Though it’s still being defined, it seems to begin with Bruce Springsteen and it might just end with Michael Molina. The pontifications and delineations are oozing out of the media even as you read this, but the best definition is in the grooves of songs you’ve never heard, such as…
A few weeks back we presumptuously told you what are the 40 coolest cover songs of all time. Great songs, and great fun for us. But God put evil in this world so we could appreciate the good, and now it’s time for the flip side of the remake coin…
When it comes to crafting original music, no songwriter can match the invention, diligence, intelligence, poignancy, or power of Bruce Springsteen. He encompasses everything in rock while repeating nothing. He is the songwriter’s songwriter. That doesn’t mean he’s beyond covering the work of others. For years he closed his legendary…
The Ramones sell out! We’ve all been waiting fifteen years to say that, never had the opportunity until now, until two Marlboro Men in a beer truck decided to enter an auto race, flipped a switch that turned their vehicle into a Jaguar IMSA race car, and roared into television…
Let me state just two things before I go so you won’t forget: The South Florida Rock Awards (the third annual) is going to be awesome this year and is going to be December 9. And I’ve heard a rumor that the sales side of the New Times corporation will…
Every once in a while we take a stab at grasping the meaning of the blues (both in this space and in real life). Try this: James Thomas was born in 1926 on a farm in Ya¯zoo County, Mississippi. Influenced by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and Elmore James, he worked…
Using a mix-and-match approach that evokes the deep-voiced, deep-hearted pith and passion of Greg Brown and the full-bodied rock flavor favored by the Canadian Invasion, a band called Crash Test Dummies achieves a uniqueness born of amalgamation. Very cool. Or, as they say in the press, very critically acclaimed. The…
Once again, good people, we face the scourge of that damn nigger music. Among the millions of hate letters – from barely legible postcards to boxes filled with voodoo trinkets – I’ve received over the years, the one I remember most was a racist diatribe delivered to the Miami News…
The stereotype of Canadians as beer-swilling hosers seems to have died, but the Great White Northerners are still collectively flawed, and that’s why Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and the other aribiters of arbitrary taste haven’t sent a Trend Alert buzzing through their computer systems and jumped on this like hungry…
A British pub in the heart of Little Haiti staging distinctly American (and distinctly nonmainstream) rock and roll hardly seems a likely candidate for institutionalization as a cultural treasure. The other type of institutionalization (as in nutsy) perhaps, but appearances always deceive, and Churchill’s Hideaway has watched many a more-typical…
The release of the second Nuclear Valdez album has been delayed by Epic until next year. The record has been complete for months – it sounds great, by the way – but its original release date (the middle of this month) was moved to October. Now it’s January. A few…
In places like France and Miami, never is heard a discouraging word about Jerry Lewis, his prodigious body of work, and especially his favorite cause, the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Naysay Jerry’s Kids? It simply isn’t done. For the past 26 years, Labor Day Weekend has been synonymous with Lewis’s TV…
Miami’s rock and roll scene has evolved to such a level that pride of purpose – or is it self-consciousness? – assumes more importance than it should. There are so many strikingly original bands, so many passionate stylists, so much variety that the national scene is a flat bore in…
School books are flipped open, homework awaits, the leaves are turning to a loamy rainbow, September’s earthen burden has – whoa. Criminy, we’re starting to sound like Spy magazine. What September is around here is Women in Music Month, Cactus Cantina’s annual salute to distaff songmakers. Apart from the not-minor…
The tumultuous and contentious internal politics that help define WDNA-FM have moved from the radio station’s warehouse headquarters to the Dade Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court system. On August 19, two groups battling for control of the Bascomb Memorial Foundation, the nonprofit corporation that oversees WDNA, took their arguments before Judge…
The game is deceptively simple. Musicians and their companies need to spread the word, so they provide the media with advance copies of new releases, photographs, biographies and discographies, anything that will make it easy for some lazy journalist to splash the product name across the printed page. The most…
One of my favorite mixmasters, Clay D, has had a hand in a vast array of hip-hop projects. You gotta own the Pull It All the Way Down album featuring D and Prince Rahiem, and you might want to check out the Clay-molded LPs You Be You, I Be Me…
The underlying cause is obvious: recorded music makes mo-mo-mo money when it receives radio play, MTV screen time, and other hype. Some record companies allegedly cough up more cash to buy airplay for potential hits than they spend cultivating or fostering the talents who make up and make good the…
As you probably know, the national concert-tour business is in worse shape than my liver. Volume this year is down some 30 percent, which explains all those illogical package tours (Sisters of Mercy on the same bill as Public Enemy?) and other tricks of the trade, such as a Warrant-Trixter-Firehouse…
Carl Hiaasen is a twisted visionary who exorcises sociological demons with words.
The snakes of South Florida range from tiny blind snakes, often mistaken for worms, to the giant indigo and equally bulky Eastern diamondback rattler, both of which can grow to more than eight feet. Smaller species eat insects. The big boys take mammals and birds. Often a snake’s value to…
The deep freezer in David A. Zlatkin’s one-bedroom apartment is stocked with chilled corpses, the macabre by-product of a hobby that has consumed him. Frozen to their bones are three red rat snakes, a scarlet king snake, a closely related scarlet snake, a cottonmouth water moccasin, a couple of mud…
