“I don’t want to be just a drummer,” says Phil Leavitt, the accomplished if reluctant stick figure for promising new pop band Dada. “Songwriting is what’s ultimately important to me. Drums are just an instrument I grew up playing. It doesn’t matter to me what other drummers are doing, who’s…
Perhaps it came upon a midnight unclear, but somewhere along the way, I became a Christmas-music fan. Everyone, even those responsible for it, admits it’s the most annoying genre of pop music ever. Individual Christmas tunes have been known to routinely engender as much pop revulsion as “Billy Don’t Be…
Green Jello may be the absolute worst band ever to sign a recording deal. And that may be too generous. The lead singer can’t sing. The band can’t play. And what’s worse, the Green Jello song list is an utterly inane collection of insipid, sophomoric, neonovelty songs based on the…
Not long ago, “Boogie Woogie Country Girl” and stripper-cum-feminist Candye Kane considered selling her soul for a recording deal. She’d already been gathering fans for years in Southern California clubs, ranging from the mighty Palomino in Los Angeles to the Lion’s Club in San Diego. Her tangy, powerful voice wrapped…
When the country seems to be unraveling in bursts of playground gunfire and boardroom slime, it helps to have a good song. For my tastes, nothing too complex or overproduced. I want my songs unadorned, with a guitar and a drum, maybe, some good backing vocals and words that cut…
There was a time when jazz pianists sounded so unique they could be identified in just a handful of notes. Bill Evans’ light touch was pensive and intellectualized. Bud Powell tore off roller-coaster twists of classical-influenced bebop. And Thelonious Monk hammered out lazy lines of chordal weirdness. Pianist McCoy Tyner,…
Asked what guitarist influenced him most, Duke Robillard doesn’t hesitate: “T-Bone Walker.” Some of the first licks Robillard learned were from 78s of T-Bone classics like “Stormy Monday.” Robillard said in a recent Guitar World interview that by the mid-Seventies he was “too into T-Bone” and was in danger of…
When the history of pop music is written, the chapter on Canada will be a strange one. Ignoring Bryan Adams (what else?), the biggest names in Canadian pop-rock music are the Guess Who and its more famous Mormon offshoot, Bachman-Turner Overdrive. From there Canadian pop history devolves to Rush, a…
genepool Time & Place (Soft Shoulder) The owners of Soft Shoulder Music, Connie Mableson and Ted Bulger, say they are guided by the idea that there’s an identifiable “desert,” or “Southwestern,” sound to the alternative scene here. It’s a sound they want to document with their new record label. It’s…
Sex Madonna (Warner Books) Give the woman credit. She pushes our buttons and we open our wallets. It’s that simple. Never mind that Erotica, the album that goes with the book, is a dance-beat stiff. That’s not a concern, because money, not music, is Madonna’s muse. Despite the hype, this…
It usually begins with a wicked smile and a line like, “You know, I slept with Joe Ely at the Holiday Inn in Waco.” From there it’s always the same–no birthmark disclosures, no pillow talk, just the inevitable summation: “He was great!” It’s the “I Had Joe Ely” club, and…
It was the eve of the final day of the 1991 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The Maple Leaf Bar was so crowded one could scarcely breathe or get a beer. Blazing a trail to the bathroom was out of the question. Onstage, the inestimable Earl King was celebrating…
Forty years from now, when the rickety old America West Arena–named after a long-defunct, long-forgotten airline–is razed to accommodate a new parking lot, a trivia question will ask: “What was the first-ever act to play at Colangelo’s Folly?” No, it wasn’t “Your Phoenix Suns” (still seeking an NBA championship in…
Justin Harwood sounds concerned. He’s musing over the apparent success of his new band, the critically acclaimed Luna2. “Everyone seems to be really happy,” Harwood says of himself and bandmates Dean Wareham and Stan Demeski. But Harwood quickly adds, “We’re still a little cynical. It’s like, ‘This is all too…
It was a glorious moment in music-video history: Evan Mecham manhandled by terrorist “pickaninnies,” shoved into a car and finally blown to bits. Inspired by Arizona’s MLK Day dearth, Public Enemy’s hip-hop fantasy about snuffing the governor, “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” made the point that white folks,…
Although I never got the chance to meet Albert Einstein, I understand he was a smart man, with burning eyes and great hair. The same can be said of Pat Metheny–especially the part about his coiffure. While this similarity doesn’t prove that there’s a correlation between the state of one’s…
In country music, the term “legend” once was mighty precious. Legends paid their honky-tonk dues, suffered for their art and strived to earn the everlasting affection of the hundred thousand or so devoted Americans who bought country albums. Merle Haggard’s a legend. Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn are legends. Porter…
Bruce Springsteen America West Arena October 2 and 3, 1992 For two hours, it sounded like Bruce Springsteen was finished as an artist. Refusing to play a single old tune, he piled on the weak new material from his bloated, two-album mistake. Flat and uninspired on record, the recent songs…
Gin Blossoms New Miserable Experience A&M The best thing about the Gin Blossoms’ new CD isn’t the potent love songs or the teary beer tunes or even the pop guitars and vocals that come off like an alternative stepchild of the Hollies. No, the best thing about New Miserable Experience…
Shot from a rooftop, one of the first official band photos of the Gin Blossoms shows the Tempe band scattered around a backyard, cigarettes and drinks in hand, displaying that grim, “we bad” visage all serious white guitar bands feel obliged to affect. Only two of the people in the…
The Chills The Roxy September 19, 1992 Martin Phillipps of the Chills is one of the best pop singer-songwriters breathing at the moment. Phillipps composes wonderfully melodic tunes resplendent in their thoughtful lyrics and catchy chords and choruses. A Chills song is at once inventive and familiar. A Chills concert…
Until a year ago, Roger Seibel hadn’t even heard of Sun Ra. Now he’s wondering if the jazz world’s leading extraterrestrial is going to make him famous. As the owner of SAE Mastering, a Phoenix company specializing in making master CDs and doing tape restoration, Seibel is the man responsible…
