During the opening day of the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Texas, where Kim Fowley is still revered and everyone gets a backstage pass for a weekend, Randy Newman sat uncomfortably on a stage in the Austin Convention Center’s ballroom. He was there ostensibly to promote…
WORST REVIEW OF A LOCAL BAND PRINTED OUTSIDE THE VALLEY Review of Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy June issue of Grid The Refreshments continue to bubble along nicely–with a new video in rotation on MTV and a recent glowing write-up in Rolling Stone–but the Tempe outfit took it on the…
Pearl Jam No Code (Epic) One of my best friends, the head sports photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times, recently told a revealing story about Eddie Vedder. A longtime basketball fan who still roots for his former hometown team, the Chicago Bulls, Vedder naturally had courtside seats for the championship series…
When the great revolutionary poet Pablo Neruda was a young man, he served Chile as consul to a series of desperately poor countries. He was amazed to find mass starvation in “the golden age of world poetry.” “While the new songs are hunted down,” he wrote, “a million men sleep…
And now a word about continuing higher education from Shamsi Ruhe, lead singer of the Tempe rock group One. “Me and Shahzad are going back to school. No more of this slacker/dropout business.” She grins before turning dead serious. “It’d be great if the music thing worked out, but if…
Meat Beat Manifesto Subliminal Sandwich (Nothing) In 1987, Jack Dangers and Meat Beat Manifesto unleashed the single “I Got the Fear” on the dance world. The result of Dangers’ attempt to “make the noisiest single of all time” was an intense, cluttered conglomeration of driving drum machine and bizarre samples-cum-beats…
Let us probe the magic, the mystery that is Ariel. The name means “Lion of God” in both Russian and Hebrew. And Ariel the pop piano man claimed it years before that little Disney hussy in The Little Mermaid. It was 1985, to be exact. The year Arkadi Efimovitch Bogoslavsky…
Ex-Phunk Junkeez rapper Kirk Reznik says he has a nagging pain in his back from the knife his longtime partner and co-MC Joe Valiente stuck there in late August, when Valiente conspired with the crew’s deejay and stage band to kick Reznik out of the group the two of them…
Cynicism prevails in the current climate of indie angst, and it takes balls for an underground band like cub to make a career of putting out upbeat, even occasionally pretty records. Except balls is one thing (two things?) these Vancouver masters of la-la pop don’t have. An all-grrl trio, cub…
Various artists Masters of Jazz: Volumes 1-4 (Rhino) Anyone compiling a CD look-see at the history of jazz is setting himself up for a fall. Especially if the project is stamped with a lofty title like Masters of Jazz. Such an anthology, to be truly representative, would have to include…
MEXICO CITY–Betsy Pecanins’ life has always blurred the borders. The 42-year-old singer grew up in Arizona, Mexico and Spain. She is the child of an American father and a Catalonian mother, whose family emigrated from Barcelona to Mexico. She speaks and sings in three languages–English, Spanish and Catalan. Starting out…
Scrawl Travel On, Rider (Elektra) If I were a boy, and I found out that my girlfriend was listening intently to Scrawl’s new recording, I’d take a good, hard look at our relationship and try to figure out what was bugging her. But boys don’t usually think that way; it’s…
Love Nut Bastards of Melody (Interscope) As a genre, power pop didn’t always guarantee great songwriting, a la XTC, Elvis Costello or Blondie. The term also covers second-tier acts like 20/20, the Dwight Twilley Band and the Producers, who consistently adhered to one simple formula: Leave the verses bland and…
KISS America West Arena August 21, 1996 “Dude, didja go see KISS last Wednesday?” “Oh, hell, yeah. You see Gene’s boots, dude?” “The dragon heads?” “Old-school, bro. Straight offa the Destroyer cover. Six-inch metal teeth for platforms, red eyes that shoot laser beams and shit. Now that’s rock ‘n’ roll.”…
The Wipers are playing a show in town this week. That’s big news, even though head Wiper Greg Sage, a longtime icon of American indie rock, has lived in the Valley for almost seven years now. Sage takes the Wipers on frequent tours of Europe and the rest of the…
Hamell on Trial Big As Life (Mercury) David Lowery, chief smart ass for Cracker, once intoned in song that, “What the world needs now is another folk singer/Like I need a hole in my head.” David Lowery needs to meet Ed Hamell. Or, at least, check out Hamell’s striking debut…
About a Mover Among other things, the history of soul music is the story of a handful of regional labels that flourished 20 to 30 years ago, releasing strings of sublime 45s before the long night of disco fell. Their passing success owed a lot to house bands such as…
According to the kids who were inside the Inclusion Art Space the night it got raided, it’s hard to say what gave away the scout team of undercover cops first–the fake nose rings, the advanced age, the silly clothes or the ill-informed attempts to score drugs at a straight-edge punk…
George Jones I Lived to Tell It All (MCA) Issued to tie in with George Jones’ tell-all autobiography of the same name, this album picks up Jones’ story at one of its most infamous low points. Married to his first wife, Shirley, the King of Country Music is reduced to…
It’s the final night for the Equinox, an underground punk club crammed into a central Phoenix office space, and Xs mark the spot. About 120 punkers have gathered to pay their last respects to the venue, listening as the local Christian hard-core band Overcome grinds away in a back corner…
Here’s my variation on Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck if . . .” routine. Call it “You might live in the Valley if . . .” The kickoff item: “You might live in the Valley if . . . you go to a yard sale where people are…
Ever go to a KISS convention and see people clamoring for a Bruce Kulick doll, or a lunchbox with Eric Singer’s mug plastered on the side? Of course not! It took Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley 13 pageant-free years to figure out what the rest of us knew all along–KISS…
