They said, “You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.” The man replied, “Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.” (from The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens) Chris Smither was not the first guitarist moved by Wallace Stevens’s poem,…

We’ve been playing telephone tag with Gen, lead singer and ringmistress of the Orlando-based, hard-core band-cum-traveling S&M shockfest known as the Genitorturers. We’re expecting the voice on the other end of the line — once we finally make contact — to snarl and spit venom. The GTs are, after all,…

Sure, they’ve got the maestro, the five-string king, Mr. Banjo, out front. He gets most of the press, and rightly so. He has, after all, taken the instrument places it’s never gone before. But there’s a lot more to the Flecktones than founder/plucker extraordinaire Bela Fleck. There’s harmonica virtuoso Howard…

“We’re the last flight of the quill before the keyboard and the console take over,” says Chris Barron, hyperkinetic mouthpiece for guitar-rock groove monsters the Spin Doctors. “Our sound just kind of revealed itself to us,” adds Toronto-bred guitarist Eric Schenkman, “like some kind of crazy sandwich that’s exponential, where…

Was there ever a tag more damning in the history of rock than that of “new Dylan”? What songwriter in his or her right mind would want to be saddled with such a burden? Better to ditch the music career on the spot and start thinking about that Sally Struthers…

Graham Parker once expressed sympathy for the people of Russia (before unbundling), whose government fed them so much misinformation, they thought Billy Joel was a rock star. If you don’t get that joke, you belong in Miami. This is, after all, the town where disco never died. John Travolta movies…

“I got into this business to have fun, and I’m not having fun,” pronounced Jorma Kaukonen twenty years ago, explaining his decision to bail out of the Jefferson Airplane. Kaukonen’s jump caught few Airplane insiders by surprise; his waning enthusiasm for the band roughly paralleled the rising popularity of his…

ROACH THOMPSON BLUES BAND Roach Thompson Blues Band (Hot Productions) BY GREG BAKER Only four of the eleven tracks are cover versions, a decent percentage for any blues record, a double-dose delight to fans who’ve come to expect a bounty of interpretation from the Roach stompers’ live shows. Thompson’s originals…

The members of L7 have exactly one thing in common with the Bangles and the Go-Gos: they’re women — or rather, to filch a description from their press kit, “four talented hags.” This year’s most overworked word in rock criticism, “grunge”, cannot be avoided when attempting to describe the band’s…

Somehow I don’t think the gentleman with the stocking over his head waving the .38 in my face as he herded my wife and me into the back of our video store and demanded the day’s cash receipts would have appreciated the urgency of my making it to Uncle Sam’s…

No doubt the biggest challenge of Elvis Presley’s remarkable career has been his recent effort to help Bill Clinton get elected president. Whose idea did you think it was to don the shades and jam with the band on Arsenio? Did you think the selection of “Heartbreak Hotel” was a…

We’re still up to our sweaty little ears in recorded music from around here, so cut on the a/c and find patience. If you’re waiting for reviews of other area projects, hang in there and stay tuned in. Everyone knows how much more time must be allotted to laundering clothes…

You’ve got to hand it to the Japanese. I can remember when their idea of special-effects wizardry was two guys in lizard costumes throwing each other around a scale-model set of Tokyo that was rendered with all the accuracy and attention to detail of the plastic hotels from a Monopoly…

When Bob Marley died in 1981 at the age of 36, he was mourned by the millions for whom he had been a musical and political messiah. Revolutionary both in style and in lyrical content, Marley’s songs were an accurate reflection of the man: defiant, idiosyncratic, perceptive, and infectious. Marley…

Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain graces the cover of the April 16 issue of Rolling Stone, in his carefully frayed jeans and his way-cool shades and his oh-so-defiant “CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK” T-shirt, desperately trying not to look like a millionaire rock star with a babe-o-rama trophy wife. Cobain is this year’s…

The results of the latest incredibly scientific New Times poll are in. In case you were among the quarter of a billion or so U.S. citizens we somehow failed to contact, the burning issue was this: Which version of Elvis should the post office put on the stamp? The landslide…

It’s Sunday night and I’m sitting at the bar in the Cactina trying to immerse myself in enough beer and conviviality to cleanse the pain of Ohio State’s heartbreaking overtime loss to Michigan in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament earlier that afternoon. Michigan’s Fab Frosh have robbed me of a…

All music is local to somewhere. Here at New Times Music Central, we’ve always believed, and tried to express, that music should be judged by its merits, not its geographic point of origin. The recordings reviewed below are examined using the same criteria we’d use for any other release, be…

I joined my first band when I was seventeen. We knew a total of four songs, but somehow we managed to stretch them into an hour-long set. We’d play make-out parties in someone’s basement, with everybody stoned on pot or Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill, an alleged wine notorious for inducing…

All music is local to somewhere. Here at New Times Music Central, we’ve always believed, and tried to express, that music should be judged by its merits, not its geographic point of origin. The recordings reviewed below are examined using the same criteria we’d use for any other release, be…

Marianne Flemming blew it. The nomadic Miami native had made a name for herself and her eclectic, category-defying (“Just don’t call it folk”) music in locales as diverse as the Bitter End in New York City, Le Tam Tam Club in Washington, D.C., the Video Cafe in London, England, and…