We cruised through upstate New York, pulling into the biker bar at two o’clock in the morning. Our Volvo station wagon didn’t exactly blend into the rack of Harleys resting in the lot. The joint was packed — wall-to-wall leather and chrome — and we might have felt out of…
The room is brightly lighted and freshly painted all white, like in a hospital. Or a morgue. There’s a cooler in the corner filled with ice and a bottle of water. Above, a lackadaisical ceiling fan spins slowly around and around and around like the world itself. There’s a table…
Everyone who’s ever strummed a guitar has at one time or another asked themselves the question, “If I could trade places with anyone in the history of rock and roll, who would it be?” I know I’ve fantasized about it once or twice myself. Of course the names that popped…
Third Wish consists of serious musicians, veterans of the University of Miami’s music school, true virtuosos capable of technical precision in a variety of genres. Even so, they’re a damn good rock band. If that seems unlikely — that players who can run through a perfect Beethoven sonata are also…
Amid all the manufactured mainstream media malarkey about 1) the 25th anniversary of Woodstock and 1A) its merchandising-gone-ballistic deadly spawn, Woodstock ’94 and 2) the Rolling Stones’s toothless and soulless new album, Voodoo Lounge, and 2A) the band’s “Till Death Do Us Part” kabillion-dollar U.S. tour in support of that…
Little Nicky Yarling says Phillip Walker is one of the best acts she has ever seen. Quite an endorsement from the juke-joint-jumpin’est frontwoman on the South Florida music scene. But then, one doesn’t become hired axman for everyone from Clifton Chenier to Lowell Fulson by being the aural equivalent of…
Intrepidation is not a word. Nor, for that matter, are decimy or centrifugion. But that didn’t stop Rob Elba, songwriter-vocalist of the Holy Terrors, South Florida’s most explosively erudite and least compromising post-punk band, from using them in the songs “Nude,” “Palm Beach,” and “Turn,” respectively, on the Terrors’s new…
It seemed like such a good idea, one of those momentary lapses of reason when both impulse and inspiration collide. The proverbial bolt from the blue, at once whimsical and foolhardy. It all began during my weekly perusal of this very publication. There it was, in the “Concert Calendar,” the…
Don’t speak to me. Don’t even look at me. For sure, don’t smile. Not before that first dose of caffeine is more than halfway down my gullet and racing back up to set synapses firing and endorphins pumping, noticeably — though barely — improving my demeanor. Good morning? Those terms…
On a scalding Miami afternoon, Juan Alvarez arrives home from work to find his son, known as Christopher Alvy, sitting in the kitchen talking to a stranger. So Alvarez fixes some cafe cubano and breaks out the scrapbooks. The father, a former baseball player and musician, flips the pages and…
Two songs into the Eagles’s Orange Bowl concert Sunday, guitarist-singer Glenn Frey stepped up to the mike, grinned boyishly, and said, “We’re baaaaaaacccck.” Depending on how you feel about stadium shows in general and the Eagles in particular — and somewhat incidentally, depending on whether you saw Poltergeist II, on…
Steve Forbert’s career as a rock musician could easily be read as a series of cautionary tales about fish and ponds. Big fish in little ponds. Little fish in big ponds. Fish lunging dumbly at the bait. Fish out of water. The simple filament of the rock-star narrative — boy…
Africa Fete ’94, a summer tour of dance-oriented global-beat bands put together by Island Records, features Caribbean zouk pioneers Kassav, electro-funk chanteuse Angelique Kidjo, and Ziskakan, a group of musicians from the East African island of Reunion who mixes Eastern melodies with rock rhythms. An Africa Fete compilation CD and…
Various artists Blues Masters — The Essential Blues Collection (Rhino) Rhino was promoting the hell out of this disc at the Chicago Blues Fest in June. Even had their own booth where they played it over and over and over. Fortunately for festgoers (and blues lovers) Blues Masters lives up…
“Everything I say is a lie” — that’s some semantic conundrum. If everything I say is a lie, and I say everything I say is a lie, then that’s the truth, so everything I say can’t be a lie, so it’s not the truth. Reality can be tricky like that,…
Maria Marshall made lasagna for Tony Bennett. Maria Marshall ate baked Alaska with Jimmy Rushing. Maria Marshall took a hundred bucks off Zoot Sims at a roulette table in Vegas. And Maria Marshall spent eighteen glorious months touring the U.S. and South America with Benny Goodman, a journey documented in…
Toad the Wet Sprocket Dulcinea (Columbia) The title of Toad the Wet Sprocket’s latest album hints at its expressive-bordering-on-mushy pop sweetness, even as the calla lilies on the cover announce it as the make-out album of 1994. If this was a beverage, it would be Libby’s fruit nectar spiked with…
Pablo Picasso once said, “The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.” Of course, Pablo never heard Cannibal Corpse. He never heard songs like “Fucked with a Knife,” “Stripped, Raped and Strangled,” or “Force Fed Broken Glass,” and he’s no longer around to tell us whether good taste should perhaps…
Fuck everything you know. Now imagine those four words sung plaintively like a wishful prayer, not a harsh declarative. Add a little acoustic strum behind them, making the nihilistic verbiage — fuck everything you know — still gentler. Fuck all that’s gone before, all you’ve ever heard and seen, everything…
Weezer Weezer (DGC) They sound like Nirvana. They sound like Hsker D. They sound like Meat Puppets. Somehow, this is not necessarily a good thing. In fact, it can be downright tedious. — Greg Baker s Luther Allison Soul Fixin’ Man (Alligator) Like many African-American musicians, bluesman Luther Allison found…
No matter what your opinion of Ozzy Osbourne, you have to acknowledge two indisputable facts. First, in popular music’s continuing saga, there exist whole chapters devoted to the demi-godfather of hard rock. Second, at the Oz’s right hand there’s always been a fledgling guitarist whose career was being set in…
It’s a long way from the gothic torture chamber ambience of the defunct and sorely missed Washington Square to the upbeat sports bar decor of Dan Marino’s American Sports Bar & Grill (as opposed to Dan Marino’s Herzegovinian Bar & Grill or Dan Marino’s Mongolian Bar & Grill, I suppose),…
