Mike Coatney is smiling, but it’s a smile that betrays frustration. He’s temporarily fulfilling the drum-kit duties for local rock quartet Haggis while the band’s usual timekeeper, Scott McDonald, plans for his October wedding. It is only Coatney’s second rehearsal with Haggis, and in two days he has to play…
In times of desperation, people always look for a savior. That tends to explain the music press’ recent compulsion to ordain so-called electronica the next big thing. It’s a bit reminiscent of the old notion that in a world of blind folks, the one-eyed person is regarded as a visionary…
Phunk Junkeez Fear of a Wack Planet (Trauma Records) There’s an adage that’s oft repeated among those who grow up in addiction-infested societies–“once a junkie, always a junkie.” It’s a saying that can also be applied to the question of Fear of a Wack Planet’s success. The Phunk Junkeez have…
All afternoon Bill Blake catalogued his depression. The money was gone. The beer almost. Rent long past due. Worse, beating-off had lost all charm in time with the porn. And the porn was just some semi-glamorous soul-killing connection to a world that was offered up through a peep-hole known as…
“The shocking thing about Oklahoma [is] it was the only thing I was allowed to play when I was little,” Tori Amos says from Omaha, Nebraska. She’s at a stop in her tour supporting her latest musical exploration into the human psyche, From the Choirgirl Hotel, and the prairie city…
Before the interview is to begin with Knack front man Doug Fieger, the man would first like to ask his own question. “I was wondering, why do you want to do an interview with me?” he says, his voice full of anger and confusion. Because, I tell him, I love…
As yet another scalp-searing summer draws to a close, the local gentry at Casey Moore’s seem suitably pacified with drink and the promise of cooler temperatures just around the corner. That cheery notion isn’t enough to straighten out the furrowed brow of the Grievous Angels’ figurehead, Earl C. Whitehead. Tonight…
Hole Celebrity Skin (DGC Records) Courtney Love is nothing if not self-aware. So it makes sense that she titled her first post-Hollywood album Celebrity Skin, because this album documents the period in which Love’s celebrity–and infamy–grew from mere distraction to overrriding theme. When Love’s late husband Kurt Cobain was confronted…
Big Mama was fuming. The notorious nighttime DJ for KPTY-Party 103.9 FM had come into the station’s office on September 8 to find that Valley parents were calling in to voice concerns about his station’s risque content. So Big Mama responded the only way he knows how. That night on…
The boys in Pansy Division are fags. It’s no secret–the band has been proclaiming its affinity for homo-sex for seven years over the course of six records in short pop-punk ditties like “Pretty Boy (What’s Your Name?),” “Smells Like Queer Spirit,” “Fem in a Black Leather Jacket” and Revolver’s favorite–the…
Frank Black and the Catholics Frank Black and the Catholics (spinART Records) Frank Black’s fourth CD begins with a brief guitar goof on the Green Acres theme, followed by a messy false start. His band then lunges into one of those absurdly speedy tempos that Black uses, not to convey…
When it comes to hip-hop artists, nicknames are the norm, but “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” are not rappers. The Manhattan Project was the code name for the U.S. effort during World War II to produce an atomic bomb. In 1942, four scientists convened in New York with calculations and…
Tom Anderson has seen a lot of DJs over the years. Many of them have spun for him over the past 16 years at his Scottsdale dance club, Anderson’s Fifth Estate. But he says he’d never seen anything to prepare him for what he experienced a few months ago, when…
How do you build a record store in six days? That was the tough question Steve Wiley and his partners, Lloyd Hummel and Kristian Luce, surely asked themselves a couple of weeks ago. Wiley, until recently the general manager of Zia Enterprises, had put together a proposal for a record…
“I got this crazy-ass offer from Jason Priestley, 90210, y’know, to be on the show. It really mind-boggled me, y’know, ’cause I don’t know if I wanna do that kind of thing,” Mixmaster Mike says on the phone from New York City, where, in a few hours, he’ll be playing…
Legend has it that the day George Gershwin’s parents brought a piano into the house, the untutored 12-year-old plopped himself down in front of the keys and a flood of music came pouring out. If the story has long carried with it the ring of Hollywood exaggeration, it still helps…
Elliott Smith XO (DreamWorks Records) Elliott Smith doesn’t sound very happy. In the few years since his first solo release, Roman Candle, Smith has honed the art of sad songs to a gleaming point, a point where, despite the depression and bitterness, the songs’ ingenuity and honesty leave you smiling…
Various artists There’s Something About Mary (Capitol Records) The Farrelly brothers are carving out a unique niche for themselves. These are the guys who are making rude, crude, socially unacceptable and screamingly funny movies. The kind of movies that make you laugh really hard at the same time you are…
About halfway through the after-the-fact Seattle music-scene documentary Hype, there’s a piece of footage that has the authentic feel of history. You see Nirvana ripping into “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” for what the subtitles proclaim to be the first time ever. The hand-held camera work is amateurish, the picture is…
DWI/I can make it if I try –Handsome Dick Manitoba The heady mix of sleep deprivation, speed and booze has given me an eagle-eye vision, and tonight the city reveals itself in painful clarity: The cheerless repetition of manicured lawns is even more bleak, the awkward, oversize grasshoppers have become…
The Spice Girls don’t do a lot of talking onstage, but about 20 minutes into the second half of their August 22 show at Desert Sky Pavilion, Emma Bunton, known to the world as Baby Spice, looked like she had something important to say. “We all know about Girl Power,”…
R.L. Burnside just took a swig of Jack Daniel’s. He’s sitting under the sweltering Mississippi sun on an August afternoon, listening to a fellow Delta bluesman. Again, he twists the cap off the plastic water bottle used to disguise the whiskey. Another gulp. “Yeah.” A few hours later, the 71-year-old…
