Ah, the holidays. For Backwash, the annual Christmastime pilgrimage to my home town of Phoenix almost always involves some exploration of the endless dive bars that line the city’s central corridor, wood-paneled places with pickled eggs on the counter and equally vile specimens on the jukebox. Because I long ago…
Ross Kersten probably owes Paul Westerberg about six million beers. As the leader of the LaDonnas through the ’90s, the Wisconsin-born singer-guitarist crafted a deliciously rambunctious, lager-laced rock-and-roll sound that owed more than an aesthetic debt to the Replacements. (The band’s cover of “Can’t Hardly Wait” became a live staple.)…
Annie Quick, who appears Thursday, December 19, at Ziggie’s Saloon, has a way of both blending into and stepping out of her environment. Her band, Stickman Jones, shed its hippie upbringing when it moved from Santa Cruz to New York City in 1997. Surging with the flash and urban energy…
The Colorado Music Association unveiled its Music Directory at a holiday party this past Sunday, passing out copies of the comprehensive talent guide. The directory, more than two years in the making, lists the vital statistics of as many working bands and artists as COMA was able to gets its…
Members of Three Degrees of Freedom recently made a very serious investment in their future, one that suggests a rock-and-roll variation on the Oscar Meyer wiener car and the Orkin man’s bug-eared auto. The jam-happy Denver outfit bought a huge white Suburban and plastered the sidewalls with a blazing, blown-up…
Durward Minor is losing his chops a little bit every day. For this he can blame both arthritis and inertia: It’s been nearly four months since he held either of the instruments he mastered long ago — the acoustic bass and the tuba — and his hands are starting to…
The chamber of commerce and the census bureau do not appear to keep records on the number of bars per capita operating in our fair city. The Department of Excise and Licenses can tell us that there are approximately 1,200 active liquor licenses on file in the City and County…
Earlier this year, Celeste Krenz and her husband, Bob Tyler, surrendered their spot as one of Colorado’s country-music power couples and moved to Nashville — the revered as well as derided epicenter of the twang-centric universe. Now they’re part of a community that’s powered almost entirely by the music-minded, from…
There was really nothing Backwash wanted to do more than spend the evening in an animal suit. Fortunately, the Warner Bros. publicist understood why I so desired to be among the fuzzy, dancing bears — and frogs, cheetahs, orangutans, unicorns and skunks — who joined the Flaming Lips on stage…
“High concept” is a term that often connotes an overwrought art project — something self-consciously deep or, worse, “important.” But when affixed to Denver’s Uphollow, the description celebrates the band’s ability to cultivate new ideas through sound. In 1993, founders Ian O’Dougherty and Whit Sibley released Soundtrack to an Imaginary…
Aubrey Collins is feeling a little tired when I call her on a Friday morning, and it’s easy to understand why. Yesterday she woke up with a sore throat and a sniffle — nothing serious, but the kind of thing that can throw your day when your life revolves around…
There was just too much rain in Seattle for Scott Kerr. “I always thought that gray, cloudy days were my favorite,” says Kerr, the guitarist, vocalist and songwriter for Yellow Second. “After being out there for a while, I realized that there were a lot of things I missed about…
Minty fresh. That’s how the side of the bottle describes the blood’s taste. Pacing on the deck of a suburban home in gigantic platform boots that obliterate the leaves crackling underfoot, Maris the Great begs to differ. “I think it’s more like cherries,” he says, and he should know. Although…
Over the course of the past year, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News have discovered that there is indeed a music scene in Denver. What accounts for this revelation, we couldn’t rightly say. Of the two, The Post has been most proactive in upping its music-savvy profile, possibly…
Since the demise of the late, great Foreskin 500, most of Dave Kerr’s appearances before local audiences have found him standing behind a turntable deck and donning a pair of headphones. He’s had informal “residencies” at the Lion’s Lair and the 15th Street Tavern, gigs that were more likely to…
Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur have been in the news more often recently than they were during their heydays as East and West Coast rap stars, respectively. A Los Angeles Times series and a new movie — each presenting different theories as to who killed Shakur in September 1996 and…
Red-haired and musically ambidextrous, Marcy Baruch has pole-vaulted into the inner sanctum of Denver-area singer-songwriters. Her debut recording, Clearly, suggests she’s paid the dues to be there. It’s easy to imagine much of the material on Clearly co-opted by aspiring Faiths and Shanias, artists who toil in the gray stylistic…
My friends were skeptical when I told them we’d be spending Saturday night watching a musical about an East German transgendered rock-star wannabe with platinum spaceship hair. It took some not-so-gentle persuasion — not to mention a couple of steins of Hefeweisen at Cafe Berlin — to assure them that…
When Kurt Ottaway and Jason Cotter decided to pull their heads out of the underground and take over a legitimate music venue, they entered into a pact — not only with themselves, but with those who for years had begged them to open a damn club already. So on Friday,…
The man behind the wheel of the forty-foot passenger bus sits and waits for 9:12 a.m., the minute that he’s scheduled to pull out of a stop at Seventh and Water streets. But on this recent Tuesday morning, he also waits for some kind of clue as to what, exactly,…
Danny Shafer has recently undergone a change of heart. For one thing, he’s been wired to a honky-tonk frequency, studying the players and pluckers who perfected the two-stepper years ago in Texas, Nashville and Bakersfield. He’s also done some stepping of his own — out of the limelight and into…
If you were to tune into KTKX 91.5/FM, a low-watt radio station beaming out of Texarkana, Texas, you might find yourself humming along to a voice belonging to Jonathan Kuiper, frontman and songwriter of Colorado Springs pop quartet Accidental Superhero. KTKX is among a growing list of similarly smallish operations…
