisal could be tacked onto the legacy of Miles Davis. Davis’ public persona and self-made image always hinged on the…
When the joke is working — witness the spot-on reconstructions, down to the album art, of KISS’ ego-stroke solo records — Seattle’s Melvins come off like the idiot bastard offspring of Black Sabbath and the Bonzo Dog Band. But the Melvins’ love for unreconstructed heavy metal power chords and guttural…
To begin with a small caveat: The next time any contemporary folkie writes a song about how you fell asleep in the passenger seat on our all-night drive across the desert and I looked at you in the dashboard light and I felt us growing farther apart, I swear to…
Rock ‘n’ roll has given Bob Pollard a lot — certainly more than any fourth-grade teacher who decides to become a full-time musician at the age of 37 can expect. As leader of cult combo Guided By Voices, Pollard has earned a modicum of financial security, loads of critical praise…
That staple (some call it a cliché) of rock ‘n’ roll, the double live album, rears its head once again this week in the form of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s Live in New York City (Columbia). And accompanied by the video of the concert — here, an…
By 1974, John Hammond had played with damn near every great bluesman who ever lived: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Duane Allman, Charlie Musselwhite, Mike Bloomfield, John Lee Hooker, the Staples Singers. For starters. He had made records with Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm when they were still young Hawks, with…
Delbert McClinton talks like he sings, like the songs he writes and the songs that inspired him, in simple declarative phrases that sound like children’s verse, but which rumble in the back of the mind like a passing train. “My stayin’ up all night days are long gone,” he drawls…
On the eerily quiet “When I Go,” the last song of Over the Rhine’s affecting new disc Films for Radio, singer Karin Berqquist asks, “Will it make a difference when I go?” The other half of Over the Rhine, multi-instrumentalist Linford Detweiler, admits that a few months after Berqquist –…
As anyone whose assorted crosses to bear include working with a slew of self-absorbed, green-haired brats and listening to their incessant prattling of the “awesome” nature of this or that fourth-generation punk band will recognize, the line between irony and stupidity basically doesn’t exist anymore. Don’t blame Spinal Tap; it’s…
Twenty years ago, when gullible tech heads were lapping up the latest improvement in sound reproduction, the compact disc, and tossing all those skip-and-pop-prone LPs into the Dumpster, little could they foresee the consequences. Years ago, when the supposedly indestructible compact disc first started skipping and the lunkheads realized they’d…
To say that this is Rocket From the Crypt’s strongest outing since Paint as a Fragrance is both true and a little misleading. If you were a fan of the band’s guitar-and-horn-heavy rave-ups from the mid-’90s, and felt a little disappointed by 1998’s RFTC, which was a slower and softer…
