Van Halen Best of, Volume 1 (Warner Bros.) Warner Bros. has already released volume one in the Van Halen best-of series: It was called Van Halen, and it hit stores in 1978. Volume two, the following year, was called, well, Van Halen II; volume three was 1984 in, well, 1984…
In February of 1989, Billy Corgan gave me a copy of a self-titled, eight-track mini-release Smashing Pumpkins had just put out in Chicago. I was in a Champaign, Illinois-based band called Stark at the time, and we played with the Pumpkins occasionally. Smashing Pumpkins was a cheesy-looking cassette with hand-drawn…
Two band names have crumpled the brows of daily newspaper editors more than any others this decade. One is the Butthole Surfers. The other, Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. In the first case, the cause of consternation is clear: No way can the word “butthole” appear in a mainstream newspaper, let alone…
Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Mark O’Connor Appalachia Waltz (Sony Classical) Arvo Part Litany (ECM New Series) Uh-oh. It’s force-feeding time at the music trough again. Every so often, a clever mind from the classical kingdom decides to shove pop ideas up the genre’s decidedly non-pop form. The results are often…
Curious, this half-page ad for upcoming shows at the downtown Manhattan venue Irving Plaza that ran in the club section of last week’s Village Voice. Curious not only because it advertises a super-rare live show by underground heroes S.O.D. (Stormtroopers of Death)–headlining a bill that also includes Biohazard and Unsane…
Earth Crisis has gone worldwide. When the commercial media finally developed a jones for stories on straight-edge punk late last year, they sought out and found a source in the subculture’s most prominent band, and stopped there. Result: Earth Crisis, one of the more ideologically hard-core straight-edge bands, was anointed…
I had a personal audience with Snoop Doggy Dogg scheduled once, but he canceled it at the last second because he and his entourage had just taken backstage delivery of several hundred dollars’ worth of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Snoop, who was due on stage in about 40 minutes, doesn’t…
Snoop Doggy Dogg Tha Doggfather (Death Row) Snoop Doggy Dogg raps the way Clint Eastwood acts–dryly but deeply. Snoop’s a bit more talkative, but his mostly impassive overtones–punctuated by spasms of spontaneous combustion–are pure Dirty Harry. The essence of Snoop’s message is almost subliminal, derived as much from the stomach-turning…
Tricky Pre-Millennium Tension (Island) From as early in life as I can remember until age 7, I had a recurring nightmare. Down the hall from my room, I could hear an ominous, gentle-but-steady drumming. Though I couldn’t see him, I knew the source of the rhythm was a little man,…
The recent jailing of Death Row Records chief Marion “Suge” Knight couldn’t have come at a more crucial time for rap music’s most successful and controversial label. In the aftermath of Dr. Dre’s defection and Tupac Shakur’s murder, and in the midst of a breaking influence and bribery scandal that…
Gene Autry Blues Singer 1929-1931 (Columbia) Aside from containing Gene Autry’s best recorded work–that is, those songs cut long before the Tioga Springs, Texas, country boy kicked his dirt-farm past to become the sort of sterile singing cowboy only Hollywood could create–Blues Singer 1929-1931 (subtitled Booger Rooger Saturday Nite!) also…
Susanna Hoffs Susanna Hoffs (London) Bad pop songs never die, they just get banished to remote parts of the world where people’s tastes are less developed. Thus it was on a recent rip to Finland when I heard the Bangles’ appallingly bad 1988 hit “Eternal Flame” no fewer than three…
Charlie Hunter calls his music “antacid jazz,” a jab at the legion of critics who’ve tagged his new-school stylings “acid,” which in critic speak has come to mean “jazz by young people in tee shirts.” Hunter certainly fits the profile–he’s sworn never to wear a suit onstage. In that respect,…
Henry Rollins Electric Ballroom November 16, 1996 Damn. I wanted to rip into Henry Rollins so bad I could taste a bloody scrap of his black Gap tee shirt on my tongue. Power Book ad-posing, 7-Eleven coffee-chugging, “Baretta” guy in better days, stunt-double-looking, Charles Bukowski rip-off bad haiku writing, underground…
“Supergroup” is one of the lamest, most cliched labels a music critic can slap on a band. The term conjures the image of conceited, balding, fallen guitar gods posed riding the cash cow on a reunion tour. Doubtless, Berkeley, California’s the Peechees will get the superdupe treatment by plenty of…
Various artists Shots in the Dark (Delphonic Sound) Oranj Symphonette Oranj Symphonette Plays Mancini (Gramavision) Inspector Clouseau may still be the anti-Bond, but the man who wrote his theme song has become the very epitome of stereophonic savoir-faire. Henry Mancini, the posthumous commander in chief of cocktail nation, won 20…
Karen Carpenter Karen Carpenter (A&M) Both A&M honchos (Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss) thought the solo album Karen Carpenter spent much of 1979 making was a bomb, and wanted it diffused without a public hearing. So did brother Richard Carpenter, but for more personal reasons. The chief architect of the…
High on the Vibe Saturday, November 9 Sixth Avenue and Jackson I am god. At least, that’s what Sunshine told me and 1,427 of my fellow deities near the climax of Dubtribe Sound System’s two-hour live house-music performance at High on the Vibe, a large rave in downtown Phoenix. Actually,…
In 1982, when up-and-coming video stars were trying to look like supermen of suave, Detroit-born singer Marshall Crenshaw came on like a mild-mannered Clark Kent, albeit one with a secret weapon–an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music past and present, which he readily applied to his own work. Shortly after his…
“We like fractured, broken sounds,” says Los Lobos sax man Steve Berlin. “We’re looking for that broken AM-radio sound, a certain poignancy that is more soulful, especially in this 32-bit digital world.” For Colossal Head, its first album of new material in four years, Los Lobos used an analog eight-track…
Wesley Willis Fabian Road Warrior (American) That thud you’re hearing is the sound of thousands of hardworking songwriters smashing their heads against a wall. Why? Because Wesley Willis–a tone-deaf, schizophrenic singer whose songwriting consists of a solitary, built-in Casio keyboard played ad infinitum–is being courted by a cavalcade of major…
Angry young men? Billboard’s overrun with ’em. Angry old men? Congress has cornered the market. But angry middle-aged men? Not a big draw. At 45, Graham Parker finds himself between a rocker and a hard sell, despite his protests that he’s “as mellow as a train wreck.” On his current…
