Buddy Guy has been waiting, frustrated yet determined, since the days when record stores carried only vinyl. Waiting for the day he can switch on the radio and hear his voice — his guitar, too — on a mainstream, big-city station. Before midnight, preferably. That radio airplay has eluded the…
Ritchie Valens Come On, Let’s Go! (Del-Fi) Whether or not listeners understand the Spanish lyrics that follow, the five-second guitar intro that kicks off “La Bamba,” the signature tune of tragic Fifties rocker Ritchie Valens, seems to affect most people the same way. Valens’s joyous reworking of the 400-year-old Mexican…
Ani DiFranco is a singer, a songwriter, and a producer, but you’d hardly know it from most of the articles that are written about her. “Music?” she squeals in mock terror in response to a question about her primary vocation. “What’s that? Nobody ever asks me about music.” Part of…
Devil worshippers, they said. In their naive enthusiasm, the four Californian musicians were adamant about their devotion to that baddest of all bad boys. Maybe it was just a phase, but from Slayer’s earliest incarnation, its members wanted everyone to know that, when it came down to the horny guy,…
Record companies love to ignite new buying trends. For decades, label execs have relied on blustery hype to spur those trends. When a musical fad begins to show signs of having exhausted its profitability, as grungy alternative rock did a year or two ago and as hard rock did when…
Crabapple, Georgia, isn’t exactly a hotbed of musical inspiration. It’s not crawling with cutting-edge, college-age scenesters pushing the boundaries of modern rock. It’s not flush with fancy country pickers or earthy blues singers. Hell, it’s not even blessed with a decent karaoke bar. But Crabapple does have its merits: It’s…
Garbage Version 2.0 (Almo Sounds) Almost three years have passed since Garbage’s self-titled debut blew a hole through the grunge-obsessed alternative gold standard, selling four million records, grabbing three Grammy nominations, and making an altrock icon of singer Shirley Manson. Garbage was heavy with crashing, burning energy and vital singles…
A lesson from Music Biz 101: Profit margin is not part of the equation when an unknown, greenhorn punk band leaves home for that first cross-country tour. Still, more and more, ambitious young bands are discovering that if they cut out the booking agent, the promoter, and the typically do-nothing…
Jerry Cantrell Boggy Depot (Columbia) After five platinum-selling records with hard rock gladiators Alice in Chains, guitarist/songwriter Jerry Cantrell’s first solo album finds him in the catbird’s seat. The much-publicized drug problems of Chains’ vocalist Layne Staley has resulted in the band losing some steam and touring opportunities in recent…
“Knowledge reigns supreme,” says Killah Priest. “When Christ was on Earth, he walked among politicians and people who were ignorant. Why would I want to go somewhere where people already know?” Priest is calling from Virginia, where he’s in the middle of a promotional tour with his hip-hop group Sunz…
Public Enemy He Got Game Soundtrack (DefJam/Polygram) Various Artists Bulworth Soundtrack (Interscope/Fox) Rap is dead. It’s tired. It’s wack. It’s no longer phat. The glory years are dead, thanks to the ungraceful aging of early superstars (Run-D.M.C., Eric B. and Rakim, and KRS-One) and the untimely deaths of many of…
A Congolese singer performing Cuban dance music in Spanish may strike some people as odd, but to Ricardo Lemvo it makes perfect sense. As it should: The interchange of African and Caribbean music constitutes one of the most harmonious roundtrip journeys in musical history. “Cuban music traveled back to Africa…
Skeptical audiences are nothing new to the members of the Cuban sextet Vocal Sampling. When the group starts to perform, concertgoers inevitably fidget in their seats, turning to each other and whispering, one eye on the stage. The group is unfazed by such rustling. After almost a decade of performing…
It’s three seconds before airtime at local radio station WHQT-FM, a.k.a. HOT 105. Funk impresario and part-time Miamian Larry Blackmon, long-time frontman for the band Cameo, bounds across the room, hops onto a tall stool, and hurriedly throws on a pair of headphones. He sits at a chest-high, five-sided, Formica-covered…
California, it would seem, has pulled a Microsoft on punk rock. If punk is your thing, you’ll almost certainly have to buy the California variety, because Golden State bands have handily crushed the competition. Look around. You’ve got your Green Day, your Offspring, your Rancid, and a dozen or so…
Tori Amos From the Choirgirl Hotel (Atlantic) Tori Amos has followed her muse to the end of some pretty thin branches, documenting her soul’s perpetual churning. So far fans have happily crawled out there with her. Little Earthquakes (1991), Under The Pink (1994), and Boys for Pele (1996) made a…
The Specials Guilty ‘Til Proved Innocent! (MCA) Go figure: After returning to the revivalist ska scene in 1996 with the listless Today’s Specials, the reunited Specials — the Coventry outfit that started the whole ska-punk thing back in 1979 — have rebounded with an album that recaptures much of the…
If, as the dear departed Frank Sinatra once claimed, L.A. is a lady, then Nashville must be her sleazy sister — a fickle, powerful, vampiric whore who flits from from one new artist to the next, sucking each dry of all airplay and record sales before casting the pallid corpse…
Last week Haitian refugees made headlines again, and once again Jacquecine Etienne had to explain. For some of Etienne’s American colleagues in the Miami law office where she works as a paralegal, the whole notion seemed incomprehensible: Haitians journeying from their homeland to Miami in a leaky freighter — with…
Gary Numan Exile (Cleopatra) Gary Numan The Mix (Cleopatra) Synth-crazed robot and occasional musical innovator Gary Numan has been responsible for some of new wave’s most laughably dated moments, from “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” and the massive 1979 hit “Cars” to the dreary, sci-fi schlock typified by “Down in the Park”…
Frank Sinatra never gave a better performance as an actor than he did in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), in which he starred as Frankie Machine, a poker dealer and junkie who emerges from prison hoping to kick all his bad habits (heroin included) and earn a living…
“You know that feeling when you’re in big trouble and you know it, but you just feel like laughing?” Mos Def asks from the stage at El Flamingo, a club on the western edge of the revitalized New York City neighborhood of Chelsea. Indie rap’s rookie of the year laughs…
