When singer Richie Havens stole the show at Woodstock in 1969, A. Melvin “Mel” McDonald says he was “a Mormon boy up in Utah.” “I thought that festival thing was nothing but a bunch of liberal freaks from back East carrying on,” recalls McDonald, a child prodigy on piano and…
In the six months since it opened, America West Arena has delighted the Valley like a shiny new toy. Sold-out Suns games, arena-football matches, concerts and other events have drawn throngs to the flashy, $87 million hall. Most seem taken by the place. But taxpayers best not ask too many…
Paul Rubin’s book about jazz musicians is clearly a labor of love. Constructed in the form of interviews with 22 outstanding musicians, it takes the genre made famous by Studs Terkel to a higher level of performance. Readers of New Times, familiar with Rubin’s work as one of the most…
You’re Kevin Johnson, once a spectacular performer. But now you must hear the whispers that the Phoenix Suns are a better basketball team without you. At this point, you don’t know how much longer it will take before your various physical ailments will allow you to return to the lineup…
The Mesa Library Advisory Board made a popular choice when it voted 6-1 to reject the gifts of three copies of the book Sex, Madonna’s fleshy paean to Narcissus. Jacqueline Kasper lauds the board’s November 12 decision, saying, “I think this was a very wise decision, and I think it…
When monkeywrencher Mark Davis pleaded guilty to malicious destruction of property in last year’s nationally publicized Earth First! trial, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Broomfield gave him a sentence that allowed for early parole. Davis, a Prescott cabinetmaker who called his business The First Noble Truth Woodwork, went proudly off…
This scene I am not likely to forget. Peter MacDonald, at one time the most honored and powerful Indian in North America, was being sentenced in a federal courtroom in downtown Phoenix. Everything that takes place in the federal building has an ominous ring to it. No television cameras are…
I wanted to call in a mountain lion. I was 10 years old, and during the spring and early summer, it seemed that all I’d heard my father and other northern Arizona cattle ranchers talk about was the big mountain lion too smart to be tracked and treed and shot–the…
Editor’s note: Barry Friedman was a New Times columnist for more than six years, and in that time perpetrated a number of memorable hoaxes. His latest and possibly greatest, which he wrote under the pseudonym Manfried Barry, claimed gold had been discovered under the Scottsdale Galleria; national headlines ensued. Friedman…
As the Hell’s Angels back their bikes against the curb at Oakland International Airport, the squares do double takes. Their conspiratory smiles telegraph envy and empathy, like if they could, they, too, would grow their hair and ride with American steel trembling between their legs. Other bystanders, more sensible, push…
Duane Okken is a relatively short, apparently fit man with a boyish face, soft hands and blow-dried hair. Seated at a conference table, he wears tasseled loafers, socks selected with some care and a neatly ironed shirt, its top two buttons open. His pale-blue eyes do not betray the fire…
The wheels of justice finally turned for Steve West on November 19, when a U.S. District Court judge ruled that two Bullhead City police officers had wrongfully stomped West–a wheelchair-bound paraplegic–in 1989. Judge William Copple awarded West $816,000 in medical costs and general and punitive damages for the one-sided confrontation…
In an east Mesa courtroom on Election Day, November 3, John Barry stood alone, the last warrior in a five-year fight between his tiny hometown of Gilbert and utility giant Arizona Public Service Company. Representing himself, Barry asked the judge to force the Gilbert Town Council to carry out its…
And–and–what comes next? –Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann Sir Charles Barkley smiled. His eyes twinkled. That fierce warrior look vanished. But that does not mean his guard was lowered. “You guys don’t know anything about basketball,” Barkley said. “And it’s you people, who really know nothing, that are picking us to win…
A 22-year-old Havasupai woman was the first to speak. Carlotta Tilousi fixed her eyes on Ed Fox, director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. “My people live in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. There are only 800 of us,” she said. “Our main source of water comes from…
Next year, Arizona high school students will hold mock trials and hear law-and-order lectures from police officers, courtesy of a $185,000 legal-education program funded by the Arizona Bar Foundation. At the same time–for want of $31,000 the same foundation will not give him–John Harris will be telling members of the…
Traffic is light as I drive north on I-17 from downtown. I spot the Woodstone Apartments on the right side of the highway. I know I’ve arrived when I see the big, block letters on the wall of the 700-apartment development. They read: Intelligent Living Intelligent Minds As I turn…
It was the worst time in her career as an educator, school administrator Janice Ramirez says. She didn’t want to believe one of her best teachers would run off with a teenage student. But that’s what happened. Ramirez was the principal of Fremont Junior High. Ken Lamberton had earned honors…
Hockey is brutal, high-speed mayhem. The players wear metal blades on their feet and 20 pounds of plastic and padding everywhere else. The object of play–the puck–is a fistful of rock-hard rubber. The playing surface–ice–is wet, slippery, cold and dense. You can’t play the game well unless you skate better…
The Arizona Board of Education disciplines teachers for sexual activity with students far more than for any other reason. Slipshod hiring and firing practices in Arizona school districts make the state “like a King’s Table all-you-can-eat buffet for pedophiles,” says a veteran Phoenix sex-crimes investigator. A New Times investigation shows…
Berkley Lunt rattles off the names the way sports fans recite the rosters of their favorite teams. Ken Lamberton. Jimmie Benally. Doug Koenig. Robert Zabroske. But these aren’t people Lunt feels any fondness toward. David McCord. John Boone. Louis Emanuel. Suzanne Yeager. They are teachers whose sexual exploits with students…
Sunday, November 15, at 9 a.m., a damsel in distress sat on a trail-side rock three-quarters of the way up Camelback Mountain. She was 29, but looked younger, and dressed as if she were going to the health club. She had hyperextended her knee, then grown nervous over the climb…
