Never let it be said that St. Paul, Minnesota, ain’t got no soul. If there’s any doubt as to whether the R&B underground is thriving in the northern climes, the brothers Tillman have stepped up to correct your ass. Harold Martin Tillman, a.k.a. Har Mar Superstar, and older bro Sean…
The power of Steely Dan always sprang from the clash between the sonority of their musical craftsmanship and the cynical, corrosive spirit that fueled their lyrics. So it’s appropriate that the defining moment in this 60-minute look at the making of the group’s 1977 masterwork Aja comes during a catty…
Ian Pooley has been around the block too many times to be lumped in with the current wave of German techno artists, most of whom are either obsessed with paring down their music to impossibly minimalist levels or simply milking the same repetitive sound. Pooley began his musical career with…
Remember the old music-industry joke, “What’s the difference between the Titanic and (insert record label of choice here)?” That’s right, darling, the Titanic had at least one good band. But just because scads of major-label employees continue to be shown the door, it doesn’t mean the brass have refrained from…
I’m gonna take out my eyes and wash them clean/Filling them in the decay/Removing all the debris, because the world I’d like to see is not behind, beside, below, above or in front of me. — Mike Matteson Mike Matteson was eagerly awaiting his upcoming performance at the Green Room…
In three weeks, the Black Heart Procession finishes the solo leg of its U.S. tour and hooks up with Man or Astro-Man? for a series of dates in the Northwest and along the East Coast. Man or Astro-Man?, as you might be aware, plays manic, intergalactic surf music, Dick Dale-on-crank…
The deal with the Mermaid Avenue recording sessions was, if you wrote the music, you got to sing the song. So Nora Guthrie was a bit perplexed to find Wilco had recorded a Billy Bragg number, set to her father Woody’s lyric, “Joe DiMaggio.” As Bragg tells it, she confronted…
Any aspiring metalhead who doesn’t know Jack is shit out of luck. That’s because the cherub-faced teenager with the spiked hair named Jack Osbourne has become, merely by his bloodline, a big wheel in the music industry. His mommy happens to be Sharon Osbourne, the woman whose summer rock tour,…
“FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: PANTERA TEAMS UP WITH VIVID GIRLS FOR IN-STORE APPEARANCES DURING OZZFEST.”So says the press release issued by Vivid Video, a porn purveyor. Oh, joy. Porn star Raylene will add zing to a Thunderbird Zia in-store appearance by Grammy-nominated metal goobs Pantera. This will precede the band’s co-headlining…
If you were to judge the online music revolution based solely on the MP3.com charts, you’d have to conclude that most folks sitting at their computers were either DJs looking to download beats for their sets, or obsessive and potentially dangerous “Weird Al” Yankovic fans. What else could possibly account…
Rancid has been one of the only bands to show noticeable improvement from album to album, starting with the raw but monotonous Rancid in 1993, evolving to the more melodic Let’s Go and the stellar blend of street punk and Chuck Berry-style rock . . . And Out Come the…
The relevant debate over turntablism is no longer whether the wicky-wicky is indeed legitimate music and the Technics 1200 a real instrument. Humans are possessed by a need to drag sound out of any remotely suitable object, no matter how much work that object may require first — after all,…
The Mile Ends The Mile Ends EP (Sundazed) In case you haven’t noticed, local music historian Johnny Dixon is writing the book on ’60s Phoenix rock for Sundazed Records one chapter at a time. This Superfine Dandelion reissue is one of the more compelling installments, if only for Dixon’s liner…
The first time I’d ever heard the term “elder statesman” used by a rock ‘n’ roll star was by Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter, in a 1979 issue of Trouser Press. “That’s me expounding like an elder statesman,” he remarked somewhat self-deprecatingly, after giving his seal of approval to bands…
If Hollywood could design the perfect hedonistic pop star, equal parts pretty boy and hell-raiser, Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins would be the man. With an affinity for fast cars and fast women, he’s exactly the kind of guy that people like Kurt Cobain used to rail against. Brash, playful…
From the ’60s through the early ’70s, jazz fans clamored for something as “far out” as what was happening in rock music. They were offered what many found to be a choice between two flavors of awful: the dissimilar, avant-garde rantings of saxophonists John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Seven recent…
For years, Russell Simmons has been the King Midas of the hip-hop world: Everything he touches turns to gold . . . or platinum. While this phenomenon is obviously most lucrative for Simmons himself, his extraordinary talents as a businessman (and, frankly, an architect of culture) have helped elevate an…
Divine Styler is a name from way back, and in the short-memoried rap culture, he is all but forgotten. Styler was an early cohort of Ice-T and dropped the original Wordpower in 1989, an eon ago in hip-hop years. In the time that’s passed between that album and this, Divine…
Wild, raunchy and brimming with chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, rockabilly — real rockabilly — was a musical sucker punch delivered to the button-down Eisenhower years. As unrefined as moonshine but packing twice the kick, here was homespun, hard-driving nose-thumbing aimed right at Mitch Miller, Kate Smith, Perry Como and everything else bland…
When the Grammys — notoriously the most staid of all the entertainment awards (remember Jethro Tull beating out Metallica as outstanding heavy metal band back in ’89?) — puts its stamp of approval on a growing genre, chances are it’s already reached the point of critical mass. Such is the…
The life of musician and composer Charles Mingus is the stuff of legends. Bursting with energy and ideas, Mingus’ peak creative output during the late 1950s and early 1960s dwarfed that of many of his colleagues in the jazz world. His best work wove together musical ideas drawn from gospel,…
If you must be a musical completist, it’s refreshingly simple and economical to be a Tom Lehrer fan. As Dr. Demento observes in the copious hardbound notes that accompany this three-CD set, the entire recorded “Lehrer canon” comes to around 50 songs. Except for a ditty he composed for Rod…
