Neil Diamond’s voice delivered a homeless man from the streets of Washington, D.C. Lacking a job and a place to live, the only thing Theron Denson had going for him was his uncanny vocal resemblance to a sequined icon. Back when Denson was just a child singing in the pews of his West Virginia church, white women would turn and…
Thursday, June 5, 2003 For stress reduction today, try Yoganetics. We like Yoganetics because Mr. Rogers — who died in February — liked Yoganetics. This gentler, smoother yoga could satisfy your need for meditation and exercise while allowing you to pay homage to the man who would have been your neighbor wherever you’d gone. If you wear a jacket to…
Wayne Thiebaud is the guy who paints cakes. He paints more than cakes, but that’s how everyone knows him. And his cakes look good. Thiebaud is not — as we suspected he might be — a fat man. From the pictures we’ve seen, he’s average weight. So we investigated his affection for cakes and realized that his is not…
In November there will arrive on newsstands a music magazine edited by Alan Light, who left Spin to embark on his endeavor of publishing a journal devoted to that long-ignored audience: the over-30 CD-buyer, the old fart for whom “new music” is a mystery left to be fathomed by The Kids, or at least those between 18 and 24. The…
While the audience is filing into the Next Space for Princess Squid Productions’ Furies, the three-person cast is preparing for the show in full view. Each performer has taken over a corner of the room and tacked up scrapbook clippings from his or her thespian life. Closer inspection reveals clues to the jaunty show about to begin, one that…
During the 1960s, regional pop bands commonly filled their sets with doo-wop and garage rock, with R&B and bouncing soul — all of it as conversant with Elvis as with the Beatles or James Brown. In that musically expansive decade, any decent bar band spoke a language known far and wide simply as “rock and roll.” Only the dialect changed…
The Smiths, perhaps more than any other band, embodied humanity at its most sensitive and vulnerable. So it’s profoundly disconcerting to hear a vocoder voice reciting the group’s “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” Less jarring, yet still somewhat spooky, is “Frogstears,” on which the same robo-crooner strums a country-fried ditty on an acoustic guitar. If machinery can…
Waylon Jennings always believed that “blues, rock and roll and country are just about a beat apart,” a gut instinct that he spent his whole career trying to prove. It came with a price, though. Jennings risked damnation by daring to defy Nashville’s image makers and a country music establishment that was as formula-driven as its pop counterpart. In 1976,…
Gary Martin must be the most obscure Detroit techno figure now working. Though he runs the respected Teknotika label, Martin’s known only by the most dedicated trainspotters, despite getting deck time with renowned DJs such as Laurent Garnier, Josh Wink and Andrew Weatherall. The aptly named Viva la Difference, Martin’s debut album under his own name (he also records as…
They shoot indie punk bands, don’t they? Ikara Colt doesn’t want to take any chances. To avoid becoming lame in any sense of the word, the British quartet vowed in 1999 to retire in five years, freeing its members to stud or birth new projects. Unfortunately for fans, this deadline didn’t spur the band to flood the market with releases….
It seems nearly impossible for a blues singer, songwriter and harmonica player to create original music these days, but Gary Primich is an exciting exception. Born in Chicago and raised in its shadow in Gary, Indiana, Primich explored the music of Chuck Berry, Dave Edmunds and the Chess Records roster. After honing his harmonica craft as a teenager, Primich found…
After rockabilly exorcised its ruffian edge, around the time Elvis traded in his blue-suede shoes for Army-issue combat boots, it floated about aimlessly as a musical specter for nearly three decades. That leather-clad spirit later found a new home in the marginalized fringes of Britain’s post-punk fallout. Born in the clubs of South London in the early ’80s, psychobilly…
Twenty years ago, Jason Ringenberg was the Jason of Jason and the Scorchers, stripping off his cowboy shirt at Off-the-Wall-Hall (now the Bottleneck). He kicked pitchers off the top of a cigarette machine and then perched there, half preacher, half gargoyle, all bright-red sideburns and chest hair, screaming his way through “Bible and a Gun.” These days, still redheaded…
Texas blues fans know Doyle Bramhall, who played drums in bands with both Stevie Ray and Jimmie Vaughan. These days, his voice, raw yet every bit as soulful as Delbert McClinton’s, has him in front of the band. On this year’s Fitchburg Street, his first solo album in almost a decade, he pays tribute to the ’50s street scene in…
When a young Los Angeles surfer named Dick Dale began playing the SoCal beach circuit in the late ’50s, he wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel; he was looking to create a sound that mimicked the roar and crash of the Pacific Ocean. Aided by prototype equipment courtesy of six-string guru Leo Fender, Dale single-handedly invented the much-mimicked surf-guitar style…
Signed to Fred Durst’s vanity label, Flip, Cold proved its mettle on the road, touring alongside Marilyn Manson, Weezer and, of course, Limp Bizkit. The group’s first two albums contained most of the requisite nü-metal ingredients (processed guitars, unfiltered angst, turbulent rhythms) but thankfully skipped anything resembling backward-cap hip-hop. Cold’s latest opus, Year of the Spider, marks a new chapter…
A versatile instrument, the organ can add an angelic glow to hymns, an eerie hum to horror movies, and seedy soul to gritty garage rock. In the hands of Scott Wexton, the Voodoo Organist, it achieves all of these objectives on a single album, Exotic Demonic Blues. Wexton alternates between haunting and holy tones, incorporating upbeat instruments into his…
Unfortunately, one of this year’s most promising new avant-garde collectives has saddled itself with a deceptively unappealing name. Despite its pun-drunk moniker, Garage A Trois is no slop-rock outfit. On the group’s debut disc, Emphasizer, Galactic drummer Stanton Moore, eight-string guitarist Charlie Hunter, saxophonist Sherik, and percussionist and serial collaborator Mike Dillon (Malachy Papers, Hairy Apes BMX, Les Claypool’s…
If Pretty Girls Make Graves were just a little bit more popular, the group would be at the forefront of “Seattle revival” hype, and frontwoman Andrea Zollo would be shoehorned between Shakira and Vanessa Carlton on Rolling Stone’s umpteenth Women in Rock cover. But like Murder City Devils, from which it pulled bassist Derek Fudesco, PGMG has set up…
Songwriter Jimmy Allen has a heartwarming tale to tell. It starts with a nineteen-year-old Chanute, Kansas, native making the two-hour drive to Kansas City in hopes of starting a band, the first step down a yellow-brick road that eventually leads him to Los Angeles. On May 20, ASCAP named a song Allen cowrote, performed by the KC group he founded,…
Metallica needs an image overhaul the way frontman James Hetfield needed to dry out. It’s been almost six years since the band released an album of original studio material, and in the interim, Metallica has dropped dud after dud. Since 1997’s lukewarm Reload, there’s been a lame, Moody Bluesesque symphonic live album; a two-CD set of covers, with every one…
Whereas many artists discuss their work with little prompting, like doting parents who can’t stop talking about their children, Ben Harper maintains a sense of reverential distance. His deference to the creative process stems from his belief that he is more an instrument than he is a musician. “I’ve never sat down and tried to write a song in my…
An Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film and winner of five Golden Lola Awards (the German Oscars), Nowhere in Africa recounts the true story of a Jewish family who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and found refuge in Kenya. Although beautifully shot and acted, the film is hampered by an unsympathetic lead character whose transformation from pampered, selfish…
Whenever the stars of the adolescent street-racing fantasy 2 Fast 2 Furious were feeling balky or temperamental on the set, as movie stars are wont to do, the cure was probably easy — an oil change and a tune-up. John Singleton’s adrenaline-spiked sequel to 2001’s surprise summer hit The Fast and the Furious comes furnished with two-legged actors (including…
