Southern Pacific drummer Keith Knudsen likes to imagine what it might be like if the early Doobie Brothers or Creedence Clearwater Revival suddenly appeared on the music scene today. Just picture the double bill, Knudsen suggests: A group of San Jose longhairs singing lazy clap-along ditties about the virtues of…
Before you meet Cowboy Junkies singer Margo Timmons, it’s easy to picture her as one of the more glamorous Canadians on the planet. Her intense, whispery voice has led the Junkies to a continuing series of roaring successes. All over the world, Timmons and her group have startled critics and…
Ten years ago, Cher was a superstar on the run from her past. Sporting pink leopard-skin skirts and shaggy bangs, the then-34-year-old singer was fronting a new-wave group called Black Rose. In a series of hilariously inept efforts to go incognito, she’d leave her famous name off marquees and pass…
It’s almost one in the morning at Asylum’s Greenpeace benefit concert, and there’s not an eco-freak in sight. There’s no sign of the speakers, petition circulators or environmentally minded standup comics who packed the Tempe nightspot earlier in the evening to raise funds for the fight against the toxic-waste dump…
A 250-pound young man claiming to be Elvis’ son sits in a private upstairs room at a bar in Scottsdale, trying hard to stay in character. Anyone who believes in Pee-wee Herman and the boogieman would say he’s doing a mildly convincing job. Tortelvis, as he calls himself, is clad…
If Brian Grillo had opted to concentrate on a career in dancing, he might’ve spent the summer wearing a double-barreled torpedo bra as one of Madonna’s boy toys. According to the Lock Up singer, the breathless blonde so liked his boogie ability that she asked him to gyrate on one…
Despite what Sting or Paul Simon might have you think, world music doesn’t have to be the pretentious sound of cultural colonialism. Here’s Poi Dog Pondering member Dave Crawford’s assessment of the form: “I think the best music comes from clashing cultures together and slamming them against the wall,” the…
When Jack DeJohnette invited Herbie Hancock and Pat Metheny into the studio recently, it seemed like the drummer was assembling jazz’s Masters of the Universe. Name most any landmark jazz event of the past three decades, and there’s a good chance at least one of them has been there. In…
Who would’ve guessed that beneath the milquetoast exterior of David Byrne burned the heart of a hot-blooded, hip-swiveling, Jose Cuervo-swigging Latino? Certainly not the followers of Byrne’s tenure as a self-consciously unemotional and asexual Talking Head. As the New York band’s brainy, neurotic front man, Byrne has been the leading…
When Hillel Slovak died in 1988 after spending his last couple of years in a heroin haze, everyone knew the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ guitarist wouldn’t be easy to replace. But when the Peppers chose as his successor a seventeen-year-old punk from Chatsworth, California, named John Frusciante, the reaction was…
Celebrity Skin is sick of blue-jeans-and-tee-shirt guitar-pop bar-hero bands. The group wants to bring glitter and glamour back to rock ‘n’ roll. It wants to revive outrageous, wailing superstardom. “I don’t want to see just the guy next door playing guitar,” says Skin bassist Tim Ferris. “I want to see…
Yo! Sun City! Get ready to rock ‘n’ roll! That hip-swiveling sound is bound to move next door any day now, and there’s nothing you can do to keep it out. No, we’re not talking about the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheelchairs tour stopping at the Sundome. We’re referring to the…
At any given moment in Sun City tonight, it’s a good bet that some nightclub act will be playing “New York, New York.” Lou Ives, who has played Sun City with his wife Lou Ann, has worked up a theory on the “New York, New York” phenomenon. “If you go…
In the mid-Sixties, a country newcomer named Doug Stone warmed up for Loretta Lynn. But instead of immediately reaping the success surely coming to an unknown who’d opened for a legend, Stone quickly dropped out of sight. The fledgling singer vowed never to give up on his career, though, and…
Tracy Chapman is not black for the same reason New Kids on the Block are black. In the music industry, cigar-chompers, not chromosomes, decide the ebony-or-ivory question. They’ve determined that R&B–yes, even New Kids’ R&B–is black and that contemporary folk is “un-black.” Of course, if Chapman were to change her…
A mere two months after the release of her debut album, Tracy Chapman snapped a stadium full of people to attention at a Nelson Mandela tribute concert in England. But not long before Chapman sold the first of her fourteen million or so records, Phoenician Rick Cyge says, the folkie…
Where the Heck Is Mr. Fun? (Or Up and Down the Donut With Frank) (Local tape) Galen Herod has always come off like a lovable spaz on stage, regaling audiences with herky-jerky post-new-wave songs and bad jokes. Where the Heck Is Mr. Fun? is a take-home version of Herod, packing…
When Thin White Rope visited the Soviet Union in late 1988, the band brought back more than caviar and a photo of the Kremlin. It experienced firsthand the early rumblings of a revolution. Rock ‘n’ roll imitated life when young Lithuanian rebels went wild at the Rope’s shows, even stage-diving…
A couple of weeks back, a strange new noise infiltrated unsuspecting suburban homes all over the country. Every household with a television tuned to America’s favorite post-prime-time talk show heard it: A dorky duo banging out frighteningly original accordion-embellished pop songs. That’s right, They Might Be Giants had invaded The…
The tour itinerary could belong to any struggling bar band. Nine dates, banged out on a typewriter, covering the entire month of April–a small club gig in Tulsa, a county fair in San Bernardino, a college gig in Douglas, Arizona. The trip culminates, promisingly enough, with a one-night stand-in beautiful…
Besides trading lines with R&B singers and jazz trumpeters, hip-hop acts have been joining up with blues crooners, punk poets and yes, art-rock bands. It was Kane’s ability to hold his own against all those jazz greats that proved hip-hop could compete with any musical form. The primary hip-hop rite…
If today’s rock ‘n’ roll philosophy of sight over sound and style over substance has taught bands anything, it’s the art of shocking symbolism. Heavy-metal bands like Iron Maiden define their identities with slobbering, monstrous mascots, and rap groups like Public Enemy hire henchmen to parade about sporting combat fatigues…
