It's 1997, and rock 'n' roll is still a dirty phrase. Once merely synonymous with teenage copulation, the term now embraces a wide array of unseemly images. Your parents doing the nasty on a Monsanto carpet. A guy in his late 40s washing his Buick to the strains of Steppenwolf...
Have Money Will Sing I must say I wasn't at all surprised by the article about Chronic Future ("Straight Outta Scottsdale," David Holthouse, March 6). Before I continue, let me just say that I have listened to the band's CD and, after reading the piece about the group, I realize...
Pat Boone Pat Boone in a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy (Hip-O/MCA) Pat Boone is back in black, and God help us all. When a recording that's so wrong in so many ways returns Pat Boone--Pat Boone--to the pop charts after 34 years in celebrity-golf-tournament exile, it's time...
thursday february 13 Big Jack Johnson and the Oilers: Mississippi Delta bluesman Johnson is that rare artist who evokes the musical voices of others without undermining his own. You'll hear loving references to "Sittin' on Top of the World" and "Proud Mary" on his new disc, We Got to Stop...
thursday january 23 Tricky: The so-called "majesty of trip-hop" is an aural explorer, and he seems to have found the Northwest Passage connecting the strange-bedfellow forms of rap and new age--though not the new age of Windham Hill, not by a long shot. As the London-based musician/producer says, referencing the...
thursday january 16 Smokin' Joe Kubek Band featuring Bnois King: A rock-solid blues band; these guys cook. Dual guitarists Kubek and King are the heart and soul, respectively, of the Dallas act, which has been on a steady rise since its 1991 debut for Bullseye/Rounder, Steppin' Out Texas Style. The...
thursday december 19 Baby, It's Bright Outside: ZooLights; Fiesta of Light and Downtown Holiday Tree Tour; Ahwatukee-Foothills Festival of Lights: Phoenix Zoo, 455 North Galvin Parkway, in Papago Park, is garbed in its usual Technicolor dreamcoat during the facility's fifth annual ZooLights display. The fun continues from 6 to 9...
thursday december 5 Baby, It's Bright Outside: Fiesta of Light and Downtown Holiday Tree Tour, Ahwatukee-Foothills Festival of Lights: The City of Phoenix's free Fiesta and its second annual, self-guided Tree Tour continue nightly, through Wednesday, January 1; guided excursions start at 6:30 p.m. each Saturday, through December 28. For...
As a musical label, "rock" has long since passed into the realm of hazy, general nothingness. Divisions and subdivisions abound--sometimes providing focus in a bewildering maze of new music, sometimes only fueling petty, elitist wars of words and pigeonholing. One sect, industrial rock, has been divided and subdivided ad nauseam,...
Pigging Out Should the esteemed young entrepreneur guest columnist Paul M. Fleming spend less time with his bankers and hobnob a bit with "the people," he might discover that many of us support alternative approaches to food production with our feet and our wallets ("Meating of the Minds," August 22)...
TV characters who became American institutions in the '70s had a nasty habit of growing stale as they "grew up." Hot Lips Houlihan morphed into the Susan B. Anthony of the Korean DMZ, while everyone's favorite bigot Archie Bunker devolved into a politically correct bartender so bland the show's writers...
thursday june 27 Lysistrata: Mike Fenlason's Mercury Theater, dedicated to producing classic works with a contemporary spin, takes a vaudevillian approach to one of the all-time classics, Aristophanes' wonderful antiwar comedy. Written more than two millenniums ago, and rarely matched for pure wit in the ensuing span, Lysistrata is about...
In what could prove to be either a groundbreaking stroke of genius or a decision of such vicious stupidity that a certain local power-pop band could get drawn and quartered by pickup trucks in Apache Junction, Evening Star has booked the Beat Angels to open for the Scorpions and Alice...
thursday june 20 Grand Canyon State Games: The fourth annual Olympics-style competition for recreational athletes of all ages and ability levels kicks off with opening ceremonies at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 20, at America West Arena, First Street and Jefferson. The event includes a keynote address by Phoenix Sun Danny...
First, rhythm and blues begat "rock 'n' roll," a term that still has cachet in a few crumbling, former Soviet republics. Then came all of rock 'n' roll's bastard offspring--folk rock, acid rock, hard rock, progressive rock, country rock, punk rock--everywhere a rock, rock. But if rock became too vague...
All the News That Fits, They Print Those easternliberalmediaelite have done it again. They come into town with their fancy luggage and black turtlenecks and fat expense accounts, interview a few chamber-of-commerce types, then write some blind-boosterish fluff. The New York Times is the latest offender. A May 26 Times...
Her name was Holly Golightly--not the Audrey Hepburn character in Breakfast at Tiffany's, but the Hollywood hooker who lived at the same hotel as the Beat Angels last October, when the Phoenix fivesome was in L.A. to finish recording its debut album, Unhappy Hour. "The Sunset Palms is a cheesy,...
The name Stephen Charles Peterson Jr. is but a blip in the annals of Arizona white-collar crime. But the 54-year-old Peterson has earned a special place as a memorable crook, mostly by dint of his chutzpah. Since 1990, Peterson has used legitimate institutions--city councils, a governor's office, a large corporation,...
When Johnny Rotten first walked into Malcolm McLaren's life, Rotten was wearing a torn Pink Floyd tee shirt with the words "I Hate" in magic marker scrawled all over it. Maybe you're of a similar persuasion these days, even if you own several Floyd albums. Or maybe, like the sleazy...
The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black Mason Jar June 19, 1994 Maybe it was when the topless woman with the purple body paint, blacked-out teeth and twisted fright wig stood on her head with her back to the audience and her legs spread, and a smaller, chubby girl painted orange...
If I owned an enormous, influential, major label, a lot of things would be different. For me, anyway; a bigger bank balance, more yes men, the finest aspirin money can buy, and--for the Beat Angels--there'd be a big, fat recording contract. This is one of the few tapes I've come...
Kiss in Our Time The world's greatest--or dumbest--rock 'n' roll band refuses to die. Pucker up, buttercup. By Serene Dominic When intellectual punk Paul Westerberg led the Replacements through a halfhearted cover of "Black Diamond" on Let It Be, it opened the floodgates for other alternative bands to finally come...
