It’s a late April night in Memphis, Tennessee, 1990, and the pint-size reggae innovator Toots Hibbert is standing tall on the stage of the Skyway room in the Peabody Hotel, surveying the crowd gathered in front of him in a slippery, fleshy knot. He’s just blazed through close to two…
It’s no doubt too soon to start yammering about the rebirth of South Beach as a mecca for live music, but things in the glitzy, neon-soaked district may at least be on an upswing. Two club owners have somehow found the courage to open their doors to local, national, and…
In the ten years since he founded the Mr. T Experience, singer/songwriter/guitarist Dr. Frank has caught a lot of crap from his punk-rock peers. His smart-assed novelty songs and forthright examinations of love and heartache were deemed L-7 almost from the get-go by an audience more interested in power-chord manifestoes…
On a warm Monday afternoon, the members of Miami’s alternative rock foursome Muse are packing up for a road trip. They’re bringing along more than their music equipment and a few changes of clothing, though. After all, their upcoming trek isn’t just a two-week shuffle across the national nightclub circuit:…
When Claudia Gould turned six, her uncle gave her a birthday present: a stained-brown wooden music box made by Reuge Music of Switzerland that contained a tiny ballerina twirling to the soothing strains of Johann Strauss’s “The Emperor Waltz.” More than 30 years later Gould, the director of Artists Space…
Six weeks after the fact, Les Garland is still scratching his head, wondering just what the hell happened. Nineteen ninety-five was a good year for the Box, the Miami-based music-video cable service where Garland works as executive vice president. Advertising revenue for the nine-year-old company had reached an all-time high,…
THIS WAS THE PREMIER OF JOHN FLOYD’S COLUMN No matter who heard the news, the responses from my friends were more or less the same: incredulous and typically smart-assed, and offered in a kind of weary sigh that lets you know in no uncertain terms that everyone believes that, once…
Gaunt Yeah, Me Too (Amphetamine Reptile) If you’re looking to point a finger at the most fertile patch of American punk-rock soil, aim it north to Columbus, Ohio, the home base for an abundance of noise-making underground visionaries, from old-timers such as Mike “Rep” Hummel and Ron House to Monster…
Word Processing Since she joined forces last October with local promoter Andy Osofsky, Cheers owner Gaye Levine figures her Miami nightclub has hosted “just about every good band in town.” That partnership, however, is now kaput: Word of Mouth, Osofsky’s production company, has pulled out of its arrangement with Levine’s…
After his death, the image remains, an embodiment of cool that leaves an indelible impression whether you encounter it on TV, at the movies, or in photographs. He is a man of Italian descent, dark and handsome. Perhaps he is standing around at some swanky cocktail party, tie loosened into…
The Captains of Crunch “We just want to deal with people we know because it makes everything easier,” explains 22-year-old Chris Lelugas, who, along with Mari Giordani, also age 22, runs the local indie record label Star Crunch. “We’ll put out anything as long as we like it. We don’t…
The Cars The Cars Anthology: Just What I Needed (Elektra/Rhino) Back in the late Seventies, when record executives and rock critics alike used the term “new wave” to describe the more accessible groups that spun off from the planet of punk, the Cars were the rulers of the new-wave hemisphere…
I’ve been compiling year-end best-of lists for one publication or another for close to ten years now, and I still have a hard time with them. It’s a daunting, intimidating task; attempting to accurately survey a year’s worth of music in ten short entries can drive a completist insane. What…
Band Better Have My Money Surely you didn’t think that Marilyn Manson could hit South Florida without getting involved in some kind of ruckus. The latest incident involving the group, whose front man of the same name has been arrested twice in Florida for various on-stage indecencies, happened on December…
In the mid-Seventies, Honorato “Ony” Rodriguez was just another teenager traveling a path well trodden by countless would-be musicians before him. He had been playing trumpet since he was ten years old, and he brought that skill to the marching band at North Dade’s Norland Senior High School. He also…
Jazz in the House of God The exploratory sounds of experimental jazz will grace the halls of the Coral Gables Congregational Church beginning early next year, as Tigertail Productions presents the four-show Composers in Performance series, an annual event that in the past has featured concerts by various jazz icons,…
Kristin Hersh The Holy Single (Ryko) On this four-song EP, Throwing Muses singer/songwriter/guitarist Kristin Hersh goes solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar with little additional instrumentation, much as she did on her fine — and overlooked — 1994 album Hips and Makers. Here she applies her clear, unaffected voice to…
For more than twenty years, Bruce Springsteen has been creating characters and pushing them through life: through high school bands and dimly lighted bars; through the back seats of Chevys; through factories, plants, and mills; through war-torn rice paddies and crowded city streets; through dead-end relationships and good, solid marriages…
Blood, Sweat & Tears The Best of Blood, Sweat & Tears: What Goes Up! (Legacy/Columbia) First, the history. When New York City-based avant-rockers the Blues Project broke up in 1967, the band’s guitarist, Steve Katz, hooked up with jazz drummer Bobby Colomby, and the pair set about welding jazzy big-band…
New Bomb Turks Pissing Out the Poison (Crypt) Before punk rock found new digs on the Billboard album chart, it was the provincial music of outcasts and miscreants who had little interest in (let alone a chance in hell of attaining) the massive fame and success awarded to the likes…
For a guy who is looking to carve out a spot for himself in the fishbowl world of rock and roll, the vocalist-guitarist for Fort Lauderdale’s Green Eden is a surprisingly reticent individual. Although born with a perfectly acceptable surname, he prefers to go simply by Max, which places him…
Inquiring Minds Sure, sure, anybody can do a fanzine. That’s why you see so many of the inky creations cluttering up the countertops of record stores and skateboard shops across the nation. Plow through a stack of them, though, and you’ll soon learn that doing a fanzine well isn’t so…
