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),…
Big Boss Man, can’t you hear me when I call Well, you ain’t so big You just tall, that’s all Prolific blues bard Jimmy Reed wrote those familiar lines a couple of decades before Johnny Paycheck was telling the boss where anatomically to place his job or Dolly Parton was…
Magda Hiller …nothing but (independent cassette) She coos. She croons. She cackles. She croaks. She yowls and howls and growls. She’s lilting and lusty and tender and … damn! There went my thesaurus again. Those things are useless — always running out of synonyms when you need them most. The…
So often it begins on a whim: As an antidote to otherwise soporific college life in Gainesville, For Squirrels bassist Bill White recalls, he and fellow UF student Travis Tooke bought guitars at a pawnshop and taught themselves to play. Less than two years later, hard work and good luck…
In Tempe, Arizona, across the street from a golf course with winter-brown grass, behind a white wall that probably keeps in more than it keeps out, sits the low-slung, spacious home of Curt Kirkwood. That’s Curt Kirkwood — father of twins, fearless interviewee, marijuana enthusiast, Meat Puppet. A pit bull…
The rumblings of a revolution can be felt in the music industry air. The record companies are testing the waters of technology, though you’ll probably never hear about it, much less actually hear it. What they’re trying to do is move us print-press dinosaurs into the modern age by linking…
You’ve done your homework on Guy Clark. You’ve studied the press clippings (“Better than a good Texas brisket!” enthuses Vince Gill. “In my wildest dreams I look like Michelle Pfeiffer and write like Guy Clark,” bubbles Pam Tillis. “He may be the Thirteenth Apostle,” raves Leroy Parnell. “A genius for…
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was a man who loved other men. It was perhaps this aspect of his life that inspired him to write, nearly 100 years ago, that “the only sin is stupidity.” He also wrote “It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize…
Ted Nugent has problems. He might be the happiest rock and roll animal in the jungle, but sometimes you wonder if he’s just one synapse away from Koreshville. Believe him A if Janet Reno and the government ever send the badged boys out to his place, they’re going to get…
For some strange reason (the media), Margie Adam, the purest pop singer this side of Judy Collins, seems to be better known for the several years she spent not making music. A decade ago, Adam quit the music biz at the apex of her career. Now she’s back. And there…
It was one of those silly moments in musical history, a throwaway novelty song performed by a duo of comedians. It was a joke, son. And yet a few of us still get the shivers just thinking about it. For some of us it wasn’t just a goofy spoof, it…
If you’re expecting subtlety from a comedy troupe named the Ballbusters, you’re in for the rude awakening you deserve. These guys are lewd, crude, and determinedly obnoxious. Their sole joy in life is derived from placing and recording prank telephone calls to unsuspecting victims, taking perverse glee in raising the…
“It’s impossible to be a competent popular music critic,” writes Dave Marsh, generally considered one of the top rock journalists in the land. So Dave, why don’t you get a real job? That’s the problem, Marsh argues in the March issue of Rock & Rap Confidential: Being a competent crit…
