The scene is a self-serve copy shop on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, the time is several years ago and the protagonist is Wesley Willis, beloved local icon. Willis is built like a Sasquatch (he’s six feet four inches tall and weighs more than 300 pounds), but his spirit is friendly…
“Who’s in charge of this? Is it okay if I sing?” The question came from Peacemakers guitarist Steve Larson. The answer was a soft murmur, neither affirmative nor negative. In actual fact, no one was in charge at Balboa Cafe on Wednesday, April 28, the night that the recently formed…
Ben Folds Five The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (550 Music) It’s a strange paradox of the music industry that a recording artist’s most common response to success is a case of melancholia. The cutout bins are overloaded with self-pitying follow-ups that lament the emptiness of fame and the tedium…
We keep hearing rumblings that Phoenix has emerged as a major metropolis. Some inhabitants even take pride in the smog they inhale, viewing it as confirmation that we’re in the big leagues. But Phoenix still struggles to find its own identity and forfeit facsimile. Serving as one of many sketchbooks,…
By definition, grindcore is an abrasive form of music. It’s fast, harsh and noisy, residing somewhere between metal and punk, and inevitably confusing fans of both. Born out of punk’s mid-’80s search for an identity that the thrash metalers were co-opting at the time, its musical message remains intact. It’s…
Tom Waits has unleashed his first album of new material in more than six years. For those who have followed the lowlife renaissance man’s career over the past 26 years, that statement is all the incentive they need to rush out and buy it. Fortunately, Mule Variations, his first album…
Fountains of Wayne Utopia Parkway (Atlantic Records) At year’s end, when critics and other know-it-alls compile their best-of lists for 1999, Fountains of Wayne’s Utopia Parkway will be there. Words like “smart” and “quirky” will adorn the disc, and no doubt there will be references to “heavenly” sounds and other…
About a month ago, singer-songwriter Pete Forbes and his band were in Los Angeles rehearsing for a club gig that night. During a short break, the band’s drummer, a wiry, bespectacled, mad scientist of the skins named John O’Reilly Jr., idly picked up a violin belonging to Forbes sideman John…
Look through the north window of Alice Cooper’stown and the message is clear. You’re greeted by a life-size cardboard cutout of the king of shock rock in black leather, welcoming you to his nightmare. In front of the cutout, the window sports an orange neon Alice Cooper signature, and directly…
Robert Pollard Kid Marine (Rockathon Records) Tobin Sprout Let’s Welcome the Circus People (Wigwam Records) If Guided by Voices is any indication, you can’t underestimate those working-class towns when it comes to spawning talented songwriters. Maybe it has something to do with the amount of beer consumed being directly proportionate…
The most frequently repeated joke about the ’60s was that if you could remember it, you weren’t there. Along those lines, the morning after the overwhelming spectacle that was the New Times Music Awards Showcase, the hazy cloud of amnesia that fills my head might be my only solid proof…
In a day and age where most bands are eager to take the quickest shortcut to commercial success, the Mob 40’s are a refreshing change of pace. While discussing their brief but eventful history in the back room of Long Wong’s, the group members never broach subjects like major-label conglomeration,…
In 1972, an eclectic Dusty Springfield album called See All Her Faces was released to every market but the United States. Unfortunately, we colonists always lost a good half of her faces in the transatlantic transfer of her discography. Despite the American Philips label having issued five Dusty LPs plus…
The Hammertoes I Too Have Sinned (Tortuga Records) It’s a sad, basic tenet of the music industry that every band thinks it’s doing something unique, but practically none of them really are. Even on the local scene, there tend to be camps, or factions, of bands that basically sound alike,…
It’s 2:00 in the afternoon and Leah Miller’s still a bit groggy. In all fairness, the Zone’s late-night DJ has a good excuse for her mild case of lethargy. Her graveyard shift at the station means she doesn’t get home until six in the morning, and she’s rarely asleep before…
What’s most disturbing isn’t the notion that the world will end by the year 2000, but that it will continue going on, business as usual, muddling through on its heartless, lazy trek. What if the world doesn’t end with a bang, but with a whimper, so blase most people won’t…
You may be right. I may be crazy for even getting upset about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, like the guy who bolts out of his easy chair to protest the implausibility of a MacGiver episode. It’s a dumb idea to begin with, turning rock ‘n’ roll into…
It’s been said that part of the reason the Beach Boys fell out of favor with the hippie counterculture of the late ’60s is that the band made the unforgivable mistake of being from Southern California. See, at that time, the command center for both the underground and its new…
That Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch is the most unlikely of rock stars is obvious from the minute he picks up the phone at his Boise, Idaho, home and explains that he’s watching his 5-year-old son, Ben. Politely he asks, “Could you call back in a half-hour?” Thirty-five minutes later,…
For most people, a mention of the music of the 1980s conjures up thoughts of big hair and Boy George–and a terrible drought in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. But for a small, alienated segment of the population, there existed a kind of parallel musical universe that delivered a…
The punches came hard and fast. The day hovered like a fucking prizefighter, and the springtime sun had plenty to do with it. So did the alcoholic blue-collar hero named Will. Lying on my back, I could smell gasoline, the blood and the orange blossoms, and the outline of his…
It took somewhere near 20 phone calls to catch Joey DeFrancesco between tours. His perpetually full schedule is an impressive state of affairs for someone who plays an instrument that until fairly recently was horribly unpopular in jazz for several decades. “I’m in Europe a lot, but it was New…
