Valley residents have often bemoaned the gentrification of Mill Avenue. Up until the late 1990s, the Tempe strip was a cultural mecca of mom-and-pop shops and rock clubs. But when corporate entities started moving in, landlords started raising the rent on retail spaces, forcing small business off Mill to make…
Old-timey prog rock band Yes is coming to Phoenix on Wednesday, February 25. This according to a press release filled with proclamations that’d make The Beatles blush:”A dominant force in rock music for more than four decades, YES has created some of rock’s most enduring and compelling hits and has…
It’s not even Christmas, but we have our first piece of big summer concert news today: Dave Matthews Band is coming to Cricket Wireless Pavilion on May 6.Yes, it’s time for “Dave” again, already.DMB’s first studio record in four years (oddly produced by Rob Cavallo of Green Day and My…
Costume designer Randall Christensen has dressed some very famous people throughout his career. Since 1985, he’s tailored for stars such as Jennifer Lopez, Antonio Banderas, R&B singer Toni Braxton, actress Susan Lucci, and *NYSYNC member Lance Bass. He’s been the sole costume designer for the popular ABC TV series Dancing with the Stars since season two, and he won an Emmy Award for “Outstanding Costumes for a Variety or Music Program” in 2006 for his work on DWTS.
It’s not often that a bassist leaving your band can make you somehow much more popular, but that’s just what happened to Black Label Society. Of course the situation wasn’t exactly normal, what with Robert Trujillo leaving the band to join The Beatles of Metal, Metallica. Soon after Bobby T…
If anyone’s compiling a reel of defining Arizona 21st-century rock moments, don’t forget Kirkwood Dellinger’s January 2008 appearance on Good Morning Arizona. Falling squarely, and I do mean squarely, under what Elmo Kirkwood will frequently categorize as “corny crap,” the band briefly played to the commercial break a snippet of…
Where’s the love for rap’s elders? Almost 30 years after Sugar Hill Gang released hip-hop’s first hit single, “Rapper’s Delight,” the genre evinces less nostalgia than reel lawn mowers. While rock luminaries like Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan still attract fans (some who weren’t even…
Zach Daniell is wiped out. It’s the night before Thanksgiving and the 18-year-old New Yorker has just flat-out sprinted through lower Manhattan with his 16-year-old girlfriend Kiki Fausel, his sister, and some friends. Bounding and pounding, they make the frenzied one-mile dash from Washington Square Park to a concert at…
This morning I woke up thinking “Hmmm, I’m pretty much done compiling my list of the top ten local releases of the year, I should write that column soon,” when I got an unexpected e-mail that threw the whole operation to disarray.That’s right, The Loveblisters record, The Nowhere West is done…
Perhaps recognizing that the tanking economy has hit the blue-collar sorts you’ll find at a massive multi-day country music festival especially hard, Country Thunder is introducing an installment purchase plan. Or, as we like to call it, “layaway.” Now on countrythunder.com you can get your tickets at the early bird…
Arizona’s own Maynard James Keenan, best known as the front man of Tool and A Perfect Circle, has scheduled a show with his new band, Puscifer and it’s nothing like what you’d expect from the enigmatic singer who was the subject of a New Times’ cover story last month. On…
I just received a book titled Time Flies When You’re In a Coma: The Wisdom of the Metal Gods (A Plume Book), a funny little tome filled with lyrical adages from the world of heavy metal music. Edited by Mike Daly (formerly of alt. country band Whiskeytown), the book is divided into four sections: Meditations, Zen Questions, Daily Affirmations, and Words of Wisdom. The glossy, full-color format of the book is slick, but after reading through it, I was still lacking enlightenment, so I turned to the gurus of another genre: hip-hop.
One-woman show Tania Katan speaks with enthusiasm on her voice mail — she speaks with enthusiasm about most things. The 37 year-old author, playwright, performer, and writing instructor manages to take a creative and humorous approach to real-life tough topics like surviving cancer and gay rights, and she’s become a brand unto herself over the past two years.
So I’ve never pretended to be an expert on the mind of the adolescent female, and I hate to sound like an out-of-touch old man, but I really don’t get this Tokio Hotel thing. Last night at Phooson, they prompted a wave of shrieks at almost every turn, being topped only by…
Director Darren Bousman described Repo! The Genetic Opera to the sold-out crowd at Chandler Cinemas on Thursday night, with all the passion of a director who’s made an instant cult classic.
So, if there’s one thing I thought Phooson, tonight’s popped up show at Cricket was missing, it was some B-list hosting talent. Luckily, Johnjay and Rich are bringing in the big guns: Paul Abdul. The American Idol hostess will join the disc jocks on stage at Cricket Pavillion to introduce…
Today is the 15th anniversary of what I’d say is the darkest day in the history of Arizona music. On December 5, 1993 Doug Hopkins, former guitarist of Gin Blossoms took his life. I’m not really the person to talk about this myself, having been 13 and living in Ohio…
Glendale resident and American Idol winner Jordin Sparks has received a Grammy nomination for her song “No Air.” The song, nominated for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, is a duet with R&B singer Chris Brown. It’s also the first of two (thus far) top 10 Billboard hits for Sparks — the other being “Tattoo.” Both songs are from her self-titled debut album, released this year on Jive Records.
Black metal beast Abigail Williams came screeching out of the Arizona desert a few years ago to much acclaim with its 2007 EP, Legend. Metalunderground.com and Hardcoresounds.net gave the band props, and Kerrang! wrote that they “have taken fresh-faced metal down the left hand path” and “the result is obscenely…
The crowd outside Holgas gallery in downtown Phoenix has swelled to nearly 100. From the apartments above the gallery, cigarette smoke rises in the November chill, drifting into a mass as two girls and a guy fiddle with amps and speakers on a makeshift stage. The crowd grows as passersby…
Over the past year or so — since just before last December’s release of 8 Diagrams — legendary hip-hop crew the Wu-Tang Clan has become its own reality show, what with all the infighting over creative direction (RZA versus Ghostface and Raekwon) and the bona fide superstars (Method Man, Ghostface)…
Reviewing Black Ice, AC/DC’s latest album, one critic summed up its strengths thusly: “Sounds exactly like every other AC/DC release.” And its weaknesses? “Sounds exactly like every other AC/DC release.” That pithy assessment gets to the heart of this band’s remarkably durable 35-year career: Are they geniuses for being so…
