Music

It’s easy to pooh-pooh white blues singers. The strained sounds of earnest dilettantes with their paler shades of blue used to be one of music’s more annoying clichés. And though you still can find artificial Negroes wailing about things like levees and deltas at the occasional suburban sports bar, that…

Nestled comfortably in the dining room-cum-mixing studio of his south Scottsdale house, surrounded by walls upon walls of empirically filed (by beats per minute) records, local über-DJ Z-Trip is suddenly agitated. Midway through an interview set to coincide with the introduction of his new “Z-Trip Presents Funky Cornbread” night at…

Five years can seem a long time for anyone, and as the saying goes, that’s a lifetime in rock ‘n’ roll. Such was the case with Tucson’s Rich Hopkins, who debuted upon the scene in 1988 with his band the Sidewinders and their first album Cuacha!. With the Sidewinders, Hopkins…

A man in his 30s sits down to write his autobiography. He knows that doing so is a rather silly proposition. After all, what does a man in his 30s know? What has he lived through worth retelling? What experiences can he recount, what knowledge can he impart, that others…

Franco Gagliano, if you don’t know the name, is one of the most storied club owners in the Valley. And his bar, the Mason Jar, one of its most storied clubs. The man built the place — and its history — from years of solid work and what some might…

“You know, the negative stuff we’re not really talking about,” says an MCA Records PR flack prior to connecting me with Tommy Lee. “We are primarily focusing on Methods of Mayhem; the shows, the new record, Tommy and what he’s worked for this record and what he’s been through as…

Interviewer: Now, you mentioned empathy for others, would you say that is what motivates you to make the music that you make? Conor Oberst: No, not really. It’s more a need for sympathy. I want people to feel sorry for me. I like the feel of the burn of the…

At a time when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is lobbying Congress to pass a law that would make all recording artists nothing more than “workers for hire” (essentially making them even less than a label employee), it’s refreshing to see there are still people like Dan and…

Let’s say you’ve got an ace band going. You’ve got some songs and a self-released CD. You’ve done bits of regional touring over the past few years. You’ve accumulated a fan base and a good amount of laudatory press. People are talking about your band, and the sense is something…

Women have a lot of advantages over men. They live longer, they can use both sides of their brains at once, and they can sound delicate when singing rock songs. (No, this is not a treatise on “Women in Rock.”) Male singer-songwriters who aim for fragility inevitably end up sounding…

There’s something a little ridiculous about being in a rock band. Maybe that’s because there are only so many poses that can be struck with a guitar, only so many emotions that can be conveyed over three chords, and only so many things that haven’t been done to death by…

In the current climate of uncertainty and unrest within the recording industry, where big record labels eat other big record labels in perpetuity, and indies retract themselves into self-contained genre-of-the-month stalwarts, it’s nearly unthinkable for a 12-year-old band to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. But…

Listening to contemporary rock ‘n’ roll records these days is like drinking in the afternoon to avoid boredom; the idea may sound appealing at first, but after indulging you find yourself either nodding off like grandpa or saddled with a dull headache, or both. I mean, c’mon. When was the…

Neko Case is still mostly asleep when she picks up the phone for her first interview of the day. Her timbre is foggy, not at all the crystalline voice that makes her second record, Furnace Room Lullaby, one of the great unexpected pleasures in country music this year. (Make that…

Like the best mid-’60s work by Bob Dylan, the first three albums by the Clash redefined the rock ‘n’ roll landscape into which they were unleashed. Between 1977 and 1979, the British punk foursome issued The Clash, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, and London Calling, along with a brilliant string of…

See, Gene Simmons’ publicist never gave me a specific time to be available for his call. She just said, “Oh, he’ll call you sometime Monday or Tuesday.” Then she told me that if I missed his call, he would leave a number on my machine that I could use to…

As a rule, instrumental rock is lame, particularly instrumental indie rock. The results are usually mathematical-sounding numbers or the wanks of virtuosos trying to show off the scales and modes they learned at Berklee. Dirty Three is different. And in this case, different is good. More affecting than a hundred…

Paul Revere and the Raiders was the first beat group signed to the once rock-phobic Columbia label. This fourplay of Sundazed reissues captures all the crucial periods of the band’s career and, in the process, makes a pretty compelling argument for reevaluating the musical legacy of these current-day state fair/casino-circuit…

When soothsayers foretold that the end of the century would bring our human community to ever higher levels of enlightenment, I don’t think Fox’s Secrets of Street Magicians Finally Revealed was what they had in mind. Or figuring out what space-age adhesive was holding up Jennifer Lopez and her Grammy…