One of the enduring myths about the Grateful Dead is that they were better live than in the studio. According to their legion of fans, the cultish Deadheads, the best way to experience the band was in concert, where, depending on the vibe — and the acid — anything might…
Daniel Johnston is feeling better these days. Austin’s most infamous and prodigious bipolar songwriter has got a real band, a larger-than-ever following and — thanks to the wonders of modern psychiatric medicine — a handle on his own mental demons. He’s also got a new album, one that finds him…
Oslin has been around country music long enough to know that the C&W establishment doesn’t often look kindly upon performers who try something different. But she didn’t let that stop her from making Live Close By, Visit Often, a disc that busts through boundaries by refusing to acknowledge that they…
According to this CD’s liner notes, the 55-year-old Iris is “still electrifying audiences today.” If that’s the case, one wonders why this collection was deemed necessary at all. With teenagers’ belly rings and gangbangers’ banter dominating the music market, it’s not like the singer’s legacy screams for a revisiting, much…
The rise of alt-country music in the early ’90s was inextricably linked to the legendary band Uncle Tupelo, which before its demise gave birth to a lineage complicated enough to warrant a Ken Burns documentary. One of the better bands Tupelo inspired was Whiskeytown, whose lead singer Ryan Adams struck…
When Quixote’s True Blue officially unveiled its new location on Friday night, it appeared as if the management had made some sort of sacrifice to the Gods of Determination. The evidence? At 2 p.m. Friday, the place was a dusty mess, with an untapped bar and walls that were mostly…
Perry Farrell is a weird genius-prophet from another dimension — or maybe from the future. His creations are cunning experiments, forays outside of the rigid bounds of normal thought. Like a trickster of myth playing possum, he pretends to be part of just another band or rock show, beguiling us…
Among the Front Range’s mamba-mad masses, Cabaret Diosa has become as much a part of the Halloween tradition as checking youngsters’ Milky Ways for wayward razor blades. The Boulder-based neo-Latin ensemble always folds a hearty dose of theater into its live shows, which are designed to incite audiences to sing,…
A few years ago, Rolling Stone did a feature on fathers and sons in music. The two-page spread featuring Loudon Wainwright III and his son, Rufus, portrayed the two men in a back-yard landscape, Loudon sitting in a lawn chair, wearing old-guy shorts, a fishing hat and a crotchety puss…
Paul Galaxy and the Galactix are slicked-back proof that rockabilly is far from dead. Their success is also evidence that a bar band can make a living — and a name around the country — while based in Denver. The Galactix have overcome the alleged out-of-favor status of their chosen…
While Bazooka Joe was being shipped off to die in ‘Nam, a sweetly sick kind of music called bubblegum oozed out of stateside AM radios like pink, candy-coated napalm. From 1967-1969, independent producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz supervised a revolving, New York-based crew of session players and professional jingle…
Like his good friend Johnny Cash, whose last three albums were among his best, Bob Dylan is on a late-career roll. Four years ago, he graced us with Time Out of Mind, a somber meditation on love and life. Dylan was 56 at the time; his voice was shot, and…
In The Outsiders, a 1967 novel published when its author, S.E. Hinton, was just sixteen, Cherry Valance is a “soc” — a teen who hangs out with sweater-wearing, affluent peers from the right side of the tracks. But whereas most of the soc guys and dolls are snooty, arrogant and…
Santa Monica-based Moonshine Records (Moonshine Creative Media LLC, in new-millennium speak) has engaged consumers of electronic music with varying degrees of success during its decade-long history. Like veteran imprints Eightball, Strictly Rhythm and Cleopatra — indie outlets servicing dance/ alternative-music formats — Moonshine seemed to lose its focus on quality…
Like its moody contemporaries Nick Cave or His Name Is Alive, upstate New York’s Mercury Rev has taken a bizarre, winding path to its current vision of twisted American music. While Cave has settled post-punk ire into outsider-bluesy balladeering and His Name swings moody hybrids of folk, gospel and ’60s…
“Everything you’ve been listening to lately sucks.” That’s the bold proclamation made by Shane Etter, primary organizer of the first-ever Boulder Unheard Music/Punk Festival (or BUMPfest). The festival, which takes place Saturday, October 20, in the Boulder Bandshell at Canyon and Broadway, is designed as an antidote to the painfully…
The Handsome Family, Saturday, September 20, at the Lion’s Lair, makes roots music that feels like the sonic equivalent to an Andrew Wyeth painting. There are cracks in the walls, despair on the faces that populate the Chicago duo’s simple, rural tableaus. Redemption lies just out of reach, and sadness…
There was a time when James Bond had us believing that espionage involved nothing more complicated than a chilled martini, a nickel-plated revolver and a well-placed telephone tap. Current events have left some of us longing for this Hollywood-movie version of reality, one that would find a perfect soundtrack in…
Like the vast majority of those in the Western world, Ray Davies, the once and future leader of the Kinks, reacted to last month’s terrorist strikes with a deepening sense of despair — and only after hours of sitting at his home in England watching the carnage on CNN did…
It’s a bright, cheery East Bay afternoon, and Miles Kurosky is walking, sunglasses on, talking on his cell phone. The singer, songwriter and guitarist for Beulah has arrived a little late for our interview, but he lingers on the phone anyway, trying to reassure the caller about something. Finally he…
For years, bluegrass was easily one of the most male-dominated musical genres around. All the biggest stars were men, and their bands were all made up of “boys.” Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, the Stanley Brothers and the…
Steve Smith, chief operations officer for Clear Channel’s entertainment division, does not have talons, or horns. Backwash discovered this last week, when Smith came to town and met with reporters in an attempt to stem the tide of negative press that his company has received in the past year, including…
