Music

TV’s Seinfeld may have shone an unflattering light on the notion of “regifting,” but that shame doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on the music industry. Every year the surviving major labels extract a dozen songs from previously released or newly deleted Christmas albums, slap them onto new “Various Artists”…

The great major-label mergings and purgings of the last several years have cost hundreds of people their jobs — but another tragic result is that many artists have been trapped in record-release limbo. The rootsy rock band Whiskeytown is one of them, and that’s left rock fans unable to hear…

Truly original albums are pretty thin on the ground these days. Everything has a genre, everything has a formula, usually in the form of a very tight, narrow sandbox in which steroidal young men fling themselves about and complain about their mommies. Poor dears . . . Once again, pop…

While the sounds of seven Harleys revving, six angels leaping and, of course, five pool cues to the head won’t necessarily ensure that consumers will pay good money for the “experience,” they are attention-getters. In the case of British bikers the Alchemysts, Zero Zen’s opener, a feedback ‘n’ splatter instrumental…

If you’re like me, you tend not to pay much attention to the actual CD itself; you just tear the plastic wrapping and peel off whatever annoying adhesives the company has seen fit to slap all over the case, take the disc out and pop it in without really looking…

The Joshua Tree home of musicians Victoria Williams and her husband, Mark Olson, is not easy to find. Situated on 10-odd acres, a mile or so off the main road on an unmarked, unpaved street — trail might be a better word — the home rests in the middle of…

As we approach the twilight of each calendar year, it seems music critics are overly eager to proclaim the preceding 12 months as the “Year of” something. You know, “The Year of Grunge,” “The Year of Women in Rock,” “The Year of Electronic Music” and on and on. But if…

Gumbo has queried the finest psychics to be found at the Valley’s swap meets, seeking predictions regarding the state of music in 2001. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Jazz, 2001: The heavy influence of conservative egomaniacal trumpeter Wynton Marsalis on egomaniacal director Ken Burns’ highly viewed epic documentary, Jazz, will…

Love letters from the past: Stuffed inside the LP sleeve of my precious, battered copy of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession — the 1968 debut from a young New York singer-songwriter whom Columbia Records impresario Clive Davis had signed practically as she was walking offstage following a controversial performance at…

Back when electronica was the next big thing — around the time the only things that needed counting in Florida were dead German tourists — Norman Cook was just another washed-up pop musician. Little wonder the former member of the Housemartins and Beats International decided an identity change was in…

Embarrassingly gifted multi-instrumentalist Powell cut his teeth working with Todd Rundgren during the ’80s before going solo, landing for a spell on Mercury Records but never quite finding his “fit.” Given his outlook — a full plate of hook-drenched power pop with a touch of lush classic rock on the…

Why is the Midwest considered the bastion of normalcy? Think about it — all that exposure to Bible Belters and the so-called moral majority is bound to warp anyone’s mind. Not only is America’s heartland a favorite breeding ground for serial killers, but creative types bloom there, too. Weirdos born…

It ought to be one of those “Where were you when?” questions. You know, like “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” “Where were you when the Bronco chase was under way?” So, “Where were you when you heard the Gaza Strippers for the first time?” Well, where were ya,…

There’s an old saying: Pioneers take the arrows, settlers get the land. “Yeah, I’ve taken a few arrows,” says Joe Jackson, speaking by phone from New York, the city he has called home for more than 15 years and which serves as the central framework for his new album, Night…

Looking back on it now, the film roles Corey Feldman played in the late ’80s and early ’90s might have been some kind of predictor of the trouble he was to face in the years ahead: He played the attention-seeking cutup in The Goonies, the volatile, ear-mangled son of a…

Done up in the style of a ’50s-era movie poster, all flat paint and a grab bag of typescript, the cover of this boxed set says all that needs to be said. There’s a smiling guitarist looking over a nighttime scene, palm trees, a silhouetted couple leaning in a loose…

Breakestra is a funk band that Bay Area hip-hop luminary Peanut Butter Wolf discovered playing in an L.A. club and promptly signed to his Stones Throw label. What piqued Wolf’s ears was not only the overwhelming tightness of the players and the James Brown-esque barks of the singer, but their…

The problem with many of the pioneers of avant-garde jazz was that they approached their music with such grave pretentiousness that no one could mistake it for anything but lofty art. What made Ornette Coleman’s first groundbreaking albums so striking was they sparkled with the sound of sheer talent thumbing…

While listening to Live on the Sunset Strip — a 1982 performance in which Richard Pryor discusses his first trip to Africa, his 180-degree turnaround on his formerly cavalier use of the word “nigger,” his visit to an Arizona prison while filming Stir Crazy with Gene Wilder, and the infamous…