Every music scene is different, but there are some rules that apply wherever you go. Every metroplex worth its salt contains at least one surf band, rockabilly band and ska band. It might not be coincidental that fans of those three genres tend to be among the most hard-core music…
Rainer Ptacek smiles. He remembers the day his doctor gave him the dreaded diagnosis. “You have the best cancer, Rainer. You really have a very good cancer.” The 46-year-old Tucson slide-guitar master seemed to be sailing through life in February 1996. His haunting music–a stark, inimitable kind of postmodern desert…
Super Deluxe via satellite (Revolution Records) Appealing and melodious though it may be, power pop has never been quite strong enough to stand on its own legs. Since it’s essentially always been an attempt to recapture the unpretentious three-minute epiphanies of pre-Sgt. Pepper ’60s guitar bands, its earliest musical joy…
Joan of Arc is not a band. Yeah, it just released an album (A Portable Model of, on Jade Tree Records). Yeah, individually, the members are musicians. They have guitars, bass, drums, etc. But as a unit, Joan of Arc is a sculptor of sonic objets d’art, and cannot be…
Rhett Miller had a habit of forming a new band every month. At least that’s the way it seemed to followers of the Dallas music scene in the early ’90s. One month it would be a breezy folk combo. Before anyone realized it had disbanded, he would launch a British…
Olympia, capital of the state of Washington, is an unlikely candidate for indie-rock capital of the nation. That becomes especially clear when observing it against the backdrop of the annual Olympia Lakefair, a weeklong festival that draws crowds from all over rural Washington to watch the parade and fireworks and…
Fuck Pardon My French (Matador Records) Never has any band been more ill-served by its name than this quartet. Before hearing a note of this album, you naturally assume that you’re dealing with a juvenile gimmick band with so little imagination it couldn’t think of a better moniker than the…
Last week should have been one long highlight reel for Mark Morrell. Morrell’s band, Zig Zag Black, was preparing for the release of its third CD with a couple of special weekend shows and a midweek listening party. It was the culmination of countless hours of studio work and rehearsal…
Wu-Tang Clan Wu-Tang Forever (Loud Records) It’s on. With its new, much-anticipated double-CD Wu-Tang Forever, the Wu-Tang Clan lands the first blow on two unfortunate trends that have saturated hip-hop over the past two years–crass materialism and studio gangsterism. East and West Coast rappers have been more interested in $1,000…
This morning my neighbor across the court accidentally killed her dog. Backed over its head with her Pontiac. My girlfriend used to feed the little brown thing dinner scraps from my kitchen door. I would tell her to quit it. But that was before. I am on the couch, drinking…
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…
Carvin Jones likes Stevie Ray Vaughan. No, you don’t understand. I mean he really, really likes him. You can see it in the Phoenix bluesman’s stage wardrobe, replete with snakeskin boots and wide-brimmed black hat. You can sense it in the Vaughanlike way he hunches his shoulders whenever he digs…
Everywhere Jay Farrar goes, his reputation shadows him. People who spend any time with the 30-year-old leader of alt-country heroes Son Volt inevitably wind up shaking their heads and regaling each other with stories. No, these aren’t Hammer of the Gods tales, wherein a debauched rocker with a needle in…
Thirty-six years after the first cascading notes from Dick Dale’s Stratocaster signaled to the landlocked U.S. that something called surf music was happening in California, Dale, now 60, lives in the desert. Long gone from his old haunts around Newport and Balboa, he retreated several years ago to a concrete…
Spanish is the loving tongue. At least that’s what the trite, old ballad says. Of course, Spanish–like any language–can, and does, accommodate feelings like anger and frustration just as easily as romance. But old stereotypes die hard, even when we can no longer feel their pulse. Nowhere is this more…
Only a nascent Valleyite like myself, with a mere two weeks in Arizona under his belt, would be unfamiliar with the impact Dead Hot Workshop has exerted on the local music scene over the past decade. All but the grievously uninitiated–like me–could tell you that this quartet has provided one…
John Hiatt Little Head (Capitol Records) There’s really no precedent for John Hiatt. Try naming another figure in the annals of rock who developed into a more confident, focused and satisfying artist in his 40s than he had been in his 20s or 30s. Little Head is the latest in…
At first glance, “Lilith Fair” may seem to be an unusual name for a music festival showcasing today’s best female singer-songwriters. But considering that Lilith was the world’s first feminist, it all begins to make sense. The story in the Bible goes that Lilith was Adam’s first wife, but she…
“We have three songs about pimps,” says Josh Prior, bassist/vocalist for hot young funksters Yoko Love, as he runs a hand through his spiked, metallic-blond hair. “Every time I hear a really serious, fuckin’ slammin’ funk bass line, I see that pimp from I’m Gonna Git You Sucka with the…
Radiohead OK Computer (Capitol Records) Maybe punk didn’t rescue us completely from prog-rock, but what makes Radiohead think prog-rock is going to save us from anything? Based on OK Computer, this Oxford quintet is convinced that the future lies in the astral hippie past, where six-minute “suites” are twice as…
It was one of those moments that tested the limits of nostalgia. See, last year MTV was hosting its second in a series of “Where are they now?” ’80s retrospectives, this one dedicated to heavy metal. Catching up with war-horses like Kevin Dubrow and Kip Winger was a queasy enough…
Immaculately clothed in thrift-store suits and sporting scuffed wing tips, the members of East Bay foursome the Hi-Fives shimmer with a panache that extends beyond their wardrobe and separates them from their Lookout Records peers. While Lookout mainstays like the Mr. T Experience, the Queers, Squirtgun, etc., define the pop-punk,…
