Full disclosure: Neil Diamond was my first real concert, in my fourth-grade year, the result of Mom’s ardent fandom. Me, Sis, Mom, and Dad at the Houston Summit. What I remember most is this: Someone who couldn’t have been paying much attention tried to pass a joint to me through…
Ed Matus loves spreading discord. As the guitarist, vocalist, and one of the primary lyricists for Subliminal Criminal, Matus injects a reckless kind of humor into the dissonant, aggressively subversive, and, yes, discordant music the Miami band creates. Matus and his cohorts — bassist-vocalist Anthony Ferry-Lucas and drummer Kris King…
How good is the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion? So good that four years after the release of the band’s screeching, wailing debut album from ’92, the Blues Explosion towers over nearly every other punk-blues fusionist shimmying and shrieking on the indie-rock circuit. Over the course of five longplayers and numerous…
Utah Phillips and Ani Difranco The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere (Righteous Babe) On “Bridges,” Utah Phillips intones: “I have a friend, a good folksinger and song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says, ‘You always sing about the past. You can’t live in the past, you know.’…
Bow your heads, please, and dress yourself in the ebony hues befitting a funeral — the Miami punk-pop collective known as Fay Wray has belly-upped, bitten the dust, gone the way of eight-tracks and Edsels. The crushing news arrived a couple weeks back from the band’s drummer George Graquitena, who…
Is the family driving you crazy? Have you had just about as much as you can take of Aunt Martha’s story about how she met Uncle Don? Lucky for you, clubland offers some interesting options that not only stir the soul, but warm the heart as well. Get into the…
It’s all about music this weekend with some phat and funky new additions to the one-nighter bandwagon. On Saturday Thunder Alley (3025 NE 188th St., Aventura, 933-9003), the usually mild-mannered waterfront haunt, transforms itself into Club F/X. The party starts early — 9:00 p.m. — and ends late, so there…
You don’t have to live in Miami very long to learn that the club scene here is, to put it mildly, kinda weird. Locals no doubt know the litany of shortcomings: too many dance pits and not enough live-music stages; a spot on the national touring circuit that’s practically nonexistent,…
El Vez G.I. Ay, Ay! Blues (Big Pop) The world’s most popular Hispanic Elvis impersonator uses his latest album G.I. Ay, Ay! Blues to attack current anti-immigrant fervor, adding his usual mingling of music cultures and a broad spectrum of rock history that begins with the King. From the resounding…
In its September 11, 1964, issue, the British pop magazine New Musical Express featured an article on the Kinks underneath the headline “This week’s chart-toppers.” Each member of the band, which had just stepped into the limelight on the strength of its third single, “You Really Got Me,” was asked,…
Nothing in Jeff Tweedy’s body of work prepares you for Being There, the ambitious and masterful second album by his band Wilco — not the charming, self-effacing songs he brought to Uncle Tupelo, the now-defunct band he co-fronted with Jay Farrar; not the tossed-off nuggets he sprinkled on the pair…
Eddie Palmieri Vortex (TropiJazz) Spike Lee’s new film Get on the Bus is the story of a bus full of men on their way to the Million Man March. But it has another very important character: an African drum that plays a key role as a link between generations living…
If the Sex Pistols made cash from chaos, Chicago’s Projekt label is making money from misery. Founded in the early Eighties by Fort Lauderdale native Sam Rosenthal, Projekt has built a hugely successful cottage industry from the dark thoughts and woeful states of a slew of bummed-out bands, including British…
It’s not easy being David Lee Roth. Notwithstanding his renewed TV ubiquity (via the canny use of “You Really Got Me” in that GI-Joe-in-a-Nissan ad), life for the former Van Halen frontman has not been kind lately. First, having shed another lead singer, his old band plucked Dave out of…
Punk rock’s greatest strength was its ability to crumble the wall separating technically proficient musicians and inspired, caterwauling amateurs — its insistence that anyone could form a band. With advances in technology making multitrack recording both easy to use and relatively affordable, you can broaden the dictum of punk rock…
Fall is the time for fashion, fashion, fashion — fashionable clothes, fashionable clubs, fashionable ideas. And what could be more fashionable than rock musicians? A bevy of such congregate tonight (Thursday) and for the following three nights at Rose’s Bar & Music Lounge (754 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, 532-0228) to…
One day in 1951, a light bulb flashed over the head of Ernie Young, the white proprietor of Ernie’s Record Mart in Nashville, Tennessee. After watching his customers buy black gospel and R&B records, Young figured that if he made the records, there’d be that much more money for him…
Now that winter is slowly rolling in — the period affectionately called “season” in clubland — so are the parties. Eighties opulence abounds on Saturday when the Jockey Club (11111 Biscayne Blvd., North Miami, 893-3344), normally a private meeting place, opens its doors to the public to broadcast the Mike…
Boxing Gandhis Howard (Atlantic) Rock critics of the early Seventies did our best to banish all thought of eclecticism, since it was usually a key word denoting fraud of the art-rock or jazz-rock sort. No one ever called Bitches Brew eclectic, though it was; that term was reserved for the…
In a pop world where female musicians are designed, micromanaged, and as carefully positioned in the marketplace as a new brand of air freshener, how wonderfully earthy and real is the art of Joni Mitchell. As a writer immersed in all the current female musicos, I found it a jolt…
Shtick is hard to pull off in rock and roll, whether you’re dressed up in patriot garb a la Paul Revere and the Raiders, stomping around a dry-iced stage in monster boots and makeup (e.g., Kiss), or clad in yellow latex suits and proclaiming in anthemic skronks that you are…
Rene Alvarez is having fun. Honest. Granted, it might not be obvious when you see the brooding songwriter playing at local clubs, banging out songs of intense frustration and instability with his group Sixo, creating a ragged kind of rock and roll noise that squalls and hollers in the middle…
