How can you tell when a jam session is working the way it’s supposed to? Reasonable people might have different opinions about it, but I’ve got a theory. Based on watching the Phoenix Jazz Workshop cast a spell over the Lucky Dragon on a recent Sunday night, I think the…
Just over a year ago, when U2 was in danger of losing its constituency, the group returned to its roots with All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and — voilà! — the pop-music world responded with a spate of ring-kissing that still has cash registers chiming. Today the lads have…
In a world filled with disposable, soulless music and overly slick production, the Mountain Goats are a refreshing antidote. This is about as simple and honest as it gets. John Darnielle, a.k.a. the Mountain Goats, cranks out songs straight from the heart and captures them on a Panasonic boom box…
How do you like your Cash served? Biscuits and sausage gravy, side of grits and hot coffee in some fleabite Southern truck stop? That’s not a bad metaphor, especially since Cash has come to represent almost 50 years of (small case) americana music. Diesel fumes, cigarette smoke, coffee and cooking…
Let’s say you’re a music-biz Dr. Frankenstein. You want to build the perfect beast for the MTV era, an artist equally adept at visual and musical communication, someone for whom a video and song are all part of an inextricable package. Rob Zombie just might be that beast. Sure, it’s…
The question is pretty straightforward, really. It’s the answer that curves away from me. I’m talking to Evidence — a third of the L.A. hip-hop group Dilated Peoples — about the state of the movement, the much-vaunted L.A. underground that flourished back in the early ’90s with a barely-noticed-by-the-mainstream scene…
Post-9/11, Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter infamously (and prematurely) declared the end of irony, and took a media beating for it. Somewhere in Silver Lake, California, though, five guys must have been wondering what all the fuss was about; how could there be an end to something they’d…
For a long time, the book on the B-52’s was that the Athens, Georgia, pop combo purveyed harmless, at times sophomoric, dance fluff. And if all that comes to mind when you think of the band are beehive hairdos, Day-Glo attire, retro dance steps and lead singer Fred Schneider flouncing…
If you’re not a Spanish speaker, “Contrabando y Traición” by Los Tigres del Norte on the Mexican-music anthology Corridos y Narcocorridos sounds every inch as innocuous as a wedding polka. Jorge Hernandez’s sweet vocals ride a bouncing oompah bass while accordion tootles suggest a nostalgia-laden ranchera that wouldn’t offend a…
Bullfrog guitarist Mark Robertson could feel the heavy gaze of the audience as he took the stage. Slowly plugging in his Stratocaster, he looked out upon a packed house, only to find a sea of angry, disdainful faces staring back up at him and his bandmates. Robertson had expected as…
I’ve had the best album of 2001 in my hands since last August. For weeks after that, it was in whatever CD player I happened to be near, and spinning in my head if I couldn’t find one. Even after all of those listens, I still haven’t heard all of…
This story, like so many in the music press lately, begins in the unlikely creative haven of Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha is home to the incestuous Saddle Creek stable of bands, which includes Conor Oberst’s Bright Eyes and Desaparecidos, the Faint, and Lullaby for the Working Class, as well as the…
If you’ve got the time and/or the money and/or the sanity to keep close tabs on America’s bustling indie-rock underground, you no doubt know that quite a few of the scruffy slouches who run things down there are double-dipping in an increasingly shallow artistic gene pool. Simply put, stagnation’s stinking…
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,…
