There’s an absolutely great short film titled Neil Diamond Parking Lot that, unfortunately, most people will never see. Shot by two guys in Maryland, the film was done in 1995 as the followup to their 1985 underground cult classic Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Neither film had a budget; it’s strictly…
Randy Newman Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman (Rhino) Has there ever been an artist as politically incorrect as Randy Newman? Has there ever been a songwriter who risked so much of his reputation by singing in the voice of the unreliable narrator? Ever since 1968, when Reprise records issued…
Old Cuban music never dies, it just gets reissued. Blame it in part on the success of the 1997 Grammy Award-winner Buena Vista Social Club, but remastered or re-recorded CDs of all manner of Cuban oldies keep on coming. In 1998 record companies strip-mined the seemingly infinite mountain of Cuban…
When the Rolling Stones staged the first genuine rock-and-roll circus in 1968, they distributed gold-embossed metallic tickets to the members of their fan club, fed them, gave them twenty hours of music, clowns, and amusements, and then arranged for buses to take everybody home. All free of charge! In stark…
Al Galvez, the singer/guitarist/songwriter of A Kite Is a Victim, sits at a candlelit table in a bar on Coconut Grove’s Miami Marina just as night has fallen. A breeze stirs up the waves and rocks the boats docked in the distance. Across a patch of grass and under a…
I am dreaming as I write this. Forgive me if it goes astray. The artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, and currently known only as The Artist, has been baffling critics and fans for the better part of the decade. Ever since his 1993 decision to…
Even if you’re the most devoted Prince fan in the world, you’re going to get sick of “1999” before Labor Day. Here, then, are some alternatives for Song of the Millennium. “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” One of REM’s finest moments,…
Wendy & Lisa Girl Bros. (Girl Bros. Inc.) Seekers of a poignant, modern-day music saga need look no further than Wendy & Lisa. As members of Prince’s Purple Rain-era band, multi-instrumentalists Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman broke from their Napoleonic mentor in the mid-Eighties and recorded three auspicious albums, including…
Jonny Lang Wander This World (A&M) Pop culture mavens are always looking for a pretty new face on which to pin their fortunes. Nearly three years ago they found one in sixteen-year-old Jonny Lang, an anomaly of a teenager. Unlike most others his age, Lang spent the majority of his…
Growing up in the historic Old San Juan section of Puerto Rico’s capital, Giovanni Hidalgo didn’t dream of becoming a musician. He didn’t have to. “I’ve been playing since I was three,” he explains. Hidalgo was one of the founders of the groundbreaking Puerto Rican group Batacumbele, and he has…
It’s weird to think that it’s taken this long for the box set community to get around to John Lennon. Yet it has been eighteen years this week since he was gunned down in front of his apartment in New York City. His recording career from the time he released…
Sunny Day Real Estate is less a band than a psychodrama. Decisions aren’t just made; they’re agonized over. Relationships don’t simply end; they shatter. Reunions aren’t merely satisfying; they’re life altering. With these guys there are no half measures. They’re as openly creative and nakedly sincere as their songs, and…
Beck Mutations (DGC) Over the course of the half dozen or so albums Beck Hansen has released, on indie labels as well as for major DGC, what is emerging is the sound and thought of a truly visionary (albeit warped) artist. Don’t be surprised if Beck turns out to be…
When I was eleven years old, my older brother gave me a tape that changed everything I thought I knew about music. The tape was called King of Rock, and it was the second album by the rap group Run-D.M.C. I thought I was pretty hip for an eleven year…
Joe “Queer” King doesn’t think it’s weird for a 37-year-old man to perform songs with titles like “Ursula Finally Has Tits.” King — songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist for New Hampshire’s the Queers — is simply another foul-mouthed punk rocker looking for something irreverent to rant about. All in the name…
Hank Williams was a drunk, a mean drunk who died at age 29 in the back seat of a Cadillac. He was a semiliterate plagiarist, a whoremonger, a brawler, and an egomaniac. He was a stingy manager of top-flight musicians and a notoriously unreliable employee who somehow managed to get…
In the spectrum of British female pop phenoms, Shirley Bassey has legs. She has endured the icy rigors of record industry bandwagoning, color barriers, fleeting trends, and fickle fans. Like fellow Brit Dusty Springfield, who rode the hit parade with songs like “Son of a Preacher Man,” Bassey emerged from…
In the beginning, there was No Doubt. Or maybe it was Sublime. And didn’t I hear something about the Mighty Mighty Bosstones putting out an album before 1997’s Let’s Face It? Thus runs the garbled ska gospel according to many of the new fans attracted by the genre’s most recent…
Derek Trucks Band Out of the Madness (House of Blues Records) In the mid-Eighties, a handsome Texan named Charlie Sexton pioneered an unlikely musical trend: the teen-aged blues guitar hero. Renowned throughout the Longhorn State for his uncanny grasp of classic rock and R&B guitar techniques, Sexton signed with a…
In the booklet for Biograph, his 1985 career anthology, Bob Dylan mused on the differences between his rapturously received 1974 “comeback” tour and the contentious series of shows he had given eight years earlier. On the surface, these two tours were similar. In both cases Dylan was backed by the…
Discussing his new quartet’s recent run at the Sweet Basil jazz club in New York City’s Greenwich Village, saxophonist Kenny Garrett is clearly excited. “That was a big party up there!” he shouts. “Some nights we were playing till three or four o’clock in the morning. Not that we had…
Ask a musician what his band sounds like and if not short, such as “blues,” or “rock and roll,” the answer will likely be a reflection of unclassifiable originality, maybe goosed by familiar antecedents. In other words, you’ll get some blather akin to “It’s kinda like the Beatles’ songwriting with…
