The Grifters Ain’t My Lookout (Sub Pop) Too often I’ll forget a CD in my portable player until I go to put in another disc miles from home. Without the proper jewel on hand, I stash the stray disc in another case for safekeeping. Because of this unsavory practice, it…
“I think the alternative scene is disgusting,” says Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul on the eve of his band’s new world tour. “I don’t know how these bands can feel good about robbing a dead man’s grave. To me, every one of them sounds like fucking Nirvana.” Like its music, Pantera’s…
Beck Odelay (DGC) What happens when a white guy from downtown L.A. starts hanging with kitschy Caucasians in Silver Lake? Does he lose his sense of hippity-hop? Does his swagger turn to slack? Does he even know who he is at the end of the day? When the white guy…
Patti Smith Gone Again (Arista) When Patti Smith sang “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” to open the first song on her first album, 1975’s Horses, she was an emerging icon, a rail-thin protopunk thumbing her nose at the heavens, daring the nearest deity to leave her alone…
Suicide Kings’ two front men look like the kind of guys your daddy warned you not to play poker with. Clad in timeworn cowboy shirts, scuffed, pointy boots and skinny-legged jeans, Bruce Cannole and Dick Taylor stick lit cigarettes in the necks of their guitars and get down to business…
“I’m stripping it down,” says Laurie Anderson from her Manhattan studio. “I’m going to be the avant-garde of the technological backlash.” Anderson speaks of her new live performance piece, “The Speed of Darkness,” a program of songs and storytelling she is about to take on a minitour of Western cities…
I didn’t have a very patriotic Fourth of July. I burned most of the morning on a quest for a smut video and the rest of the day flaying my ears with punk rock and dodging skateboards. Let me explain. About a month ago, publicists in L.A. started asking if…
The Kelley Deal 6000 Go to the Sugar Altar (Nice Records) There are roughly two kinds of identical twins in the world: Those content to live life as a unit (and perhaps star in Doublemint commercials), and those who separate to carve out their own spaces in the world–an often-painful…
This year of our Lord is just more than half gone, and what does American pop music have to show for it? The Fugees, a superb second effort from Porno for Pyros and the return of Patti Smith. Those are the only three standouts in my “pro” column. Under “so-so,”…
Imperial Drag Imperial Drag (Work/Sony) Yet another Jellyfish offshoot, Imperial Drag sounds like it was shipwrecked on a desert island starting in 1970, and the only things that washed ashore for the next five years were cheesy K-Tel albums. This self-titled debut offers a skewered view of Led Zeppelin and…
Revolver Goes to Court One clear thought goes through my head the night of April 30 as I watch three beef cakes in Gibson’s security shirts encircle a scared, scrawny kid pinned against a light pole. And that thought is This is a bunch of bullshit. Five minutes earlier, Chris…
The Entertainment Monitor covers the entire country, but so far only two Valley bands have made the grade. The Meat Puppets were awarded a measly “D” for references to amphetamines, but dig the special editor’s note about No Joke: “Many of the songs do not tell concrete stories and many…
In 1968, Johnny Cash’s Live At San Quentin cut “A Boy Named Sue” became the first song in Top 40 history to have a cuss word (bitch) bleeped out on the air. Fair enough–while bad words go over big with shackled audiences, no one expected the Man in Black to…
Paul Leary, 39-year-old guitarist for Butthole Surfers, isn’t exactly an artiste dedicated to pulling eternal verities from his soul. In fact, the Austin, Texas, musician and studio engineer (Meat Puppets, Supersuckers) sounds like he’d be just as happy slopping hogs as hawking songs. “I wish somebody would pay me not…
Maybe it’s the alien radiation emanating from Hangar 18 at nearby Wright Patterson Air Force Base, or maybe there’s just not a whole helluva lot else to do there. For whatever reason, Dayton, Ohio, has burst into one of the most prolific and unlikely hotbed rock scenes of the decade…
Porno for Pyros Good God’s Urge (Warner Bros.) Porno for Pyros’ eponymous 1993 debut reeled under an overdone side-show/carnival atmosphere. Leader Perry Farrell’s whiny rasp wailing over neo-funk rhythms and all-around heavy-handed production resulted in a dense, dark, and uneven album. The band’s sophomore offering, Good God’s Urge, plays it…
Tori Amos Symphony Hall, Salt Lake City June 21, 1996 I’ve got trouble. Southwest Airlines flight 1787 is scheduled to depart Salt Lake City for Phoenix at seven o’clock on a Monday morning. The departures monitor just inside the door reads 6:53, and the status message beside my gate flashes…
Before death metal hacked into the fray with its thesaurus-straining scenes of “multifarious carnage,” heavy-metal librettists generally confined themselves to four primary topic areas: vixen sex, war visions, trick-or-treat occultism and blue-faced teenage rebellion. The stuff of dreams for 15-year-old Reagan-baby boys, slipping into their headphones and away from the…
Soundgarden Down on the Upside (A&M) Extract Soundgarden’s DNA and you’ll see Zeppelin molecules on one helix and Sabbath matter on the other. Keep looking and you’ll uncover chunks of MC5 and the Stooges, and bits of the Beatles and Pink Floyd. You’ll find, in short, the echoes of pregrunge…
“What do you mean I don’t know metal? Hell, back in the day, I butt-rocked with the best of them.” Well, that’s what I would’ve said to the irate Crushed fan if she’d bothered to leave a name and number earlier this month when she called to dress me down…
Metallica Load (Elektra) Nice haircuts, guys. You and Soundgarden better not get your wardrobe trailers mixed up, or things are gonna get a bit confusing on the Lollapalooza main stage this summer. Whose idea was it, anyway? To gussy yourselves up like a Josta marketer’s vision of a grunge band…
TV characters who became American institutions in the ’70s had a nasty habit of growing stale as they “grew up.” Hot Lips Houlihan morphed into the Susan B. Anthony of the Korean DMZ, while everyone’s favorite bigot Archie Bunker devolved into a politically correct bartender so bland the show’s writers…
