I hate musicals. And I will continue to feel contempt for the genre until the audience stops clapping after every damned song. It’s an infuriating habit. It means that most of us consider a musical a mere collection of tunes–at best, a happy diversion, a pleasant spectacle. We don’t expect…
It is a strange breed of rock ‘n’ roll band, this Coctails. The six-year-old quartet’s ethos does not include anything to do with sex, drugs or even booze. The members don’t care about getting famous, and they’re not in it for the money. “When we started, we were all visual…
Throwing Muses University (Sire) Throwing Muses used to be an easy band to loathe. Chief Muse Kristin Hersh wrote wildly inconsistent songs and sang them with the vocal equivalent of buckshot on broken glass. Rock critics from the indie underground drooled ecstatically over the Muses in part because the noise…
Dag, and Mother May I Neeb Hall, Arizona State University campus, Tempe February 22, 1995 If you ever thought that being signed to a major label was the ticket to Easy Street, you should have made it to this show, a double helping of rising acts recently inked to majors…
Now the stage is bare and there’s emptiness all around. Facing his audience after almost seven years in the wilderness, it’s only natural that this beloved performer should be wracked with fear. Will the old magic work again? Will this crowd get fidgety and have to go to the bathroom…
For years, the crumbling of the British Empire has been mirrored by the shrinking chart fortunes of British bands in the colonies. Sure, at one time Britain gave us the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Sex Pistols, the Police and the Smiths–but…
God knows what I was thinking. I’m no rap fan, I hate Candlebox, and I hate sports. I know even less about sports than I know about music. Yet for some reason, I allowed myself to be talked into going to that live MTV/All-Star broadcast thing at America West Arena…
Russell Sepulveda wears a cowboy hat and sings with a twang. His songs leave room for pedal-steel-guitar breaks, and his bands–both of ’em–cover C&W tunes by the likes of Buck Owens and Gram Parsons. Sound like a country boy? Not quite. “Country music today is so far from its roots,”…
Many times over the last four decades it seemed like Ronnie Dawson was on his way to being somebody. At the ripe age of 17, he was picking and yelping his go-to-hell rockabilly on American Bandstand. He was part of seminal rock impresario Alan Freed’s stage shows. He played on…
A frog? “Yeah,” confirms Emo, tour manager for G. Love and Special Sauce, “last night they played so long, somebody threw a frog up onstage.” A live frog? “No” he says, voice turning thoughtful over the phone. “They must have brought it from a high school or something. It was…
Let us now perform a general dissection of the various forms of rock ‘n’ roll music being performed in the Valley of the Sun. There are the pop guitars on Mill Avenue that go jingle jangle jingle; there is the bouffant metal of Phoenix; you’ve got your neohippie groove funk;…
The box is full; time once again to throw the tapes in the machine and let the opinions spew out. But first, this: Apologies to Spinning Jenny; the title of the band’s new CD is not Piata Full of Beans (as I wrote last week), but Piata Full of Bees…
“Should I get into the fact that producers and rockers really love Arizona because of the tit bars?” asks Jon Harris, owner of Phase Four Studios, a 24-track Phoenix recording facility. “And golf, too. I haven’t met a musician who doesn’t play golf. All these cats into heavy metal saying,…
Of the 43 bands from the Valley that applied for the South by Southwest music conference this year, guess how many were accepted? I’ll give you a hint: No, I won’t. I’ll just tell you. Other than the Refreshments (who are attending under a business arrangement between New Times and…
Texas singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston’s either a nut or a genius. Singer Kathy McCarty says he’s both, and she should know; McCarty’s seen Johnston battle terrifying cycles of manic depression, replete with periodic stays in mental hospitals. She’s also seen Johnston write and perform some of the most honest and aching…
You may not believe this, but I went to church on Sunday. The Electric Church, that is, to worship at the altar of Jimi Hendrix. Actually, I was at Tower Records to check out the latest batch of releases from Loompanics Press–slim, fascinating volumes on stuff like lock-picking, surviving in…
It’s a Saturday night in 1980 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Los Angeles. Chelsea, the Dead Kennedys and X have all come and gone, disgorging an awesome load of punk rawk to the dripping crowd that packs the hall. These are three groups at the height of their…
You do not want to be Dick Dale’s guitar. The Undisputed King of Surf Guitar does not merely play his instrument, he punishes it. Forget about the word “nuance.” He breaks heavy-gauge strings like they were bands of saliva, wrenching a nonstop, high-speed onslaught of reverbed, staccato licks that shred…
Just when you thought there was no possible musical configuration left after grunge-goth-speed-death-metal-neo-punk-post-New Wave-bubblegum-pop-etc., along comes homo-core. Specifically, along comes Pansy Division. Jon Ginoli, Chris Freeman and Danny Panic are the self-proclaimed Pansies, three San Franciscans whose music is from the late-Seventies, early-Eighties melodic punk school and whose lyrics celebrate,…
Remember that TV mail-order albums like Country Gold and The Best of Floyd Cramer were available on almost-obsolete eight-track cartridges well into the Eighties? Now the Nineties has its version of this phenomenon: Recent TV titles like Soft Rock of the ’80s and The Best of John Denver are being…
Alice Tatum Piano (TTC) The only things missing from longtime Valley artist Alice Tatum’s new CD are cocktails and cigarettes; Piano is an exercise in soft, spare, lounge-ready vocal gymnastics. The singer caresses 13 standards, accompanied only by the subtle keyboard work of locals Chuck Marohnic, Charles Lewis, Phil Strange,…
It takes a whole lot of water to wash four years’ worth of pigeon dung off the faade of the Arizona State Capitol, but the government grounds crew is ready to meet the challenge. They’re up in the air on a mechanical platform, shooting a mighty torrent of water onto…
