The other day I heard someone say, “You know, America is in real trouble.” — Johnny Sea, “Day for Decision,” 1966 All you have to do is turn on talk radio to hear just how much trouble we’re in these days. It’s February and the swell of patriotism that united…
There’s only one serious drawback to being a musician: the musician’s lifestyle. Sure, that sounds a bit like the old Thurston Howell III line about how the only problem with poverty is being poor, but in this case the issues go a little deeper than that. Most people get into…
Critics are quick to credit alt-country icon Gram Parsons as the visionary who first imagined a blend of disparate genres into a single sonic stew he dubbed “cosmic American music.” For Parsons, it meant creating a style where self-described “longhairs” could perform everything from gospel to psychedelia under the same…
Carl Cox may be one of the best Detroit DJs who actually hails from Manchester, U.K. Not that the tribal-house guru hasn’t repeatedly blazed through the Motor City during his quarter-century of jockeydom. It’s just that he bottles a particular blend of soul tech, futurescape electro and throbbing club vibe…
It’s fitting that Raul Malo’s first solo album kicks off with a whirlwind hybrid of a song, blending salsa figures with calypso horns, English-language lyrics, a chorus drawn from Beatles-era Top 40 hits, and a pumped-up carnival atmosphere raucous enough to swallow the rest of Today. But Malo’s huge, emotive…
A few months ago, Daniel Johnston revealed that if everything went well, he was going to tour the country behind his new album, Rejected Unknown. This was something of a bombshell, coming from a man who seldom leaves the rural Texas home he shares with his senior-citizen parents, a man…
Waylon Jennings loved to be in control. He rarely allowed others to make decisions for him, and even then he’d famously say, “There’s always another way to do things — my way.” Jennings, who died last week at his home in Chandler at the age of 64 after a long…
In 1941, a 12-year-old Rufus Jones electrified his homemade guitar with a piece of fence wire and a truck battery, “to impress them local Mississippi girlies,” he recalls. While showing off by playing the guitar with his teeth — decades before Jimi Hendrix would do the same — his pet…
If a major-label deal is the musical equivalent of being presented with a worldwide soapbox, it doesn’t take Trik Turner long to address the big issues on the group’s self-titled new RCA debut album. Consider the title of the album’s first track: “Existence.” It doesn’t get any bigger than that,…
While Exit Planet Dust’s contributions to the big-beat canon have earned the Chemicals vanguard status, each album since their debut has been, in every sense of the phrase, an industrious exercise in button pushing. They mercilessly morphed one of Dig Your Own Hole’s best and most accessible tunes — the…
Fifteen years ago, Justin Broadrick helped create one of the most intense, groundbreaking death-metal albums ever. Now, he’s co-created one of the most intense, groundbreaking hip-hop albums in recent memory. What gives? Broadrick, who drifted out of Napalm Death after its debut, Scum, to found the dense industrial group Godflesh,…
The following is a sad story, in a sense. Not for its protagonist, former Valley resident and much-ballyhooed turntable artist DJ Z-Trip, because this is the story of his triumphs. It’s a story about the machinations of success in the music industry, the story of a Phoenix boy who moved…
Like all great writers, Jeffrey Hyman used special stationery. “He was always writing lyrics on little scraps of paper — on shopping bags, on cardboard from shirts,” recalls his mom, Charlotte Lesher. “They would be really crazy lyrics.” “Beat on the brat,” he wrote, “beat on the brat, beat on…
Gustavo Angeles had every reason to feel sorry for himself. The sudden closing of the two Altos Bistros last month brought an abrupt end to a nearly yearlong gig for Angeles’ traditional Latin group, Cascabel, the Spanish restaurant’s weekend house band. It temporarily left Angeles without a venue to showcase…
Last September, Roger Clyne organized a gathering at the Sonoita Fairgrounds to celebrate the Festival of the Chubascos — chubascos being shorter and fiercer Mexican versions of the monsoons that Arizonans contend with every year. The part of the chubascos phenomenon that Clyne really loves is that people in Mexico…
It’s impossible to listen to Kasey Chambers without imagining the vast expanse of the Australian plains, the thousand and one nighttime noises, a train wailing across great distances — although I have no sense of whether that’s an authentic view or a projection based on press releases and interviews. Chambers…
These days, Bill Doss, a key member of the Elephant 6 collective and a co-founder of Olivia Tremor Control, likes to refer to himself in print as “thebilldoss,” or, when he’s in a hurry, “tbd” — both good examples of how he’s able to freshen up familiar ingredients by giving…
At its best, the music of Texas has an openness and quiet intelligence unlike any other state’s. These Texan qualities seem unrelated to style or subregion — it’s evident in Doug Sahm’s border rock, Joe Ely’s flatland rockabilly, and Townes Van Zandt’s wandering folk. That same supple wisdom suffuses Jon…
The enduring power of rockabilly is that it’s rock ‘n’ roll in undiluted form. The dark menace and raging lust that early rock only hinted at were the foundations of every rockabilly backbeat and echoey hiccup. But it took a clique of maniacal ’80s rockabilly revisionists like the Cramps, Flat…
At 22, Conor Oberst is probably too young to be locked into the expectations of a fan base. After all, most musicians of his age are only beginning to figure out what they want to express, and how they plan to go about it. But Oberst’s intensely emotional, confessional songs…
Every rising pop star who manages to forge a distinctive personality on the radio and MTV inherits them seemingly overnight. Hundreds of thousands of like-minded — and sometimes like-dressed — individuals are suddenly drawn out of their shells through their instant identification with this larger-than-life representation of their secret, inner…
Remember Napster? Oh, sure, it’s so two years ago now, but remember all the time, energy and money spent by the record labels to beat it down? And how about all the time, energy and money now being spent doing the same to the similar services that sprouted in Napster’s…
