Dean Fertita, songwriter and lead guitarist for Detroit-based pop group the Waxwings, might be the least career-minded musician this side of Guided by Voices’ Bob Pollard to make a great album. Fortunately, he has luck on his side — as evidenced by the chance way in which his band wound…
The Athens, Georgia-based duo Jucifer an alt-metal combo comprising Amber Valentine on guitar and her boyfriend, Ed Livengood, on drums mixes up a lethal cocktail of punk, heavy metal and plain ol buzz-saw rawk, redefining Southern gothic. The couple self-released a debut album in 1998 titled Calling All Cars on…
Worldly and wild, MaggieJack mixes funky-feeling Latin and African grooves into a unique concoction. Lyrically, the band offers a rootsy environmental message; it’s music to make you think as you dance. Led by the boisterous Lisa Maria Maestas, who sings lead and plays a variety of percussion instruments — including…
It could have been a beautiful score. “The guy in front of me was dancing around, and out of his pocket came a vial of my drug,” recalls Steve. “It was sitting on the floor in front of me. I was looking at it.” For many years, Steve was the…
Earlier this year, Tony Hajjar was in Vancouver, recording a new album with his band, which is both exactly where he should have been and not where you’d expect. Let’s back up. In 2000, At the Drive-In, an El Paso quintet featuring Hajjar on drums, released Relationship of Command, the…
It’s a buyer’s market for jam-band fans as the ranks of musicians with heroic endurance have swelled in the years since the Grateful Dead went belly-up and Phish went on permanent hiatus. Everyone from Les Claypool to that kid down the street is in a group these days. The challenge…
My landlord knew a drug dealer in high school. The dealer had a bunch of acid — two sheets’ worth of quarter tab — stashed in his sock. It was a hot day. His feet got sweaty, and he absorbed most of the blotter. After a week in the emergency…
Record companies specializing in musical subgenres regularly market certain releases to tourists, literal and otherwise. For instance, blues labels tend to balance albums aimed at consumers who know the form well with lowest-common-denominator platters intended for people who think it would be cool to purchase a blues CD once every…
On Blue Country Heart, Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen goes country, singing heartfelt versions of songs by Garth Brooks, Toby Keith and Tim McGraw. Guest vocalists include Martina McBride and Faith Hill, who help Kaukonen shed his blues-steeped image. Just kidding. Sure, Blue Country Heart was recorded in Nashville, but…
For host Sid Pink and his helpers, Portia Needlewax and Professor Snarly, the Westword Music Showcase Awards Ceremony, held Thursday, June 20, at the Bluebird Theater, was fraught with peril: At one point, an unknown artist, frustrated that he wasn’t among the sixty acts nominated on the Westword Music Showcase…
Denver’s Czars, who appear Tuesday, July 2, at the Gothic Theatre with Lift to Experience and the Devics, have been compared to Radiohead, probably because of the atmospheric, swirling, textural quality of some of their songs. But the band also recorded “Song to Siren” for a Tim Buckley tribute album…
It’s hard to believe that seven years have passed since Qualm first inflicted a stage with its breakneck teenage punk rock. Now wiser, tighter and (kinda) all grown up, the band will be celebrating the release of its new album, A Long Story Short, on Saturday, June 29, at Tulagi…
As a band, I’d say that Pleasure Forever is a celebration of the ecstatic annihilation of orgasmic energy.” So asserts Dave Clifford, drummer for the vicious cabaret that is San Francisco’s Pleasure Forever. Clifford, guitarist Josh Hughes and keyboardist/vocalist Andrew Rothbard form an unholy trinity of rhythm, noise and verse…
Mayor Wellington E. Webb’s Music Festival at Red Rocks features a couple of big names in the jazz field — veteran vocalist Al Jarreau and fast-fingered guitarist Stanley Jordan — as well as soul/gospel singer Yolanda Adams. But those who’ve closely followed Denver’s jazz scene over the years may be…
Surely the most surreal musical moment of the year occurred last February at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, when Ralph Stanley, the bluegrass patriarch, scared the bejesus out of the Armani-clad music-industry folks at the Staples Center with his chilling a cappella version of “O Death.” In the song,…
Nat Yarbrough never loses his cool. A slender, long-legged man with a calming, regal aspect, he moves as beautifully as a panther and rarely betrays the slightest hint of physical exertion — not even in the mounting heat of a solo, when both feet are thumping the pedals, his sculpted…
Last year, when Clear Channel vice president Chuck Morris first announced his company’s plans to open the CityLights Pavilion at the Pepsi Center in partnership with Kroenke Sports, newly reinstated House of Blues head Barry Fey vowed to send a private plane over the crowd, streaming a banner that read:…
When it was launched in 1995, the Warped Tour was one of many multi-band bashes — from H.O.R.D.E. to the Lilith Fair — that emerged in the wake of the influential, highly successful Lollapalooza festival. So why, seven years later, are virtually all of these allegedly annual events, including Lollapalooza,…
Singer, songwriter and guitarist John Davis was born and raised in south Georgia, a few miles from the Okeefenokee swamp, among what he calls “unredeemed Baptists, bootleggers and riff-raff.” Davis, who moved to Colorado in 1997 and quickly became a favorite at Swallow Hill Music Hall, revisits his roots on…
Early on a Sunday morning back in 1985, I was working at Tower Records on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip when the air became heavy with the scent of pheromones and ego. David Lee Roth had arrived. At that instant, Diamond Dave was at the zenith of his celebrity. By then,…
Jello Biafra’s scathing brand of political commentary won’t pass for comfort food in troubled times: Gooey, patriotic pabulum is best left to star-spangled yokels like Lee Greenwood or Alan Jackson. But the guy takes his anti-punditry as seriously as any free-speech proponent out there. He also has a knack for…
Bluegrass music is full of hotshot musicians, but only a handful qualify as true innovators. Jerry Douglas, the extraordinary dobro player, belongs to that exclusive club. He took an ungainly instrument with a relatively limited musical vocabulary and found a way to coax a variety of sounds from it: sweet…
