Everything made sense until the Beatles broke up. Rock’s audience expanded explosively at precisely the same time the music lost its popular and aesthetic center. The Beatles had demonstrated that what was popular could be art; in their wake, some artists decided to see whether art could be pop. It…
Usually it’s tragedies that happen in sets of three, but this week it’s anniversary parties, all of them in Miami Beach. Lost Weekend (218 Espanola Way, 672-1707), the Abbey Brewing Company (1115 Sixteenth St., 538-8110), and Twist (1057 Washington Ave., 538-9478) are celebrating their one-, two-, and four-year anniversaries. Hold…
What are two of the most oft-heard cliches about South Florida? It’s a cultural wasteland, and the Design District is the next cool boom spot. Tonight (Thursday) Power Studios (3701 NE Second Ave., 576-7567) starts the weekly party Madame X to contradict the first and confirm the second. This performance-art…
Music festivals come straight from Satan. It’s the only way to explain them. People have been complaining for years that rock is the devil’s music, but they’ve got it all wrong. Standing around all day sweating in the hot sun in an endless sea of human wreckage, sucking down four-dollar…
Peter Jefferies/Jono Lonie At Swim 2 Birds (Drunken Fish) Out of print since its 1987 release in New Zealand, an obscurity to even the most fervid Kiwi-noise devotees, At Swim 2 Birds has been the missing link in the long, weird history of Peter Jefferies. Arriving just after the disbanding…
This column wasn’t supposed to be an obituary, although it was meant to sound a knell of finality, if not death. This is my last column for New Times; I’ve decided to go back home to Memphis to work on a project that seems too good to pass up. After…
Bob Dylan didn’t die. Apparently the state of his condition following his May 25 hospitalization for histoplasmosis was greatly exaggerated by the news media. (“DYLAN COULD BE IN FIGHT FOR LIFE,” wailed the headline from the May 29 edition of the New York Post.) Still, the news of that hospitalization…
Various Artists Ultra-Lounge: On the Rocks, Parts One and Two (Capitol) I’ve marveled at the sonic gimmickry and the compositional and arranging genius of Juan Esquivel, I’ve basked in the cheesy tropical splendor of Martin Denny, and I’ve been obsessively passionate about Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra since my mid-teens…
Join owner Digby Leibovitz in saying goodbye to Swirl Shop this Saturday, June 14 (1049 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, 534-2060). Leibovitz muses darkly about Swirl’s demise: “People aren’t supporting the small local places. And if they don’t, everything is going to turn corporate.” The blowout begins at 11:00 p.m. with…
The attack is a bit “sweeter” this time around for Matthew Sweet. Instead of the usual jabbing guitars flexing up the straight-forward pop, the singer-songwriter has decided to tone things down. “Up until recently Matthew gave guitar players all the room in the world,” says guitarist Ivan Julian, who has…
Despite all the recent press talk about the demise of rock and roll and the glorious advent of electronica, I’ve neither subscribed to the former nor believed for a minute that insipid doodlers like DJ Spooky will become anything close to the Next Big Thing. But then I started thinking:…
Despite her success, Tina Turner has done her best to obscure the fact that she’s a great singer. It doesn’t help that she just launched her latest solo album, Wildest Dreams, and her first U.S. tour in six years at the same time one of her most incendiary early-Seventies performances…
The musical dynamic of Ed Matus’ Struggle was once described by a fan as “a train coming, then all of a sudden someone pours fudge on top of it.” The Miami quartet — comprising lead guitarist/songwriter Juan Montoya, singer/guitarist Scott Nixon, drummer Robert Lecusay, and recently acquired bassist LeRoy Talcott…
Unfolding under this Thursday evening’s new moon (and every Thursday to follow) is an event that sounds so much like Miami it’s almost cruelly coincidental that it was transplanted from New York: Cafe con Leche at KGB (637 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, 534-5420). For years Cafe con Leche was a…
The Monks Black Monk Time (Infinite Zero/American) Everything that’s great about the Monks is right there on “Monk Chant,” the lead cut from the group’s 1966 underground classic Black Monk Time, reissued on American’s Infinite Zero imprint after 30 years of obscurity. Over galloping drums, fuzzed-out bass, horror-show organ, trebly…
A few words on Pete Moss from some people who knew him. Moss, a fixture on the local music scene for more than ten years, died early last week. No cause of death has been announced. Hal “Boise Bob” Spector, musician: “We met while he was playing in Gay Cowboys…
After seven years at this wonderful newspaper, I’m jumping out of the club parade and into a seminormal job. Unfortunately for me, now I’ll actually have to be up in the morning. This fine piece of work is my last column. My stint as nightlife guru has ended. My replacement,…
In the inaugural issue of No Depression — a fanzine out of Seattle that has somehow grown to embody the genre of “insurgent country” — the editors wrote: “We claim Gram Parsons as our unholy ghost, minister of the shotgun wedding of country and rock ‘n’ roll long before the…
Take four people from widely varying ethnic and personal backgrounds, put them in a potentially intense situation, then wait for the sparks to fly. It may sound like the formula for some “real life” MTV show or the premise of the next “Must-See TV” program, but it’s actually the secret…
Pete Ham 7 Park Avenue (Rykodisc) The mere fact that Badfinger was originally signed to the Beatles’ Apple label unfairly stigmatized the British popsters as a surrogate Fab Four. But unlike their labelmates, Badfinger’s story did not include highlights like soldout shows at Shea Stadium. That story, chronicled in Dan…
Oh, sure, nowadays everyone likes Black Sabbath. You know, there used to be rules for this sort of thing. Black Sabbath at one time was viewed as a joke by most folks. The only people who liked them were kids so completely stoned all the time they were mesmerized for…
For someone who considers himself an expressionist, Khadir frontman Lino de la Guardia has had a hard time expressing himself — or rather, he’s found it difficult to get the sounds in his head captured on tape. His frustration is evident when the 32-year-old Miami native talks about all the…
