Falling James

This is Mick Jagger's car.

We Lurked Outside the Rolling Stones' Rehearsals in Burbank

Falling James
Last week, the center of the rock & roll universe was located in an industrial part of Burbank. In one room at CenterStaging studios, Paul McCartney was rehearsing with his band for their upcoming world tour. Next door, his old pals and supposed rivals the Rolling Stones were preparing for......
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Marnie Stern, Qui

Falling James
Each Marnie Stern song sounds like a hundred record stores at once, so densely are the tracks packed with ideas. On her fourth album, The Chronicles of Marnia, the New York guitarist refines her unique form of bubblegum prog, contrasting insane finger-tapping flurries and loopy and looped layers of guitars......
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Steve Earle & Allison Moorer

Falling James
Texas singer-guitarist Steve Earle lifted the title of the classic Hank Williams song "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" as the name of both his most recent studio album and his 2011 debut novel. The album is a set of generally serious-minded ballads influenced by the death of......
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Tamaryn

Falling James
Kicking off with a barrage of ringing guitars, "The Garden" blooms vibrantly on Tamaryn's second album, Tender New Signs. The New Zealand native croons in a contrastingly soft and somnolent voice as the loud guitars and bass fuse into a golden molten lava that washes over her fragile melody. Her......
The Rezillos

The Rezillos – The Echo – 11/18/12

Falling James
The Rezillos, The Stitches The Echo 11-18-12 Better than . . . getting your head kicked in tonight. One of the Rezillos' earliest singles was titled "(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures," but there weren't any statues standing around at their show last night at the Echo, which was only the......
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You Can't Keep an Old Punk Down

Falling James
Few of the punk rockers who were around during the early days of the Hollywood scene remained unchanged by the inexorable confluence of cultural and sexual frustrations that spontaneously erupted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some people lost their minds, and more than a few lost their lives,......
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Plath

Falling James
What would have happened if Sylvia Plath had somehow staved off her terminal depression and hung on for a few more years instead of sticking her head in an oven and killing herself in February 1963? At the time of her death, during an unusually bitter winter, the troubled Boston......
Zac Rae

Fiona Apple, Blake Mills – The Greek Theatre – 9/14/12

Falling James
See also: Our review of Fiona Apple at the Hollywood Palladium Fiona Apple, Blake Mills The Greek Theatre 9-14-12 Better than . . . getting knocked out by shadows. There's something about Fiona Apple that makes you want to take care of her. Maybe it's because she's so slender, you......
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Angela's Sashes

Falling James
"Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls," the Kinks' Ray Davies once declared in "Lola," his pop ode to a transvestite. "It's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world." Now Angela Bowie attempts to sort out who's who in her fascinating new book, Lipstick Legends, looking back in love (instead......