There are nasty rumors swirling about Archers of Loaf and their label, Alias Records, and they go like this: A skeleton crew is running the once-thriving indie label, which has sunk to releasing back order and product that’s already in progress; and Archers, the label’s last bastion of credibility, will…
When the surviving ex-Beatles put together their three-volume Anthology series a few years ago, they faced a daunting artistic challenge. On the one hand, they had to satiate long-suffering fans clamoring for a collection of the band’s best unreleased tracks. On the other hand, because the Anthology CDs were conceived…
On January 1, 1988, in Tucson, Arizona, Billy Sedlmayr stepped out of a stolen pickup truck and walked into a Dairy Queen. He had no gun but told the ice cream clerks he did, and they believed him. The lie yielded him $97, a sum small in proportion to the…
Kevin Newell was irate. Halfway through an emotionally charged zoning administrator hearing to decide the fate of local hip-hop club House of Grooves, the head of the Whittier Neighborhood Association was on a roll as he recited a list of neighbors’ complaints against the venue. Some of his points were…
Leftist politics, despite its role in the gestation and development of punk rock, holds virtually no demographic within the record-buying public today (discounting the homeless crusties who sport Refuse & Resist tee shirts and listen to decades-old Crass records). The kids wanna hear artists emote; they want them to bleed…
While it’s probably bad form to inhale a three-course meal and still find it wanting, the Burt box achieves the desired effect if it sends you scurrying to find more Bacharach/David gems not included here. The following are some of the ones whose absence I noticed: “Warm & Tender”–Johnny Mathis…
Lately the words “resurgence” and “Burt Bacharach” are finding their way into a lot of the same sentences. There’s been an avalanche of press coverage on Bacharach and the stepped-up use of his songs in hit movies like Austin Powers, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Forrest Gump and The First Wives…
R.E.M. Up (Warner Bros.) There’s a moment on R.E.M.’s new album, Up (the band’s 13th or 14th release, depending on whether you count best-ofs), that will be instantly familiar to longtime fans. The song is called “The Apologist,” and Michael Stipe nails his point home in the chorus by singing,…
This year the kids just banged on Bill’s door regardless of the fact that the trailer was dark as a cemetery. And the only exterior light on the tin home came from the silver and yellow strains of the half moon and the barren Dairy Queen sitting well-lit across the…
Belle and Sebastian The Boy With the Arab Strap (Jeepster/Matador) Goth can be a many-sided gloom. At its silliest, it’s too much eyeliner on a suburban kid playing make-believe with death and destruction. At the other end are fashion nonspecific soundtracks of honest human entropy: the artist-as-fuck-up documents like Big…
The theme of the night at Arizona Roadhouse was “In Love with Debbie Gibson.” In set-list currency, that translated into each of the night’s four acts scraping together one cover song by the ’80s teen sensation. Near the end of the set by power-pop up-and-comers Crashbar, lead singer Adrian Smith…
When I was 11 years old, my older brother gave me a tape that changed everything I thought I knew about music. The tape was called King of Rock, and it was the second album by the rap group Run-D.M.C. I thought I was pretty hip for an 11-year-old, but…
Geoff Brown is a junior-high science teacher. He’s also a dedicated Christian. He has short, dark hair and is dressed conservatively in slacks and a green short-sleeve shirt. Though he’s only 30, he somehow seems much older. It’s not that he’s aged badly, really, but just that he speaks with…
There’s a famous old skit on Saturday Night Live in which a series of cheesy spokespeople vied with each other to prove that their brand of jam was the best, simply because it had the most vile name. The perverse gist of the mock commercial was that only a wonderful…
Tempe street artist, avid cyclist and self-made celebrity Frankie Martinez, known to most as Elvis, died October 8 after one of his lungs collapsed. This came as little surprise to any of the thousands who recognized him or the few who actually knew him, because Elvis always looked pitifully sick,…
Wailing Souls founder Winston “Pipe” Matthews has been working on his car. It’s a chore he knows plenty about: During the early ’70s, when Bob Marley and other reggae stars were earning international recognition, Matthews usually had his head under a hood. “There was so much struggle within the music…
Reubens Accomplice “Borders” b/w “O’ the Night” (Jerk Records) The four young men who comprise Reubens Accomplice have, over the course of time, developed into high-caliber pop musicians with an immense talent for precocious, intricately constructed pop songs seething with charm and innocence. A glance at the sleeve of this…
Flat Duo Jets Lucky Eye (Outpost Recordings) The Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based Flat Duo Jets have been bringing their stripped-down brand of southern roots music on the road for nearly 15 years. The duo of guitarist/vocalist Dexter Romweber and drummer Crow has earned a reputation as an intense and exciting…
Maybe it was some need to exorcise the past that sent Roger Clyne and P.H. Naffah hiking through the desert this summer. Clyne, the singer and primary songwriter of The Refreshments, and Naffah, the band’s drummer, had just decided to pull the plug on the group that had brought them…
In the booklet for his 1985 career anthology, Biograph, Bob Dylan mused on the differences between his rapturously received 1974 “comeback” tour and the contentious series of shows he had given eight years earlier. On the surface, much was similar about these two tours. In both cases, Dylan was backed…
Old habits certainly die hard. Blake Schwarzenbach knows this well. Nearly two years ago he brought his band, the seminal San Francisco punk-pop outfit Jawbreaker, to an end after fronting the band for the better part of a decade. Jawbreaker had been, and continues to be, one of the most…
Anyone shocked by the rampant intrusiveness and utter lack of accountability of Ken Starr and his posse probably has never had a run-in with Arizona’s liquor board. For years now, this group of self-styled morality czars has indiscriminately dropped its wrecking ball of disfavor on any club that chose to…
