Because a girl tossed a drink in his face, punched him and left him stranded in Hollywood into the wee hours, Jeff Whalen’s first moments on the phone included three rasping, indecipherable attempts at a greeting. But it was noon, and he didn’t mention anything about intending to lie in…
A call or package from local DJ/archivist Johnny Dixon is usually cause for celebration. The noted Arizona musicologist has an encyclopedic knowledge of the state’s rich musical heritage and an ear for the obscure. While Dixon is usually touting the unknown, the most recent project he’s connected with is a…
Resolver’s best cut, “Yeah Man,” finds Louise Post informing her submissive male that “I’d know you in the dark/By the way your hands pull me apart/I’d know you in the day/By the way you’re miles away/I know you’re in the mood not to be attached or be misused.” Great, now…
When you become intractably identified as “formerly of” and your new band is relentlessly mentioned as a “side project,” it’s not easy to make a name for yourself — just ask Looper’s Stuart David. A founding member of cult darlings Belle and Sebastian, the mild-mannered David was sometimes mistaken for…
You seem like a person who knows from fun — here’s an exercise guaranteed to provide you your required dosage of cruel hilarity. You know that panic-stricken look that comes over people when their CDs get stuck and start skipping violently? It’s a million times worse than the sound of…
Gumbo loves slamming pud jazz wanna-bes and goo-heavy R&B warblers. But my insensitive editor stubbornly refuses to allot me an extra page for diatribes on, say, how stupid it is to categorize Sade as jazz. Gumbo has, however, been granted an additional 17 syllables, used below to convey a haiku…
“It was direct. There was no bullshit, no obscurity. It was like, ‘This is it, this is what I feel.’ It punched you straight in the heart.” Matt Johnson is talking about John Lennon’s lyrical prowess, but he could well be speaking about his own approach to songwriting. Calling from…
Channel-surfers flipping past the USA Network’s music showcase program, Farmclub, might have had their fingers stop dead in their tracks if they happened to come upon the Bloodhound Gang’s recent performance on the show — one that featured fire-blowing, sporadic nudity and snippets of TLC, Rammstein and Korn songs spliced…
Tracing the contours of the cerebellum like some evil throb, the ringing can make your hair hurt. Later, you keep hearing a far-off siren, like some ambulance, distant and shrill. That weird, high hum lingers for days, weeks, always. But that’s all part of the fun, right? At least the…
Five years ago, back when Sleater-Kinney was just starting out, the song “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” gave the band a bold statement of purpose that couldn’t help but be noticed. Blaring out the title more like a proclamation than a chorus, co-founders Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker made…
After about a decade’s preoccupation with making big noises with the likes of Pearl Jam and perennial collaborators Crazy Horse, Neil Young settles in for the winter of his content. Silver & Gold is an open hearth warming up the cabin while the wind howls outside. Young’s tenor, getting more…
Potential. Chances are, you’ve heard that term applied to yourself at some point. It’s an overused and double-edged word, implying lack of present-tense success and the possibility for future failure. “Potential” is a word that was used, quite accurately and frequently, to describe what the band Mineral had. The group…
Tara Hitchcock, host of Channel 3’s Good Morning Arizona, probably had no idea what she was getting into. It was just supposed to be another band doing another in-studio promotion. But the group in question was the Zen Lunatics. Members of the always eccentric power-pop quartet decided to turn their…
The Arizona Roadhouse Brewery, situated prominently at the corner of Apache and Terrace in Tempe, is an aesthetically pleasing and fairly sophisticated brew pub — copper tanks staring conspicuously out of the glassed façade, an oak bar with brass railing, expensive cigars resting enticingly in a bar-top humidor, award-winning beer…
The white man or woman who plays the blues is often forced to confront a long-standing stereotype: the idea among blues-brained purists that only black artists can truly sing about pain, loss and heartbreak. Of course, music history begs to differ with this notion. Some of the most wrist-slitting blues…
It had to happen. Pop-tart Gwen Stefani — pretty as she can be with a midriff for the ages — celebrated a special birthday recently: the dreaded three-oh. And by industry standards — those sad, governing, youth-obsessed and number-crunching principles — such a cosmic reckoning usually means one thing: Keep…
Bless his heart, but Robin Wilson is a strange guy. It’s not just the Gas Giants front man’s manner of speaking — a tone that has the slickness of a used-car salesman and the perpetual chipperness of a TV weatherman — or his conversation — an unrelenting jackhammer of self-promotion…
Not since his admission in the late ’70s that “dancing about and wearing loads of makeup” was but a dopey career move has Lou Reed uttered anything so classically obvious and stiltedly spot-on as his recent pronouncement: “Artists, like anyone else, should be paid for their work.” Several of you…
Slobberbone is scheduled to perform on Saturday, May 13, at the Balboa Café in Tempe, with the Orphans. Showtime is 9 p.m.
Here’s a snatch of overheard conversation, circa 1983, taking place inside a Greenwich Village record store on Bleecker Street called The Golden Disc. At the counter, two men are quietly conferring like doctors around a malignant x-ray. The shopkeeper is holding the sleeve of XTC’s latest import single, “Wonderland,” now…
In the long line of limey trailblazers that couldn’t move unit one stateside, the Stone Roses at least proved themselves predecessors to navel-gazing U.K. teen-a-ramas like the Charlatans, Ocean Colour Scene and the vaguely remarkable Primal Scream, Manics and Oasis. On Brit shores, the Roses’ ’89 self-titled debut was considered…
If you polled a Family Feud studio audience for “reasons people become musicians,” answers like “sex,” “drugs,” “fame,” “money” and even (yawn) “the music” would all be greeted with dinging bells and a deep tongue kiss from Richard Dawson. Just as surely, Greg Sage’s reason, “the appearance of the grooves…
