Henry Gray, born in Louisiana in 1925, pulled a stretch in World War II and then migrated to Chicago, which was where Howlin’ Wolf found him. Gray had been honing his piano chops for years in a variety of barrelhouse and back-room settings throughout the South, but it was Chicago…
“Two nights ago in Manhattan, I was onstage thinking that there’s something very cheap about this job,” Rhett Miller says, via phone from the roof of a nightclub in Baltimore. Miller, singer-guitarist for the Old 97’s and band-proclaimed “face man,” is loading in for a show at the beginning of…
How do jazz players come up with the bucks to pay the rent? Do they sell plasma? Stuff envelopes at home? And was that famed jazz saxophonist Jackie McLean Gumbo saw selling tokens to kids at Chuck E. Cheese’s? If 95 percent of all albums made sell less than 2,000…
In Native American folklore and art, the circle often illustrates the continuum of life (What? You were thinking of The Lion King?). So it’s only appropriate that the Native American blues-rock band Indigenous would title its sophomore effort Circle. Released last year on Pachyderm Records, the album has garnered a…
There’s no greater compliment a fan can pay an artist than to confess that he reaches one’s most private core. Alejandro Escovedo has done so in the past for this writer, most notably on his ’93 epic Thirteen Years, a stark chronicle of tragedy, serenity and bloody-minded resolve (much of…
April 10, 1985, Hampton, Virginia: I’m sitting on a dressing-room sofa, somewhere within Hampton Coliseum, passing a bottle of red wine back and forth with Bono. A few hours earlier, U2 had flawlessly executed a show on the Unforgettable Fire tour; now, the singer is holding forth animatedly on the…
For the listener, it’s a genuine high finding a ferociously creative talent that few of your friends know about. You fetishize the records, play them for your friends (“You gotta hear this”), and, if God is good and the ferocious talent rolls through your town, you drag all your like-minded…
Wouldn’t you know it; no sooner do we muse idly about the relative dearth of double-CD/triple albums of new material by women artists (review of godspeed you black emperor!’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, October 5, 2000) than Ani DiFranco comes along with a double-disc collection of…
Another year, another local music extravaganza, another Sunday afternoon gauntlet to run. But there was something different about New Times’ 2001 music showcase, the sixth annual version. There was a definite sense that we’d really made it. Sure, we’ve always had good attendance and rabid participation, but something was special…
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…
“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…
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…
