I find the song selection and those songs’ ordinal placement on Bruce Springsteen’s chart-topping Greatest Hits album transcend any chronological approach, but more important, you must use a yellow bowl with soapy water to fight aphids. Not red or blue or even off-white — yellow. My dad taught me that…
There’s a sad expanse of oiled flesh by the Fontainebleau Hilton pool, sizzling like bacon in the sun, and the Peck’s Bad Boy of England, author Martin Amis, is rolling another cigarette by a high camp mural of rearing horses, eerily composed for a man in the eye of a…
This Saturday the place to be is actually two places. As mentioned here last week, the Florida Music Association presents an expo and a concert on Saturday, although it turns out that only the show will take place at Button South — sixteen acts on two stages (see our “Calendar”…
Basta! It’s like a joke, a running joke, a sick joke. Yes, another important local rock club is shutting down. This time it’s Rosebuds, which for sixteen years (five times longer than the Talkhouse) has provided a stage for rock and roll, in the past few years concentrating on metal…
Home in bed with the vapors, overcome by existential futility and retreating from the social fray — who are these people? why are these people? A society assuming the qualities of a 3-D interactive round-the-clock tabloid, hardwired to the cornea. And then the whims of destiny dictating two consecutive nights…
One of the coolest-vibe clubs on South Beach, one with extra friendly service and reasonable prices and a clientele made up of people whose company actually was enjoyable — and one with excellent live local music — has closed its doors. Blue Steel might not make news like the Stephen…
And so there we are at The Forge, the palace of excess, working the great game show of American life. Another week in the popularity sweepstakes, another a-star-is-stillborn story, another feast on the gravy train. The clean-living Tommy Pooch celebrating a birthday amid the nomadic beasts of pleasure, dodging an…
Florida is best known in the rap world for a genre called bass, that beat-heavy, thump-thump-boom sound you actually can feel coming out of chopped-down cars around town. Bass music is like other rap forms but with more beats per minute and a woofer-blowing emphasis on, well, bass. It was…
Dateline Palm Beach, a flight from local society, working the shortcuts of the American dream. The endless journalistic scramble, the hustles, the protocol phone calls paying off with a stray Saturday night at Mar-A-Lago, returning to command headquarters of Donald Trump, the All-American survivor. Donald and Marla Maples celebrating yet…
Maybe it’s just us, but lately parties seem like one vast theater of the ridiculous, riddled with bad taste, dysfunction, and assorted societal diseases. Accordingly, taking the path of high culture and hauling a shattered carcass down to the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts, eager to bask in the…
A few weeks ago, Bobby Johnston, lead singer for psycho punk maniacs Load, was sitting in the studio of WAXY during the Beast and Baker Show as his band’s raging music roared into the airwaves like drunk Scuds. Between Load cuts, Johnston answered questions about his band, mentioned upcoming gigs,…
Nightlife, over time, renders everyone walking obsessive-compulsive voids, feckless and hopeless, lab rats in a B.F. Skinner universe of degradation. One long wasting in appetite, rats and humanoids doomed to press eager little noses against a pleasure bar, searching for sensation, sustenance, cocaine, and endorphin rushes, accepting rude shocks and…
Is it a scene yet? Whatever you think of the press coverage provided by corporate media outlets A the Miami Herald, New Times, et cetera A you can’t say local original rock isn’t receiving almost as much coverage as it deserves. Cable television offers Music X, Rock Ya Ma Call…
We’ve got five years, man, that’s all we got. (Sorry, Mr. Bowie.) But it’s true, the millennium is quickly running out on us, and I consider it a deadline. People have to turn around what’s been neglected in recent years: Feed the hungry, clothe the ragged, console the hurt, heal…
Another dream of the night, another chaotic cesspool of delights, diversions, and close encounters of the unfortunate kind, the past, present, and future jelling into a tortured narrative, a monologue of narcissism and hurt, the cheap melodramas of darkness. You take a beating out here every day, but the pros…
He wrecked his truck, got stabbed, run over, and lost a finger. His wife ran off with his best friend. He got shot, chased by large crowds of angry people, then thrown in jail. And that was in just one day. So goes the Rex Neilson-penned tune “Thank God I…
Nightlife, a dicey proposition of plugs, hugs, and drugs, hubris and horrors, fair-weather friends and unsavory courtesies. A trade with certain charms, this chasing of trifles, chimeras, and cheesiness: Stick around long enough and the great pageant unravels in a pleasantly deranged manner, a kind of sustaining brain candy. Been…
A beautiful riff that dates as far back as Louis Armstrong’s “Wonderful World” visits town twice this week, showing up in the Floating Men’s “Call of the Wild” and in the lead track of Greg Brown’s latest masterpiece, The Poet Game. It’s just a little high-note-bomp-low-note-sustain, but when played by…
The music industry virtually shut down this past week while every flack, hack, and sad-sack musician in the land converged on Austin, Texas, for the huge showcase convention SXSW (short for South by Southwest). There are panel discussions and such, but the big draw is the bounty of showcases. There’s…
The real-life follies, clinging to the sanctity of good clean fun, faith tested time and again. Till death, or worse yet, unemployment, entrapped within the bell jar of gossip, the cutting wire that dices, dissects, and taints every circumstance. But then, the razor’s edge of columning cuts both ways, the…
Lamenting the demise of the vinyl configuration for recorded music is at this point as tiresome and pointless as the Simpson trial. The “wax” many of us grew up spinning now makes up a minuscule portion A perhaps three percent A of the market. Live with it. And celebrate the…
Vacation time, a brief reprieve from these deranged metropolitan diaries A in truth, we don’t even know what the hell they’re all about A inspiring a curious strain of holiday anomie, the workaday world suddenly robbed of meaning, authenticity, and dramatic interest. Without the small deaths of deadlines, the daily…
