Who’d have thought that a band like the Clash would ever make it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? True, Joe Strummer and company did flirt with the mainstream a bit, but even in today’s climate of punk patronization, it seems creepy to lump the group that wrote…

Geez, aren’t you supposed to lighten up as you get older? Love Me Destroyer is the new incarnation of Pinhead Circus, the much-loved outfit that spent ten years belting out its brand of catchy, heartfelt punk rock. But where Pinhead Circus once cast a youthful, almost happy-go-lucky glow on its…

It’s a muggy August night in Omaha, and outside the weathered Sokol Auditorium, kids line the sidewalk like a string of firecrackers waiting to go off. It’s kind of a weird setting for a big rock show: a snoozing residential neighborhood full of gas stations, dusty signs and weeds poking…

Prometheus, says the myth, stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this heinous transgression, he was chained to a rock and forced to listen to an infinite loop of the new Dashboard Confessional album. (Or maybe it was having his liver torn out and eaten by…

Expectations. Sometimes they can ruin everything. Most people spend half their time trying to cram everyone around them into molds and the other half of their time bitching about how nobody fits. Having a history doesn’t help; the things other people presume about you can hang around your neck like…

Everyone’s cashing in on this whole “black” thing. Black Keys. Black Eyes. Black Dice. Black Flag. Black Sabbath. Ritchie Blackmore. None More Black. But California’s Black Rebel Motorcycle has got them all beat. Besides their black band name, the guys in the band have black hair, black boots, black jeans…

It’s like the flutter of a bug caught in a cobweb, or the jittery split second before a first kiss, or maybe even one of those tics throbbing deep in your eyeball that make you seriously contemplate clawing out your vitreous humor to get at your retina. It all starts…

In today’s climate of indie-rock sarcasm, a band called Destroyer plays sweet, sophisticated pop, while groups with names like Sparkles play music that’s more bludgeoning than brass knuckles. But there’s nothing tongue-in-cheek about the Oregon combo All Girl Summer Fun Band (which will perform Thursday, September 18, at the Larimer…

When it comes to centers of power, none in history can approach the hubristic might of Washington, D.C., the seat of the American Empire. And yet, dwelling in the shadow of that city’s neo-classical white-marble monuments is a thriving, outspoken punk scene, one that revolves mainly around the independent Dischord…

Contrary to popular belief, rock and roll is not a form of music. It’s not an attitude, either, or a lifestyle, or a sexual position, or even a catchphrase. It’s an accident. Literally, an accident: a collision of bodies, a random act of gross negligence, a forced release of bodily…

“I can’t remember the last time I listened to a country record.” For most people, that would be a pretty innocuous statement. But for someone who plays in a band that has been shoehorned into the alt-country pigeonhole for the past five years, it’s almost antagonistic. M.C. Taylor of the…

Ovulations? Clowns with knives? Suns that don’t want to be photographed? With subjects like these, you might figure that why? isn’t your typical, gold-grilled hip-hop MC. Born Jonathan Wolf, the Oakland-based vocalist and producer grew up as the son of a rabbi in suburban Cincinnati. It was there that he…

It happens once every couple of years. You wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. Your memory’s stuck in shuffle mode, so you roll out of bed and start digging around in the closet for some musty knickknack or photo album. Then suddenly,…

Drummer Don Ogilvie has taken a pretty bumpy path through the music scenes of Denver and Chicago over the past twenty years. He started out in numerous noise bands in suburban Illinois in the mid-’80s, including a short-lived combo with Todd Rittman — later of U.S. Maple fame — called…

The collective lyrical output of rock and roll reads like a shopping list of things that are hard to do. Breaking up. Making up. And, inevitably, just plain old growing up. Through cracked vocal cords and hormone-scalded nerves, the Jealous Sound’s Blair Shehan came of age in Knapsack, a small…

Denver lost a mighty source of rock power the day the Volts disbanded. From 1991 to 2002, the quartet — led by the circuit-blowing vocalist J.R. Spiegel — was as forceful as its name, fusing rowdy Oi! and sleazy street punk into a single, sizzling shock. When Spiegel left Colorado…

There was a time not too long ago, before the plague of Good Charlotte and Sum 41, when it was still viable — even respectable — to be an underground pop-punk band. Instead of appearing on slick, big-label, CD-only releases, groups sacrificed months worth of beer money and practice-space rent…

What happens when punks get sick of playing punk? Historically, all kinds of great things, from Public Image Limited to Slint to the Mercury Program — which will perform Saturday, August 16, at 32 Bleu in Colorado Springs, with Appleseed Cast, Chin Up Chin Up and Eyes Caught Fire, and…

Ask anyone from the ’90s music scene about Diggie Diamond, and you’ll get quite a reaction: shock, fear, awe, reverence, gagging noises. You might even be regaled with tales of a few dozen legendary gigs fraught with seared retinas, scorched lungs, ruptured eardrums and flagrant displays of genitalia. As the…

When you click on the word “Biography” on the Giddy Motors Web site, you’re taken to a page that says simply “There are three of us.” But the pranks don’t stop there. Click on “News,” and you’re whisked away to the BBC News home page; click on “Nothing” and it…

As far as credentials go, Madlib’s got it made. Baptized Otis Jackson Jr., he has an immaculate pedigree: His dad, Otis Sr., was a soul semi-star in the 1970s, and his uncle is Jon Faddis, a trumpeter who played with both Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus. On his own merits,…