It’s not quite spring (not even close, actually), but all of the unwanted or ill-fitting gifts we received for Christmas have stuffed our storage closet beyond capacity. See, the same closet also houses our supply discs from area artists, and it’s time to clear that sucker out. What better time…
About a year ago, an editorial about a group of musicians appeared in the Tucson Weekly, a newspaper much like this one, in which it was suggested that prior to being allowed to form yet another local band, the players in question should be forced to take a written test…
Mark Spiewak is hard of hearing. You might say he’s half deaf, though no doctor has ever diagnosed him as such. He doesn’t like doctors, he won’t investigate the fancy new hearing aids on the market, and he’s sure as hell not going to learn sign language. He just prefers…
At times this column seems like an obituary page for local bands. And so it goes as another area outfit calls it quits, at least temporarily: Chief Broom, at the approximate age of 3.5 years, suffered from self-inflicted disbandment after a final show at Quixote’s True Blue on Sunday, January…
The first time Paige O’Meara met film director James Merendino in a Salt Lake City dive bar, he was convinced that the square-looking guy swilling beers behind Buddy Holly specs was, to put it delicately, full of shit. “I’ve met a lot of delusional people,” O’Meara says. “I met this…
Mike Jerk, of Denver’s Soda Jerk Records, and Jason Cotter, singer for local punk outfit the Family Men (who perform this Friday night at the 15th Street Tavern), are the two-man force behind the fantastically understated punk-rock mecca that is The Raven (2217 Welton). Unapologetically ramshackle, the ornithologically monikered club…
For some, tickets to Neil Diamond’s not-really-even-close-to-being-sold-out New Year’s Eve performance at the Pepsi Center may seem like a viable gift option for the music lover who has everything — or a really expensive, ironic gift for the malcontents among us. (A simple Charlie’s Angels lunch-box might do the trick.)…
In all likelihood, nothing’s going to happen when the clock strikes midnight on December 31. Still, the government has advised us all to take a few precautions — stock up on some extra water or freeze-dried lentils, just in case. Which leads some of the more paranoid among us to…
As far as the guardians of cool might be concerned, Robert Mirabal has a couple of things working against him: First, his most recognizable accomplishment is his inclusion in John Tesh’s One World video for the Public Broadcasting System, a colorful and accidentally amusing piece of footage that finds him…
In this season of mad scrambles over the newest Pokémon knickknack or another, it’s easy to forget just exactly what it is we’re all shopping for. It was, after all, the Big Guy’s birth that initiated all of this madness — and in the roughly 2000 years since that day…
A perhaps little-known fact about Slim Cessna: Despite the aeronautical implications of his surname, the Auto Club leader is, in his words, “horrified of flying.” He’s gonna have to get over that right quick. Cessna has announced that, come January, he’s moving to the East Coast — specifically, to Rhode…
Singer/guitarist/songwriter Peggy Mann has been playing around these parts for nearly twenty years, which makes the release of her debut CD Tenderness seem slightly overdue. The eleven-song effort touches on all of Mann’s well-worn influences: The folksy, melodic lilt of “Undercover” features a chorus reminiscent of Meredith Brooks’s annoying “Bitch”…
In that spirit of Thanksgiving, here’s a cornucopia of reviews of local releases: On “Denver Radio Talk Show,” the first track off his five-song CD, titled, well, Five Song CD, Gregory Ego has got it in for a battery of local radio talk-show hosts. In fact, his thinly veiled indictments…
When the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” first joined the words “hip” and “hop” for a nationwide radio audience in 1979, Mike Merriman was little more than a bundle of gelatinous, fetal goo. And in 1983, when Run DMC’s “Sucker MCs” led even those who didn’t reside in the South…
Overheard on the sidewalk outside of the Cosmo Lounge last Thursday during the early portion of a night dubbed “The Pimp & Ho Ball”: “Dude, this place blows.” Truly, the young man who made that comment just might not have been down with the LoDo club’s theme last Thursday evening…
As a former entertainment editor for Boulder’s Colorado Daily, Leland Rucker is perhaps among a handful of people qualified to compile a thorough history of the town’s rock-and-roll history. At least that’s what the Boulder Arts Commission might have been thinking when its members approached Rucker and Channel 8 producer…
In the spirit of a surge of satirical acts performing around the area in recent and coming weeks (The Monsters of Mock at the Bluebird; the Aerosmith cover band Walk the Line at the Soiled Dove on Halloween; Neil Diamond impersonator Super Diamond at the Ogden on November 13) it…
Musician Todd Bradley’s friends aren’t the people in your neighborhood. Instead of kicking back on a modulated sofa with a cold can o’ Coors, they’d prefer to chat on the Internet about WAV files, audio compression and the most current analog-to-digital conversion methods. Actually, Bradley’s friends aren’t even the people…
The mountain of local releases that needs reviewing is slightly diminished after last week’s column. But continuing the quest to cover all things local, here’s another smattering. Brethren Fast visits and revisits themes of gear revvin’, truck lovin’ and beer swillin’ on 500 Laps of Beer Drinkin’ Fun, the band’s…
Ah, autumn. The days grow shorter, the trees grow more bare, and local releases continue to pour in like so much sludge down a storm drain. As Denver begins to resemble Kraków more each day, it’s the perfect time to hibernate indoors with a couple of records. As usual, local…
It’s been more than three years since Miramax released Swingers, the film that helped the swing-dance movement creep out of the underground and guaranteed that we’d all hear the phrase “Vegas, Baby, Vegas,” every time that desert city was mentioned. Then, after legions of potential Gap shoppers heard Louis Prima…
Stephen Torres is wearing a plastic glow-in-the-dark rosary, a skull tattoo with a banner that says “Kimberly Forever” and an aquamarine jumpsuit. Both the rosary and the tattoo are easily explained. Torres is a spiritual man, he contends; the skull he received as an Army Ranger, while “Kimberly Forever” refers…
