When musicologists of the future try to reconcile the high and low of late twentieth-century music — the time when avant-gardists dismantled classical convention while rock and rollers assembled a cross-cultural folk idiom A perhaps they’ll find the missing link in Can. Much like the Velvet Underground, this German progressive-rock…
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…
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…
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…
Rock and roll exists today only because so many have decided they’re going to be rock stars or they’re going to make a living as accessories to rock stars. They don’t realize the era of the rock star is over. We’ve seen all the clothes and poses and we’ve heard…
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…
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…
“I’m very much opposed to Christian fascism and people listening to everything Christianity has to say,” expounds vocalist, lyricist, and bandleader Marilyn Manson. “But what if everybody listened to everything I have to say? On a couple of different levels, I think it obviously would be better, but at the…
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…
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…
Rocket From the Crypt Scream, Dracula, Scream! (Interscope) From Gene Pitney and the Crystals to the Gap Band and the Lyres, great singles artists have had trouble filling albums with worthwhile songs. San Diego’s Rocket From the Crypt are cut from the same patchy cloth. They’ve cranked out close to…
Great music writing should thump you on the head and in the heart with the visceral power of the music itself. It should dance in your mind with the sure-footed authority of a tightly locked rhythm section riding a bodacious groove into the Valley of the Big Beat. It should…
It’s easy to think of country music these days as a homogeneous piece of product used primarily as the soundtrack for the Tennessee Nashville Network. TNN is a blisteringly bad but wildly popular cable channel that serves as a kind of MTV for wearers of cowboy hats and Wrangler jeans…
Al Green Your Heart’s in Good Hands (MCA) Even with his Seventies hits inspiring everyone from Dwight Yoakam to film directors such as Quentin Tarantino and the Hughes brothers (Allen and Albert, of Menace II Society fame), Al Green still has to compete with the likes of Michael Bolton and…
The first thing you notice is the gleaming and colorful clothing. Orange and silver vinyl, red leather, psychedelic swirls on thrift-store polyester. Then the hair. Dark curls, purple braids, and blond crimps. And when the punky, percussive music starts, it all swirls into motion, like a carnival ride or an…
Joe Satriani Joe Satriani (Relativity) Joe Satriani has always been an odd sort of guitar virtuoso. Too flashy to ever play sideman, too song-oriented to just wail away in some fusion project, and too weak-lunged to sing with any kind of Clapton-like proficiency, he tries to make catchy instrumental music…
Boy George Cheapness and Beauty (Virgin) Brace yourself for the second — okay, third, if you count his out-of-nowhere hit with “The Crying Game” from 1992 — coming of the Boy. Armed with a tell-just-about-everything autobiography (Take It Like a Man) that has sold gobs in England; regularly pumping up…
The Blue Meanies make it a practice to sleep with their fans. “We can’t afford hotels, so usually someone puts us up, people in the crowd we happen to meet,” explains Bill Spunke, the Meanies’ 27-year-old lead singer. “Sometimes you luck out and stay with someone who lives in a…
Call it karma or chalk it up to sheer luck, but things have a way of working out for Stephan Mikes. For example: Ten years ago, while he was living in Jupiter, Florida, Mikes paid $300 for a secondhand sitar, then shelled out a few extra bucks for a beginner’s…
k.d. lang All You Can Eat (Warner Bros.) I miss the country k.d. The ache and twang in her voice, the kitschy cowpunk outfits, the whole Tom Mix meets Patsy Cline thing. Since she dumped the westernware for romance with 1992’s Ingenue, lang’s music has undergone a maturation of sexual…
When you talk with John Hiatt, it becomes glaringly obvious the man knows how to laugh. A robust and hearty howl almost constantly precedes his answers, as if it’s his hammy way of announcing that he’s about to speak. Listening to Hiatt’s music, it’s also evident that he knows when…
Juan Gabriel El Mexico Que Se Nos Fue (BMG/U.S. Latin) Pop hero Juan Gabriel goes back to his roots a la Gloria Estefan on this Mexican-style Mi Tierra. Nortenos, rancheros, son michoacano, and other forms of Mexican country music are the stuff of Gabriel’s nostalgia, and like Estefan’s Grammy winner…
