Those of you who frequent Herman’s Hideaway have no doubt noticed the disappearance of Sharon Rawles, who toiled at the club for twelve years and was eventually named its general manager by owner Alan Roth. Well, you can relax, as both alien abduction and spontaneous combustion have been ruled out…

Summer may be drawing to a slow, sad close, but there’s still plenty of time to pack up the family wagon and head for the hills. We took a bag of local releases along on a recent road trip, and while barreling down the highway, we discovered that the local…

Rubber Planet, with Sad Star Cafe, Friday, August 11, at Hermans Hideaway, bounces around the pop universe with a classic songwriting approach that results in catchy, radio-ready anthems; luckily, the players possess the talent to make that proposition interesting. The Denver-based four-piece crafts catchy variations on the verse-chorus-verse formula while…

Mike Ballard and the small army of volunteers who compose Friends of Red Rocks — a musically minded not-for-profit organization that claims Twist & Shout owner Paul Epstein, former Herman’s Hideaway general manager Sharon Rawles, chanteuse Lannie Garrett, COMA president Dolly Zander and other local rock-and-roll representatives as members –…

Houstons Pure Rubbish, Saturday, August 5, at the 15th Street Tavern, with Hemi Cuda and the Volts, is really messing up the notion that punk rock is a bastion of anti-authoritarianism. A few years ago, lead guitarist Derek D and drummer Evan D asked their father, Punk Daddy, to sing…

There’s been a lot of talk lately about this little old thing called “online music.” Last week, a court ruling ordered the file-sharing system Napster to close its electronic doors for good (a ruling that was subsequently stayed until Napster’s pending appeal can be heard). In the wake of that…

British author Jeff Noon would probably take a shine to Denver rapper Mike V. Noon’s novel, Vurt, takes place in a future world populated by all kinds of variations on the human species: human/dog combos, folks whose physiology involves copious amounts of gas and vapors, robotmen and people who live…

Someone recently swore to Backwash that Aurora is the single worst place to live — in Colorado or anywhere. Though the conclusion wasn’t based on the sort of quality-of-life research that informs Forbes and other publications that regularly make such decrees, it seemed an authoritative one: The fella hailed originally…

You have to wonder what caused those early pioneers — bound for the West Coast, motivated by the promise of gold or, more simply, water — to plunk down and set up camp in the Sonoran desert. The Native populations — Navajo, Pima, Apache — who had inhabited the land…

Cherry Bomb Club, Thursday, July 13, at Seven South, boasts a membership more exclusive than that of the Denver Country Club. A project begun by Divineshaker (aka Dave Moore) of Foreskin 500 and Legendary (aka King Scratchie of the infamous Warlock Pinchers), the clubs roster now includes local blues goddess…

On a recent lovely July evening at Red Rocks Amphitheatre — on which the moonlight hit the rocks in such a way that even the clouds appeared to share the ruddy properties of the Flinstonian architecture — you could hear the wind rustling the trees. The occasional bird chirping. And…

Here’s a little-known fact about Ethel Merman, not that you asked: The Broadway belter with the enlarged nasal cavity extended her skills into a new arena by cutting a disco record, There’s No Business Like Show Business, in 1979 — something Backwash discovered while thumbing the bins at a particularly…

Sherri Jackson, Thursday, June 22, at the Boulder Theater, with Michael Smith and Matt Need, and Saturday, June 24, at the Soiled Dove, is in the midst of what some might describe as a good ol-fashioned success story. After toiling in local music circles, Jackson has received some well-deserved national…

You might not know it from a quick survey of the dance floors at several LoDo nightclubs, but, as many people who first began going to disco-theme parties in the late ’80s can tell you, ’70s nostalgia ceased to be interesting around the same time Shelley Long stuck a Mrs…

Somewhere up around 40,000 feet, while Neil McIntyre was flying over the desolate, expansive state of New Mexico on his way to Phoenix, the woman in the next row let him know that she had seen his band, Yo, Flaco!, play months before at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival in…

Sarah McLachlan and her floral-skirted sisters would be wise to skirt around the Boulder Theater on Saturday, June 17, when the Lilith Scare slips on its stilettos, rolls up its shirtsleeves and goes to work on the crowd — and perceptions of women in music. A tall, blond vixen-in-the-making whos…

Screenplay writers and film directors have long recognized the appeal — both aesthetic and cultural — of the mom-and-pop record shop. Most recently, the movie High Fidelity devoted a sizable amount of screen time to a record store where concert fliers competed for wall space with vintage Beatles and punk-rock…

8 Bucks Experiment, with Hate Fuck Trio, King Rat and Uphollow, Friday, June 9, at the Raven, celebrates the release of Payback, its second full-length recording, with a quadruple bill that packs a punk-rock punch. The band, which includes the brothers OMeara (songwriter/guitarist Paige, drummer Alfred and singer Evan) and…

Lil’ Brian & the Zydeco Travelers, Wednesday, June 14, at Brendans Pub, are an accordion-toting crew from Barrett Station, Texas, that aims to prove that modern zydeco music can carry the same hipness quotient as other urban genres like rap and hip-hop. Foundationally, the Travelers music is rooted in crawdad…

You can learn a lot while circling LoDo searching for a parking spot on game day. For example, Backwash heard this factoid on NPR just the other day: Colorado is the sixth most-visited state in North America, attracting tourists from far and wide who’ve heard tales about the splendor of…

In the book Those Magnificent Mountain Women, author Janet Robinson recalls the ways in which, in the mid- and late-1800s, brave ladies would snowshoe or ride horseback across the formidable Colorado terrain, walking or riding for hundreds of miles before settling among the pines to “fetch a bite of cheese…

Psychologists have long studied the secret languages that sometimes develop between identical twins. In extreme cases, there are entire complex codes of communication shared only by the siblings — something that is sure to alternately puzzle, frustrate and fascinate the non-fluent. The Twins, with the Dinnermints, Saturday, June 3, at…