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…
When you’re a little kid, cursive handwriting seems like such an arcane, esoteric thing: Its strange and indecipherable loops and swirls reduce words to fluid mystery, some secret code shared by grown-ups. By the time you actually reach adulthood, cursive looks juvenile, even quaint — the hormone-inked scrawl of impetuous…
One of the least-used compliments in the average critic’s vocabulary is the word “consistent”; few scribes come out of a great concert exclaiming, “That was one of the most consistent shows ever!” But consistency is an important artistic attribute, particularly for a performer who hungers for career longevity, and Duke…
In opening remarks that christened Music Lowdown 2002 last Saturday, Colorado Music Association director Jeff Campbell rested his hands on a lectern, surveyed the crowd and shook his head, a sly smile forming on his lips. “Man, who would’ve imagined this?” he asked. “Musicians up at 9 a.m. — on…
Back home in Austin, Bob Schneider is King of the World. Sandra Bullock’s hunky, erstwhile paramour has escorted many a University of Texas freshman through the process of growing older, wiser and more worldly. Sometimes wisdom has had very little do with it: Schneider’s past projects include the funky, frat-boy-friendly…
As members of Boulder’s exploratory outfit United Dope Front, saxophonist Ben Senterfit, guitarist Javier Gonzales, organist Jarad Astin and drummer Damieon Lee Hines mold a groovy, hypnotic and thoroughly modern form of acid jazz. But every now and then even the most future-minded players look to the past for inspiration…
The only downside to discovering a band that’s so cool you simply have to tell the world about it is that eventually, the world does find out, and then things are never quite the same. The White Stripes’ regular fan base in Los Angeles knew that a new element had…
Over the past several years, Americans have grown accustomed to hearing rising stars on the British music scene make pompous pronouncements about everything from their talent level to their odds of success in the colonies. The standard setters in this regard are the men from Oasis, whose Liam Gallagher told…
There are certain words that commonly creep into descriptions of Mark Eitzel: “brilliant,” “tortured,” “honest” and “poetic” are among the often-used adjectives. These may all be fitting descriptions, but isn’t everyone a little brilliant, a tiny bit tortured and even honest sometimes? It’s more accurate to describe Eitzel by explaining…
Working musicians might be the only subsection of Denver society that’s actually quite pleased that the Detroit Red Wings scored seven goals against the Colorado Avalanche in game seven last Friday — effectively quelling hometown dreams of hosting that large, silver spitoon-looking Cup thing two years in a row. As…
If you’re going to do an Internet search for the Queers (who appear June 11 at the Bluebird Theater, with the Briefs and the Independents), don’t do it at work: Locating the band online involves scrolling through pages of hits, including Queers for Christ and a Web site named thequeers.com…
As its name would imply, local indie-rock combo O’er the Ramparts is well-versed in the fine art of the anthem. The band, which appears Friday, June 7, at the 15th Street Tavern, stirs up an epic mess of skittering melodies and saccharine-baited hooks that harks back to the vintage American…
Writing about band names is one of the great cliches in rock journalism. Every group with an off-kilter appellation has an allegedly amusing or revealing (and often lengthy) story about how its stage alias was invented, but the majority of these tales are about as fascinating as a day spent…
Andrew W.K. is working hard to have a good time as often as possible. Whether he’s talking about amusement parks or music, it doesn’t take much to raise the long-locked rocker’s excitement level. The Detroit native is the first rock artist to do partying justice since the Beastie Boys fought…
Dr. Bug and I, we were basically playing in dumpsters and garbage cans in alleys around the Denver area,” says Log frontman Harry Lug Nutz, the essence of haute couture in a Mexican-wrestler mask and a pink polyester muumuu. “We would occasionally go down to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for aromatherapy conventions,…
Back in 1994, during an interview with Westword, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo blamed his dislike of promotion on a pre-record-deal gig selling “Cutco high-quality kitchen cutlery. They were really expensive knives — the ‘homemaker’ set, which was ten knives, was a little over $600 — and they were the best knives…
With perennial collaborator Tobin Sprout, Robert Pollard presents his second full-length effort as Airport 5. Life Starts Here is the eighteenth overall installment in the Fading Captain series, a body of work that includes the busy Guided by Voices singer’s nonstop solo flights and side projects. Recorded in separate studios…
Solomon Burke comes from the storied tradition of soul singers who made the leap from church choir to radio. He has been proselytizing since he was seven, and he has the warm, rich voice of a singing preacher: part B.B. King, part Al Green. It’s enough to make an unbeliever…
Statewide restrictions on campfires have already dampened the spirits of local rugged types who’ve resigned themselves to spending summer indoors, lest they endure freezing-cold evenings at high altitudes warmed only by a Coleman stove. And next summer, fans of Colorado’s many outdoor concert series and festivals could face an even…
Although hot remixers come and go, only a relative handful become hot solo artists. But Timo Maas, a Madonna-approved dial-twister who appears Saturday, June 1, at Vinyl, seems ready to make the leap. Loud, Maas’s first non-remix CD, recently issued by Kinetic Records, is a wonderfully accomplished blend of clever…
