They say girls mature faster than boys. Shannon Curfman, however, is maturing faster than everyone. At fourteen, she’s doing her schoolwork on the road while touring behind her major-label debut, Loud Guitars, Big Suspicions. Her turns in the spotlight haven’t come in the school auditorium but on Late Night With…
Tommy “Working Man” Thomas is in a jam. Sure, he’s got a new CD, Working Man, out in stores, and he’s slowly selling copies of the bluesy six-song disc. He’s also getting a dash of airplay on the local airwaves. But musically speaking, Thomas’s handle doesn’t seem to hold water…
A dollar won’t go far these days. But five dollars is a different story — especially in Arapahoe County. County public defender Hollynd Hoskins knows just how far five bucks can stretch: across five months, several law-enforcement departments and two counties. Last July, Hoskins tried to give $5 for bus…
Five years ago, vocal hemp supporters Kathleen Chippi and David Almquist put their money where their mouths were by opening the Boulder Hemp Company. The pair’s activism by way of commerce has since produced a line of cookies, snacks and baking mixes made with hemp flour, which they grind from…
Beer Wolf (not his real name) steps from his bedroom into his basement studio, a large glass jar in his hand. As he unscrews the lid and presents the jar to a visitor, a musty aroma wafts up from the leafy green resinous material within. “You can’t buy this around…
A front-row seat for the touring version of Phantom of the Opera may be the hottest ticket in Denver this holiday season. But if you can’t get an A-list seat to this hugely popular play — it’s played to over fifty million people during its run of more than thirteen…
When you consider his career and accomplishments, it makes no sense that Sleepy LaBeef is tilling the back forty of America’s musical consciousness. After all, his resumé includes prolific stints on labels that virtually birthed rock and roll, such as Starday and Sun. His Fifties peers and labelmates include George…
Giving and receiving are the most important concepts this time of year. Unfortunately, for too many of us. those ideas translate into “buying” — the deeper meanings of the season be damned. Thankfully, the holidays also offer plenty of relief from the stresses of shopping till dropping. This month local…
There’s a reason the black leather jacket and the pompadour continue to stand as calling cards among lovers of Fifties rock and roll. After all, they were two of the more disturbing fashion statements to parents whose kids were forsaking Pat Boone for Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry…
The back pages of Colorado history are filled with hardy souls who conquered the rugged territory, who defied the odds with gusto. One of Colorado’s toughest early settlers was Augusta Pierce Tabor, a frail New England society girl whose transformation from debutante to pioneer is the most impressive makeover the…
As a fledgling country musician, Shelton Hank Williams, aka Hank Williams III, is in an unenviable crossfire of high expectations that make Jesus’s son-of-God standing seem almost cushy. After all, Williams’s grandfather, the legendary Hank Williams Sr., virtually created the country-and-Western genre and cemented its place in the archives of…
Bruce Hartnell, formerly of Los Angeles punkers the Detonators, has executed a drastic change in style. Instead of the three-chord crunch of his past, these days guitarist Hartnell and his many mates in Los Mex Pistols del Norte are playing a form that hails less from Southern California as from…
The Great American Beer Festival is the ultimate test of mettle. The three-day event presents about 1,700 different beers, making it the drinking equivalent of the Tour de France or the Boston Marathon. Thankfully for attendees, tasting each of these beers is not required. But for Paul Gatza and his…
Pinetop Perkins is a man of priorities. Sure, there’s a writer on the phone waiting to talk music, but the 86-year-old piano legend has important stuff to do. “I can’t talk right now,” Perkins says in a gritty, down-in-the-bottoms voice. “I’m gettin’ ready to go fishin’.” A moment later Perkins…
Like many who have endured sexual abuse as a child, Jasmine Sailing grew up to become a troubled adult with low self-esteem. Like her abused peers, she also grew up equating sexual situations with pain and fear, sought solace in drugs and wound up in abusive relationships well into adulthood…
Figuratively speaking, traveling musicians are used to taking the occasional shot from locals. But when Custom Made Scare toured Colorado last spring, the concept reached a literal — and dangerous — level. As the band rolled up Interstate 25 after a show in Denver, a sniper took aim at the…
To the millions who adore her, Jewel Kilcher is America’s songwriting sweetheart, a musical soulmate with an angelic face and karma to match. A look from her baby-dolled eyes or a note from her pouty lips can send legions of fans into swooning fits of “oohs” and “ahhs.” But for…
For the impoverished, ramen-noodle-eating guitarist dreaming of a better instrument, there’s a no-money-down way to improve the arsenal: trading up. The combination of a well-made ax and a guitar market that treasures its past means one man’s old workhorse is another’s cash cow. “That’s what guitar collecting is all about,”…
When your professional title is “lactation consultant,” things are tough enough. But for Laraine Lockhart Borman, director of the Mother’s Milk Bank in Denver, the names get worse. “We’ve been called ‘lactitions’ and ‘lactaters’ — every variation of those words,” Lockhart Borman says. But there’s one more title that really…
To white-bread America in 1970, the blues was an alien form of music. Ignored by the folks on Main Street, the genre was embraced mainly by record-store-hunting folkies, retro-minded rockers and weed-smoking academics. That is, until B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” came bleeding through the nation’s quadraphonic speakers and…
If you believe that “the truth is out there” but that it’s being smothered by diabolical forces, Dean Stonier can help you. Since 1980, Stonier, a congenial retired nutritionist, has served as the director for Global Sciences Congress, a Thornton-based collaborative that gathers the kind of inside-out info that Scully…
For the consumer, it’s a given–a pound equals sixteen ounces in weight, a gallon equals 64 liquid ounces, and a pint is sixteen of the same. Thanks to the watchful eyes of various government consumer agencies, the public trusts that any advertised serving measures up. But here along the beer-blessed…
