Patti Smith Gone Again (Arista) For an artist with such a stratospheric reputation, Smith’s body of work is, in a word, skimpy. Horses, from 1975, stands as one of the most impressive debuts in the annals of pop; the first words out of Smith’s mouth (“Jesus died for somebody’s sins/But…
It’s fifteen minutes shy of nine o’clock in the morning, but the rented Capitol Hill house of Superstar DJ Keoki, the newest prince of the Denver club universe, is already rocking. A deafening dance groove built on a roaring synthesizer and more beats per minute than at a porno theater…
As we all know, Ron Miles is finally receiving national attention thanks to his recently consummated album pact with Grammavision and the appearance of his latest recording, the first-rate My Cruel Heart. But only a handful of locals recall that Miles’s debut recording (Distance for Safety) was issued way back…
On a weeknight evening at the Blue Note Cafe, perhaps a dozen people chatter over pastries and coffee. The majority of them appear oblivious to Steven Ray Liedlich, a nondescript young man clad in a T-shirt and jeans who’s sitting on a chair tucked into a niche near the front…
Rick Miller, guitarist and frontman for Southern Culture on the Skids, has just returned from a European tour, and he’s got trouble. “I’ve got to get all this cheese out of my system,” he says. “People over there eat cheese with everything.” To make matters worse, “what they call sausage…
“It’s weird where songs come from,” muses Joe Reinke, lead vocalist and guitarist for San Francisco’s Meices, during a mid-June interview. “They just come out of the air or out of experiences and things like that. You have to live to be able to write, I think. If you sat…
“We’re thinking of changing our name to ‘Juhl: J-U-H-L,'” says Mike Behrenhausen, drummer for Boulder’s Juhl. “Because anymore, that’s how we have to introduce ourselves: ‘Hi, we’re in a band called Juhl: J-U-H-L.'” “Yeah,” adds guitarist/vocalist/frontman Ben Wolaniuk. “When we’re booking shows, people ask us, ‘What’s the name of your…
It’s early June, and less than 48 hours earlier, an event took place that immediately changed the manner in which the current Finn Brothers tour was perceived. At the conclusion of a concert in London, Crowded House, guitarist/vocalist Neil Finn’s main project for the past decade, shuttered its windows and…
In discussing his latest solo project, Year of Mondays, Mike Johnson offers easy dismissals–“It’s no big deal” and “It’s natural,” for example–which imply that sensationalism can find no foothold here. The flexibility and nonchalance of his even-tempered utterances, periodically muffled by clouds of smoke from unfiltered Old Golds, help one…
Some good news on the local club scene. Club Mecca, at 1360 College Avenue in Boulder, provides something that the Denver-Boulder area has never really had–an all-ages, no-alcohol, after-hours hip-hop club. The venue is in the space that once housed Ground Zero, a nightspot known for its dark, semi-industrial look,…
Beck! Odelay (DGC) Based on the two shows I’ve seen him perform, Beck Hansen probably isn’t the worst performer in the history of popular music, but he’s certainly in the top ten. Damn it if the little squirt hasn’t made a pretty decent album, though. His major-label debut, Mellow Gold,…
It’s not easy to track down Roger Gillies. His home is officially located in the tiny mountain community of Jamestown, Colorado, but in actuality, it’s far removed from the burg’s unpaved but passable streets. Simply finding his abode is a challenge–and even those visitors able to locate it must travel…
I. Purpose Radio, in Denver and most other American communities, is more segmented than ever before. Demographers and marketing gurus have a tremendous say over what music stations broadcast–so much so that the actual quality of the material that gets played usually is less important to media executives than the…
In a world of pierced navels and rainbow-coiffed power forwards, no-nonsense performers like Stephen Lee tend to get shunted into the background. But the twenty-something singer-songwriter behind the solid new CD No Turnin’ Back (on Denver’s GMR Entertainment label) somehow managed to avoid that fate. “I just remember being asked…
It’s been a couple of weeks since we’ve spoken. We have some catching up to do. June 21 was the last day on the Denver airwaves for KBPI’s Dean Myers and Roger Beaty, aka Dean and Rog; they’ve been transferred to KSLX-FM/100.7 in Phoenix, an outlet recently purchased by Jacor…
“Can you hang on for a minute?” asks Todd Lewis, singer, guitarist and principal songwriter for the Toadies, in response to a click on his phone line. When he returns, he says, “That was MCI. They wanted me to pay my bill.” He adds, with a mixture of amusement and…
To the easy rhythm a person assumes when striding through an open-air market, Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh intones, “First I was a foreigner/Then suddenly everything was cool forever/This Western Oriental’s going full circle.” These lyrics–from “Wog,” on the 1995 CD Woman’s Gotta Have It–are the most concise way to sum up…
Jazz pianist/vocalist Shirley Horn is a cult classic. A restrained and reticent woman, Horn loathes interviews and seldom appears anywhere other than her hometown, Washington, D.C. “I was born here,” she says from the nation’s capital. “I’ve lived here all my life. And I’ll be here all my life.” As…
Although it pains me deeply on a personal level, I must admit at the outset that the hero of this next item is Sting. Angela Long is a local substitute teacher who’s legally blind, 20/200, even when corrected. Her husband, Kent, a certified attorney who works as a contract administrator…
So you thought that after coming through heroin addiction, imprisonment and virtual banishment from the country-music industry, Steve Earle would be suitably apologetic and recalcitrant? Think again. As Earle puts it, “There are some people in this world that I really quite frankly don’t give a fuck what they think.”…
The message flashed at viewers during the introduction of The Last Klezmer–a 1994 documentary film made by Yale Strom, leader of the klezmer/jazz act known as KLAZZJ–underlines the important role the style has played in Jewish culture throughout Eastern Europe. “A wedding without a klezmer,” the saying goes, “was worse…
“I think we need radical change in politics,” says Wayne Kramer, “and that can only come from young people with revolutionary ideas. Right now we’re getting business as usual.” If that sounds like the brand of verbal throwdown most frequently associated with the protest movements of the late Sixties and…
