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In the shadow of the towering, gilded dome of West Virginia's state capitol building, the knotty-pine walls of the Empty Glass bar were ready to burst. Crammed shoulder to shoulder, several patrons had abandoned their seats and were standing on table...
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'Round midnight on December 20, 1989, at the World in downtown Manhattan's Alphabet City, Terence Trent D'Arby trooped back onstage to perform an obligatory encore for a scant crowd of a couple hundred concertgoers. The black-clad, dreadlocked soul s...
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Walking proud to the bandstand, grinning like a man going home, Gerald Wilson started a recent set at Moonlight in Sherman Oaks with a little offhand patter. "We got a lot of great guys here tonight," he said, scanning the assembled 17 members of the...
by
RJ Smith
on June 18, 1998
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Article
Oklahoma, the Sooner state - as in, the sooner you're out of there the better - was not where the members of Woodpussy wanted to spend the rest of their lives, so they came to Los Angeles to find jobs and form a band. But Oklahoma pervaded everything...
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One glorious Saturday morning in the spring of 1974, my friends and I rode our bikes downtown to the record store/head shop. The typically cynical fat-guy employee (every record store/ comic-book shop has one) saw me looking over an Eno album.
"Hey...
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Kevin Ayers is a rather cultivated, somewhat self-effacing British man somewhere in his 50s. He is by occupation . . . call him a singer-songwriter. Which is to say, he does do that if pushed, but he'd much prefer to snorkel in the Mediterranean, sip...
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Country singer Randy Travis' tour bus - over half a million dollars' worth of steel and chrome, emblazoned with an adobe-village mural on either side and muzzled with a tucked-and-tooled cream-and-turquoise Indian-motif leather front end - idles in a...
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Near the end of every Third Grade Teacher show, singer Sabrina Stevenson rolls around onstage, twitching spasmodically as if suffering a seizure. Her glassy eyes bug out, her face turns bright red and she begins singing in tongues, spitting out rap...
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ESTHERO
Breath From Another (Work)
Excessive talent is received with suspicion in the democratic world of pop, and this Toronto duo makes almost too much good music for a debut. With her creamy voice, heavy-lidded invitation and coltish R&B fee...
by
Greg Burk
on May 28, 1998
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RAMBLIN' JACK
ELLIOTT
Friends of Mine
(Hightone)
Among singer-songwriters, Ramblin' Jack Elliott is a key figure, largely owing to his huge influence on Bob Dylan, but not only for that. His style melded equal parts Woody Guthrie, cowboy ...
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Rock stars act as our surrogate pricks. In both senses. Like actors and athletes but without the expectation of role modeling, they must sleaze their iconic genitalia across the uncivilized world to compensate for John Q. Pubic's enforced abstinence....
by
Greg Burk
on May 21, 1998
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We knew we were on to something by the number of people screaming. At our studio, drunks would burst in and thrash about the room. Onstage, people would leap up and commandeer the mike, or it would somehow end up in the audience. "I AM AMERICA!" one ...
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Article
It was more than just black and Puerto Rican B-boys in hip-hop's early days. Women have been an integral part of the breakin', writin' and rappin' (r)evolution since hip-hop's genesis in the late 1970s. But involvement and visibility are two differen...
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Article
In the mid-'70s, the din of Merzbow's fluorescent feedback, Scandinavian Black Metal and your mother's Cuisinart had yet to exist as viable forms of musical terrorism; even if they had, chances are people wouldn't have known what to make of them. Tim...
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Technically speaking, with three-fourths of the band's members in their 30s, Stanford Prison Experiment is a senior citizen in the 14-to-24-year-old-demographic-worshiping culture of pop music, as presented in Rolling Stone and on MTV.
"That's a cul...
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POP PSYCHOLOGY: NICK LOWE'S BETTER TOMORROW
NICK LOWE
Dig My Mood (Upstart/Rounder)
In nearly three decades of rocking, writing and producing, there's very little that Nick Lowe hasn't done. Launching the careers of Elvis Costello and the Pr...
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In Tehran, the graffiti appeared on a wall near the university: "Andy." Authorities scrubbed it away; it reappeared a day later. This went on for some time, and the phantom scribbler was never apprehended. So the wall was torn down.
Young women i...
by
John Payne
on April 30, 1998
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Article
Though it would make it easier for me, I won't try to glamorize his death into an art statement. Rozz Williams hanged himself in his West Hollywood apartment on April Fools' Day. Best known as the founder and front man of seminal goth band Christian ...
by
Ron Athey
on April 16, 1998
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Article
English Frank was a true friend, and one of the most misunderstood people I've ever known. Those close to him, however, knew how thoughtful and considerate he really was. Maybe because he was adopted and an only child, he never took friendship for gr...
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JOHN SCOFIELD
A Go Go (Verve)
John Scofield might have laughed if you told him his project with groovemen Medeski, Martin & Wood was going to be his best album ever. The jazz-guitar generalissimo probably figured he'd double-park outside the stu...
