A few years back, I spent an afternoon with Pat DiNizio, the leader of the Smithereens, in Hartford, Connecticut, killing time before a radio interview. At a time when everyone else was replacing their record collection with CDs, DiNizio was looking high and low for a turntable to accompany him…
Roni Size Reprazent: New Forms (Talkin’ Loud/Mercury) Plenty of electronica artists are taking the Prodigy route: i.e., they’re attempting to split the difference between dance music and pop in the hope of coming up with hit singles that will still work in Clubland. Size, for his part, is moving in…
Way back in our January 1 issue, I wrote about Sire Records’ decision to license Tone Soul Evolution, a fine CD by the Apples that was originally emblazoned with the spinART logo. Now Sire has climbed into the sack, business-wise, with another Denver artist: Sherri Jackson, whose eponymous debut on…
Timbaland and Magoo Welcome to Our World (Blackground/Atlantic) Tim Mosley, aka Timbaland, is a producer who has stepped into the spotlight a la Sean “Puffy” Combs–but unlike the Puffster, Mosley seems to understand his limitations. Rather than positioning himself as an egomaniacal rap word-slinger, he keeps the focus on the…
Joe Queer, leader of the Queers, is a veteran of the punk-rock wars, but that doesn’t mean he’s stopped making enemies. A recent example involves Converse, the sneaker giant, which slapped the Queers with a cease-and-desist order after the band appropriated the company’s corporate logo for a series of T-shirts…
Something’s rotten in the music industry, and Ian O’Dougherty, guitarist/vocalist for Denver’s Uphollow, thinks he knows what it is. During performances, he says, most local and national musicians he’s seen lately have spent more time looking down at their hands than at the audience members with whom they’re supposed to…
San Francisco’s Charlotte Kaufman, whose nom de plume is the Baroness, is an exemplar of a rare species: the female DJ. But even though she’s the only woman in the Hardkiss Family collective, a group that’s considered legendary by many participants in global electronica, neither of her names is of…
Released in June 1966, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds was regarded at the time of its appearance as a commercial disappointment. As author Timothy White reports in The Nearest Faraway Place, his detailed 1994 biography of the band, representatives of Capitol Records, the group’s label, were frankly baffled by the…
Low Estate, the scorching second album by 16 Horsepower, is reaching retailers in the United States this week, but it’s already a success beyond these shores. Says the band’s leader, singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist David Eugene Edwards, “It’s been out in Europe for five months or so, and it’s doing really well–better than…
In a working-class town north of Columbus, Ohio, a few years back, the rowdy patrons were drinking beer out of buckets–using straws–when the bartender clanged a ship’s bell and announced, “I want all of you to hear this sax player!” Such an introduction would have left most instrumentalists fearful that…
By day, Billy Sheets teaches special education to middle-schoolers in Los Angeles. But by night, he offers a different brand of instruction to swing dancers across Southern California. In a musical environment in which most combos make hep-cat Forties jazz and frenetic Western swing for the growing legion of loose-jointed…
Various Artists Lounge-A-Palooza (Hollywood) Various Artists Paint It Blue: Songs of the Rolling Stones (House of Blues) London Philharmonic Kashmir: Symphonic Led Zeppelin (Point) A hundred years ago, the creative landscape fostered outrageous acts of art by Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and Munch. Approaching 2000, our own fin de siecle is marked…
“I would’ve loved to be a pitcher in baseball,” says Robert Bradley. “When I was younger, I was a big Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals fan. And I liked the Yankees, too, because being from Alabama, those were the teams you could get on the radio. Basically, it was…
Virtuosic guitarist/singer-songwriter Adrian Romero grew up as a classical-music prodigy. So why has he placed this style on the back burner in order to roam the pastures of pop music alongside his band, Love Supreme? He shrugs off the question with a caustic comment: “Denver isn’t really concerned with that…
When I learned that Kool Keith was coming to town, I reacted with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. As a founding member of Ultramagnetic MC’s, a mysterious but influential Eighties/Nineties rap act, and the voice behind Dr. Octagon’s Dr. Octagonecologyst, a terrifically twisted opus issued in 1997, Keith had…
Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do concert promoters–which is why the Denver live-music market has been weaving like Charles Bukowski on a bender ever since Barry Fey announced that he had sold the remaining shares of his Fey Concerts firm to Los Angeles-based Universal Concerts last August. Just two…
To most stateside music lovers, the idea of a road show starring three accordion players conjures up images of Geritol-chugging seniors playing polkas to nodding retirement-home residents. Even here in Denver, where the instrument stars in the rousing local acts 16 Horsepower and Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, such a bill…
Say goodbye to the Hectics as you knew them. The group, a Westword profile subject (“Getting Pretty Hectic,” April 25, 1996), called it quits shortly after a December 19 performance at the 15th Street Tavern and just before this very publication placed its debut full-length, Everything I Need (released by…
Carla Madison has probably been skin-to-skin with more famous musicians than anyone in Denver. But while most women would be reluctant to reveal such a fact, Madison takes pride in discussing the hefty number of stage-stomping idols she’s had her hands on. “Lou Reed, Eddie Vedder, George Clinton–I’ve worked on…
Bjork Homogenic (Elektra) There’s no shortage of acts that have mingled ancient music with new technology, and although some of the results have been interesting (Dead Can Dance), plenty of others have inspired only yawns (Enigma). None, however, have been as successful as Bjork, who attacks the music on Homogenic…
Guitarist Dave Brylawski, one of the principal architects behind Polvo, is an adamantly regular guy. So eager is he to make a personal connection with the Coloradan on the other end of the telephone wire that he is soon noting that his brother lives in Snowmass and that guitarist Ash…
Today’s hardcore rappers are in a difficult position. Many of them achieved success via exciting accounts of drinking, drugging, dealing, whoring and homicide that they defended by claiming that the tales were simply reflections of the hard realities in America’s inner cities. But following the murders of Tupac Shakur and…
