Boulder-based Starkland Records, owned and operated by Tom Steenland, has issued some of the most idiosyncratic discs imaginable during its years of operation: Take, for example, the recordings of Tod Dockstader, a onetime sound editor for Mr. Magoo who went on to become an influential musical avant-gardist. (See the August…
Musical anthropologist Alan Lomax first captured the voice of bluesman Fred McDowell on tape in Como, Mississippi, in 1959, three years after Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and five years before the British Invasion. Because the homogenizing effects of satellite dishes, video rentals and cable-television networks specializing…
Just because the music of Scotland’s Del Amitri is tuneful and accessible doesn’t mean that the group’s lead singer, Justin Currie, is shy about expressing himself. He fires off his opinions straight up, with no chaser. Examples? In Currie’s words, the neo-hippie movement that, from a commercial standpoint, is hotter…
You’ve got to hand it to Sammy Hagar. A man less sure of himself might have crawled under a rock in shame after being ignominiously dumped by Van Halen in 1996, a full decade after replacing David Lee Roth as the mega-band’s lead singer. (The three other members of the…
For vocalist/composer Marie Daulne, founder and lead singer of Zap Mama, multiculturalism was a birthright. She was born in Zaire, the daughter of a Belgian father and a Zairean mother. When she was still an infant, her father was killed during an episode of so-called “ethnic cleansing,” causing her mother…
It’s been a bad year for Westword profile subjects. This summer, two of them, Johnny Clyde Copeland and Jeff Buckley, died. And last week brought another victim: First-rate blues guitarist and vocalist Luther Allison, who succumbed to cancer complications in Madison, Wisconsin. He was 57 and had appeared in Denver…
With everyone from marginally talented sitcom actresses to scores of hairy-legged Indigo Girls wannabes trumpeting their alternative sexual proclivities to boost their careers, you might expect songstress Catie Curtis to be shouting about her lesbianism from the rooftops. But you’d be wrong. “I just think that it doesn’t feel personally…
“On our first tour, our van caught on fire in Missouri,” recalls Matt Beld, guitarist for Los Infernos. “It was the coldest night of the year, and the wind chill was probably about twenty below. Transmission fluid got all over the transmission, man–it just lit up. It was pretty hairy.”…
There has been one constant in Jamaican music from the early days of ska through the mid-Sixties rock steady period to the development of reggae and beyond: Frederick “Toots” Hibbert, leader of Toots and the Maytals. You might think of him as the Forrest Gump of modern Jamaican music, although…
Those of you who’ve been counting the days until the reunion of Talking Heads can give your fingers a rest. David Byrne, the act’s frontman, makes it abundantly clear that the chances of him joining forces again with keyboardist Jerry Harrison, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz are none…
DJ Jonas Tempel accomplishes more in one week than many of his peers have this decade. He is perhaps best known at present for his residency at the Church, one of the most recent additions to the local nightlife. But this gig is only a sideline to the real love…
Blues Traveler Straight On Till Morning (A&M) Since the birth of rock and roll, the rise of teen idols has been a surefire indicator of a terrible period in popular music–and indeed, the recent successes of acts like Hanson and Robyn (see review on page 92) have come at a…
In my excoriating review of the 1995 version of the Lollapalooza festival (“Stick a Fork In It,” July 12, 1995), I wrote, “Once an institution like this gets rolling, it’s hard to stop. So there may be a Lollapalooza next year–and if there is, you can bet that the money…
With electronica spreading at the speed of a super-virus, adhering itself to every known genre of music and producing new hybrid strains faster than anyone can affix names to them, it would be convenient to accuse London-based singer-songwriter Beth Orton of being a dabbler in trip-hop. After all, her debut…
Barry Fey: genius. The last of the old-time rock promoters. A man with a legendary ear, terrific taste and an unmatched ability to hype a concert into an event. A bit rough around the edges, maybe, but a good-hearted fellow who single-handedly saved Denver’s symphony orchestra in 1989 and set…
In the 1969 film Change of Habit, Mary Tyler Moore starred as a nun who had to choose between her commitment to Jesus and her love for a character played by Elvis Presley in his final on-screen dramatic role. She picked Elvis–and since his death, on August 16, 1977, plenty…
Atari Teenage Riot Burn, Berlin, Burn! (Grand Royal) For those of you who think that the culture industry’s commodification of packaged rebellion destroyed punk, you might find hope in this agit-prop sonic assault–but to do so, you must be willing to make the leap from old-school analog punk to what…
“We’re all very much into cars,” announces Margaret Doll Rod, singer, songwriter and ringleader for the Demolition Doll Rods. “In fact, for this tour coming up, we were like, ‘Oh, jeez, I don’t know. Are we gonna miss the derby? When’s the derby coming? James Brown is coming and the…
In the beginning, Perry Farrell envisioned Lollapalooza, an event he helped create, as a traveling circus that would expose just-outside-the-mainstream styles to the public at large. A few seasons later, this goal had been largely forgotten: Last year’s disastrous tour, headlined by Metallica (not exactly an obscure cult group) and…
By New Year’s Day of 1970, a hefty number of baby boomers were already nostalgic for the Sixties–and since then, they’ve kept their myth-making machines working overtime. The romanticization of the period has become a cottage industry, with everyone from rock stars to onetime protest leaders profiting mightily by creating…
Reviews of local recordings–and nothing but reviews of local recordings. Vicki Taylor, whose most recent platter is Out of the Blue, has a voice that’s both smoky and solid, and her songs set it off beautifully. She operates in a blues mode, but that’s not to suggest that she’s one-dimensional…
Journalists know that most musicians will gush about their latest projects no matter how tepid they may actually be. So it comes as a pleasant surprise when Wil Masisak, one-third of Boulder’s You Bastard, says of the group’s just-issued eponymous debut CD, “I think it’s a series of really bad…
