Last year’s acclaimed I Am Shelby Lynne was a personal and artistic breakthrough for a singer who’d nearly been crushed by a decade in the Nashville songmaking machinery. Right down to its pointed title, the record brimmed with Lynne’s hunger to establish an identity of her own, one not controlled…
Name something that’s better than the Klassic Kinks. Mini skirts? Not short enough. Cherry-chocolate layer cake? Not sweet enough. Two hundred pages by J.D. Salinger? Ray Davies could paint existential dysfunction as richly in three minutes. The Beatles and the Stones? Maybe combined. In the mid- and late ’60s, Dave…
Rock ‘n’ Roll Music is the sound of four guys with a past and unkempt hair (drummer Slim Jim Phantom, guitarist/vocalist Gilby Clarke, keyboardist Teddy Andreadis, and bassist/vocalist Muddy Stardust) sipping highballs, taking the piss out of each other and writing songs that traverse the space among Memphis, Beggars Banquet,…
There was a time, early in Hank Williams’ recording career, in 1947, when Williams was swinging pretty hard, when lead guitarist Zeke Turner was permitted to show a degree of uptown flash that would not appear in the later records. And there was a long-standing rumor that Williams had recorded…
It’s a sad fact that when most casual music listeners think of the blues these days, they’re likely to picture a mullet-headed, white journeyman cranking out the umpteenth tired version of “Born Under a Bad Sign,” for tight-assed corporate execs who think soul music is the stuff Vonda Shepard plays…
The only chore that goes along with being into the Dismemberment Plan — a Washington, D.C., outfit that in about three years has gone from being the oddity of the remarkably goal-oriented D.C. punk scene to perhaps the most creative underground guitar band in the country — is deciding which…
For those unfamiliar with the history of world jazz, to say nothing of Brazilian music in toto — that is, to most of your workaday music fans north of the equator — it’s difficult to explain just how monumental an album Gil and Milton is. Try to imagine the results…
Her Mystery Not of High Heels and Eye Shadow is Jonathan Richman’s first studio effort since 1999’s I’m So Confused. And though it is a solid offering — another slab of Richman’s pre-Beatles musings on love and wonder — it ultimately fails to enrich Richman’s oddball oeuvre. All of the…
Two decades ago, Iggy Pop made a rare TV talk-show appearance and was asked to explain his performance approach. Why did he go to such extremes onstage? What was the deal behind all the self-flagellation and drop-your-drawers exhibitionism?To Iggy, it all came down to Dionysus vs. Apollo. Iggy saw himself…
Jason Pierce doesn’t know how to read. Music, that is.Incredible, then, that Pierce has managed to construct dense, intricately crafted music over a career that’s spanned more than a decade, first as singer/guitarist for ’80s-era British psychedelic-rock icons Spacemen 3 and later as a founding member and the mastermind behind…
Sparing no expense and subjecting himself to an appalling level of moral compromise, Gumbo has secured numerous seedy contacts in the music industry who now supply yours truly with all manner of smut and trash on musicians who play roots music. So you think that National Public Radio interview with…
On the morning of Tuesday, October 30, Robin Nash went to work thinking she’d be unemployed in a couple of days.Nash, long the midday linchpin of alt-rock station KEDJ-FM 106.3 and KDDJ-FM 100.3 (The EDGE), had known since mid-September that her days were numbered on the Valley’s airwaves. That was…
Sometimes it seems the path to teen-pop stardom is traveled by supersonic space rocket. Drawing from our nation’s apparently abundant pool of singing and dancing dream prom queens, new Mandys, Krystals and Christinas are discovered, groomed, prepped and launched into the pop music limelight faster than George Jetson carpooling daughter…
When Stanley Kowalski mumbled, “What are you, a bunch of queens or something?” in A Streetcar Named Desire, he wasn’t fixing to pay his wife and nutty sister-in-law any compliments. But if he or you or anyone else were to burst in on the very sane women of W.O.M.B. with…
A 4-foot-by-6-foot Jolly Roger flaps from a post in my front yard. Gives the dirt plot a bit of shade while providing respite from so much Red, White and Blue. Yet, predictably, not everyone appreciates my goofy little symbol of free speech. The hostility in the air is thick and…
Kimber Lanning likes to keep lists of tasks she has to complete.For Lanning, the owner of Stinkweeds Records and a self-described type-A personality, it’s a way of assuring herself that she’s in control of the numerous roles she juggles on a daily basis: record-store owner, college student (majoring in psychology),…
Like their most obvious model, Blondie (sexy female singer + trend-hopping pop-rock band = airplay), Garbage’s greatest virtues are all on the surface. It wouldn’t be fair to call either of them shallow, exactly, it’s just that they tend to celebrate pop more for its sonic pleasures and attitude poses…
The last five years have been tough on the Butthole Surfers. Their 1996 album Electric Larryland spawned the unlikely hit “Pepper,” an odd blend of rap and grunge that was the first taste of mainstream success for a group better known for scatological imagery and hair-raising orgies of psychedelic noise…
Being of original Southern heritage sometimes leads one into misguided reactionary territory, especially when you’re talking Southern Rock. There’s not a punk fan alive from south of the Mason-Dixon line, for example, who didn’t at one point disavow ever liking Lynyrd Skynyrd. Although I had a good excuse when, on…
Does one take seriously a guy in his 60s who claims, “Gonna do it to you baby ’til ya yell for more”? You do when he’s standing on his head and wrenching masterful machine-gun solos from his Strat.Maybe the only person ever to have appeared on The Gong Show who…
After New Times ran a feature last year focusing on four of the biggest-drawing tribute bands in the Valley, their audiences grew. Even naysayers who pooh-poohed the idea of tributes (read: other musicians) found themselves wanting to form a cover band for any number of bad reasons. But there was…
Selling out hasn’t been as simple as Tricky imagined. The former Adrian Thaws made reviewers swoon with 1995’s Maxinquaye, a moody, atmospheric tour de force that helped establish the trip-hop genre worldwide. But although he clearly felt worthy of the praise he received (his ego is as juicy and robust…
