A mystery is the only way to describe what’s happened to the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir. Two short years ago, these sturdy Eastern European women with babushkas on their heads and red onions on their breath exploded onto the world-music scene with their evocatively titled debut…
The night before our Saturday-afternoon talk with the Kentucky HeadHunters, the boys played a gig in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the kind of show their growing cadre of fans has come to expect: energy to rival or best any hormone-driven thrash punktet; massive doses of homemade, hot-from-the-barbecue Southern rock; plus…
If all the peeling Bauhaus stickers you see in cars’ rear windshields prove anything, there are still a few die-hard goth-rock fans out there. Brooding goth bands will probably always have an audience as long as there are pallid, chronically mopey, black-clad teens around. But for most listeners, self-consciously gloomy…
When they first hear it, folks with a high degree of prissiness in their blood tend to cringe and blink. “Bone Mama?” The term has the ring of a sordid nocturnal adventure down on Van Buren, or the chick who took on the frat house. It refers to deejay Mary…
Napalm Death has been called the end of music. The English band has gone to the lead in taking music to its furthest illogical extreme. The group was among the first to add voltage and thundering rhythms to speed in order to create monstrous sixty-second bursts of sound. With all…
The Feelies really care about their public. Lead vocalist-guitarist Glenn Mercer swears it’s true. So what if they only record when they are good and ready, or that they only gig in the flesh every three years or so? The Feelies care deeply about having an audience. According to Mercer,…
It’s Saturday night at downtown’s Silver Dollar Club, which, this particular evening, is hosting a Fish Dance. The club’s been given a cool aquarium motif, with slides and film loops of fishy images projected on the gray walls and a makeshift screen. The music isn’t bad either–if hard-edged Eurodisco is…
Nestled deep in the Mercedes jungle of north Scottsdale sits a little-bitty ol’ piss-ant country place that has not only survived the region’s creeping hoity-toityism, but has thrived. And so has one of its favorite sons. The Handlebar-J and its previous incarnations have held country court at the same location…
Chick Corea is a certifiable musical multiple personality. The 49-year-old pianist is a jazz Sybil bouncing from one distinct character to another with nearly every album. There’s Chick the Fusion Whiz, Chick the Latin Romantic, Chick the Avant-Gardist and most recently, Chick the Conservative Standard Bearer. Jazzbos of every bias…
Four months have passed since Billboard dropped the bomb in its 1990 year-end issue announcing that rock, for seventeen years the dominant genre on the top album charts, had lost its title to rap and danceable pop. So far, the music biz is still waiting for the other dancing shoe…
They are a loud, crude, Jack Daniel’s-guzzling band, with a lead singer that looks like Meat Loaf on steroids. In their home base of Seattle, Washington, they host a public-access porn show, reviewing slasher films a la Siskel and Ebert. They are serial-killer trivia buffs who adopted notorious necrophile-cannibal Edward…
On the cover of a video documenting Todd Rundgren’s latest recording session is a photo of his hands, each waving a symphony conductor’s baton. It is an appropriate symbol for a man who for twenty years has been his own maestro, conducting one of rock music’s most varied careers with…
When Living Colour steps out onto the stage these days and launches into “Elvis Is Dead,” the lyrics and the attitude answer a lot of stupid questions. The band members aren’t freaks. Rock ‘n’ roll is black. Chuck Berry invented it. And Elvis Presley was never the king. “That `King…
A couple of years back, Sonic Youth singer-bassist Kim Gordon interviewed L.L. Cool J for Spin magazine in an attempt to get a feminist/hard-core perspective on rap’s estimable MC. Early in the interview, it became obvious that the two shared little common ground. Their clashes were sometimes comic, as when…
Anyone with a record collection more than a foot wide probably owns a piece of David Sanborn’s unmistakable sound but doesn’t know it. The Stones’ Undercover, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, and David Bowie’s Young Americans all benefit from Sanborn’s wailing alto sax. He’s backed up James Brown, Stevie Wonder,…
Yellow ribbons whip down city streets on the pinned-back antennae of imported Sentras, Camrys, and Accords, wrapping the USA in patriotism like the loosely woven fabric of a giant Ace bandage. On the radio, the premier pop diva of the day belts out the national anthem as if the centuries-old…
Coming soon to your favorite cable-TV dance show: Anthrax? Don’t be too surprised if you see New York’s greasiest headbangers on Club MTV in the next few months. Anthrax is about to release a dance remix of its rap/speed-metal hit, “I’m the Man,” which the band is hoping will shoot…
Marty Stuart has a lot of names–big names–to drop, and he does. But after all, he’s been picking guitars and mandolins alongside C&W luminaries since he was thirteen. He’s earned his bragging rights. “When I first heard Flatt and Scruggs, it blew my mind,” Stuart drawled during a recent telephone…
A few years ago, Manchester, England, was notorious for its underground acid-house clubs where young Brits gobbled X-tacy and other designer hallucinogens and trance-danced ’til dawn. The Charlatans UK singer Tim Burgess was a fixture at these stimulant-fueled shindigs. But Burgess was less interested in the available drugs than the…
Once upon a time, a Colorado alternative band emerged from the semimoribund Denver music scene and began to create a buzz. Loyal homies packed large and small venues. Locally produced cassettes sold out entire runs in record time. The local alternative weekly began championing their cause. Shows in jaded metropolises…
Don’t blame Johnny Cash for his unusual silence in the Eighties. For ten years, the outspoken Cash searched for a place between the growing neo-country Nashville and the wholesale, creased-denim twang crowd of Music Row. His attempts at balance were met with lukewarm reviews. Finally, in 1988, heart surgery looked…
Late August 1984. Half past midnight on the haunches of what has been, for most kids, the first day back to school. Up and down the quiet suburban streets, the bedroom lights that burned brightly all through summer vacation have been snuffed out cold. “Not on a school night,” the…
