R.E.M. New Adventures in Hi-Fi (Warner Bros.) Midway through R.E.M.’s new album, a perplexed Michael Stipe figuratively rubs his big, bald head and ponders, “This fate thing. I don’t get it.” Welcome to the occupation, Michael. Stipe’s professed befuddlement is understandable. After all, he and two of his bandmates, bassist…
Tom Morello, 31: a leftist radical with a seven-digit savings balance. A Harvard graduate (1986, with honors) who plays guitar for a platinum-selling band with hit songs that advocate class warfare. A reformed metalhead who was born in Harlem. A public supporter of both Amnesty International and the Shining Path,…
By design, bootlegs are supposed to be against the rules–people pay top dollar for the illicit thrill of hearing music not meant for world consumption. Tacking an “official” seal onto the forbidden fruit leaves a bad aftertaste, like parents telling their teenage son it’s okay to smoke dope and have…
Bruce Hamblin, 1950-1996 The common wisdom among members of the Valley’s rockabilly, blues, roots and country music scenes last week was that some band in heaven just picked up one hell of a standup bass player. Longtime Valley musician Bruce Hamblin died September 18 of liver failure. He was 45…
As a musical label, “rock” has long since passed into the realm of hazy, general nothingness. Divisions and subdivisions abound–sometimes providing focus in a bewildering maze of new music, sometimes only fueling petty, elitist wars of words and pigeonholing. One sect, industrial rock, has been divided and subdivided ad nauseam,…
Call it crusty garage rock, or high-octane, drag-race punk. Dave Crider, founder/owner of Estrus Records and front man for the Monomen, doesn’t care what label you slap on his record company, or his band. He “just wants to rock.” Since 1987, Crider and his wife, Becky, have been pressing records…
Admit it. You want the Macarena to be over as much as the media do. Even Regis and Kathie Lee recently informed their viewers that the Macarena was nearly a dead item. Then when nighttime rolled around, David Letterman did his part by shoving a Macareniac into a waiting cab…
During the opening day of the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Texas, where Kim Fowley is still revered and everyone gets a backstage pass for a weekend, Randy Newman sat uncomfortably on a stage in the Austin Convention Center’s ballroom. He was there ostensibly to promote…
WORST REVIEW OF A LOCAL BAND PRINTED OUTSIDE THE VALLEY Review of Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and Buzzy June issue of Grid The Refreshments continue to bubble along nicely–with a new video in rotation on MTV and a recent glowing write-up in Rolling Stone–but the Tempe outfit took it on the…
Pearl Jam No Code (Epic) One of my best friends, the head sports photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times, recently told a revealing story about Eddie Vedder. A longtime basketball fan who still roots for his former hometown team, the Chicago Bulls, Vedder naturally had courtside seats for the championship series…
When the great revolutionary poet Pablo Neruda was a young man, he served Chile as consul to a series of desperately poor countries. He was amazed to find mass starvation in “the golden age of world poetry.” “While the new songs are hunted down,” he wrote, “a million men sleep…
And now a word about continuing higher education from Shamsi Ruhe, lead singer of the Tempe rock group One. “Me and Shahzad are going back to school. No more of this slacker/dropout business.” She grins before turning dead serious. “It’d be great if the music thing worked out, but if…
Meat Beat Manifesto Subliminal Sandwich (Nothing) In 1987, Jack Dangers and Meat Beat Manifesto unleashed the single “I Got the Fear” on the dance world. The result of Dangers’ attempt to “make the noisiest single of all time” was an intense, cluttered conglomeration of driving drum machine and bizarre samples-cum-beats…
Let us probe the magic, the mystery that is Ariel. The name means “Lion of God” in both Russian and Hebrew. And Ariel the pop piano man claimed it years before that little Disney hussy in The Little Mermaid. It was 1985, to be exact. The year Arkadi Efimovitch Bogoslavsky…
Ex-Phunk Junkeez rapper Kirk Reznik says he has a nagging pain in his back from the knife his longtime partner and co-MC Joe Valiente stuck there in late August, when Valiente conspired with the crew’s deejay and stage band to kick Reznik out of the group the two of them…
Cynicism prevails in the current climate of indie angst, and it takes balls for an underground band like cub to make a career of putting out upbeat, even occasionally pretty records. Except balls is one thing (two things?) these Vancouver masters of la-la pop don’t have. An all-grrl trio, cub…
Various artists Masters of Jazz: Volumes 1-4 (Rhino) Anyone compiling a CD look-see at the history of jazz is setting himself up for a fall. Especially if the project is stamped with a lofty title like Masters of Jazz. Such an anthology, to be truly representative, would have to include…
MEXICO CITY–Betsy Pecanins’ life has always blurred the borders. The 42-year-old singer grew up in Arizona, Mexico and Spain. She is the child of an American father and a Catalonian mother, whose family emigrated from Barcelona to Mexico. She speaks and sings in three languages–English, Spanish and Catalan. Starting out…
Scrawl Travel On, Rider (Elektra) If I were a boy, and I found out that my girlfriend was listening intently to Scrawl’s new recording, I’d take a good, hard look at our relationship and try to figure out what was bugging her. But boys don’t usually think that way; it’s…
Love Nut Bastards of Melody (Interscope) As a genre, power pop didn’t always guarantee great songwriting, a la XTC, Elvis Costello or Blondie. The term also covers second-tier acts like 20/20, the Dwight Twilley Band and the Producers, who consistently adhered to one simple formula: Leave the verses bland and…
KISS America West Arena August 21, 1996 “Dude, didja go see KISS last Wednesday?” “Oh, hell, yeah. You see Gene’s boots, dude?” “The dragon heads?” “Old-school, bro. Straight offa the Destroyer cover. Six-inch metal teeth for platforms, red eyes that shoot laser beams and shit. Now that’s rock ‘n’ roll.”…
The Wipers are playing a show in town this week. That’s big news, even though head Wiper Greg Sage, a longtime icon of American indie rock, has lived in the Valley for almost seven years now. Sage takes the Wipers on frequent tours of Europe and the rest of the…
