You wanna play your little games, I’ll play your fucking little games. I heard all the rumors, the innuendo, the kvetches, gossip, and comments during Miami Rocks! (a two-night showcase of local bands at Club Nu on February 19 and 20), Miami Rocks Out (a pre-showcase smatter featuring several dozen…
Some musicians are satisfied with past accomplishments, basking in the gold and platinum records collecting dust on their walls. Others look at the past as exactly that, and move toward new beginnings, new directions, particularly the direction that leads toward the top of the charts. Guitarist and singer Ted Nugent…
I don’t know whose idea it was to lock Doc Wiley (Washington Square), John Tovar (band manager), Sandra Schulman (Sun-Sentinel, XS), Lisa Cillo (WKPX-FM), Laura Regalado (WVUM-FM), Ariyah Okamoto (Snatch the Pebble), Curt McIntosh (Long Distance Entertainment), Glenn Richards (latent axe murderer), and me in a room without adult supervision,…
Admittedly what most people remember from the movie The Big Easy is either the steamy love scene between Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin or Quaid’s cockeyed Cajun accent. Louisianans from Thibodaux to Natchitoches howled at Quaid’s mangling of the vernacular, especially the way he said “cher” (it’s pronounced “sha” as…
They hang there framed and encased in glass, preserved memories of Miami’s occasional reach up into the stratosphere. If you crane your neck back far enough, you can read the names: Ted Nugent, the Eagles, Yngwie Malmsteen, Bob Seger. All have gold or platinum records, all a part of music…
Want a surefire way to silence a South Beach conversation? Mention that your next assignment is none other than Neil Diamond. And watch as a rash of too-cool profiles creep into question marks. But the faces won’t be asking who. They’ll be asking why. Why Neil? Why now? And then…
Call him Paradox Pierce Pettis. So close to stardom his diehard corps of fans can taste it, Pettis himself still says, “I’m about as obscure as you can get and still be doing this.” The comment might be borne of humility, but it’s also the plain truth. One need only…
Maybe it was the fact that when they released their first full-length cassette, they designed each one for its individual purchaser. Maybe it was the night they opened for Nuclear Valdez at a packed University of Miami patio and took everyone on an unforgettable mystery tour. Maybe it was the…
A pretty big record company A eastwest records america A has just released an album by, and begun a hype blitz for, a band called Deep Jimi and the Zep Creams. They are from Iceland and, as their name suggests, they have a fondness for a musical style twenty-some years…
Only in the rarest instances is a band’s chosen name relevant to anything. (Names given to bands, on the other hand…) When too much is made of a moniker, it’s usually at the hands of some naive and marginally literate music writer, desperate for something semi-interesting to write, concerned mostly…
Maybe they’ve forgotten to bring their guitars with them. Maybe they’ve had too much to drink. Maybe they just don’t feel up to it. Whatever the reason, the last scheduled performer of this open-mike Wednesday night at Cactus Cantina has stepped away from the microphone, leaving five minutes to kill…
Printed here is the list of inaugural entertainment obtained from President Clinton by New Times. In tribute to outgoing veep Danny Quayle, we’ve used the new administration’s spelling on all names. (Yes, we’d also like to know who Whoopi Goldbert is.) Beyond (mis)spelling, don’t count on this for complete accuracy…
Now that Skinny Elvis has his stamp, Fat Elvis has ascended into the White House, and Saddam Hussein has so graciously consented to single-handedly reversing CNN’s ratings slump, the time has finally come to refocus our nation’s awesome problem-solving skills on a deeper dilemma, one that threatens to lower the…
Ask any rock operative, be they critic, barfly, informed groupie, or guitarslinger, from the birth of Aerosmith to the rise of Sonic Youth, to name two of the most influential rock bands of all time, and chances are they’ll answer not with the expected Beatles and Stones, but, if they’re…
Only a few short years ago, when the word VJ simply meant the end of W.W. II, songs created for TV series or commercials regularly made the pop charts. The trend got its start in the Fifties, churned up a head of steam during the Sixties, and made listening to…
There must be a thousand people inside the Cameo Theatre, and this is long before the popular DJ-dance happenings currently occupying weekend nights at the venerable venue. This is way back when live concerts were the Cameo’s bread and butter, the mid-Eighties, and the Ramones are set to take the…
The name Brad Gillis must be held synonymous with Night Ranger, the mega-appeal band that broke up only after filling almost a decade with classic rock. Even so, the Night Ranger oeuvre is but one episode in the guitarist’s career. In fact, the latest chapter in the book of Gillis…
When you think of the megagroups, you should think art. Not that their music always aspired to higher aesthetic grounds. But while most of the members of Pink Floyd were architecture students, the band’s earliest and mightiest creative force was Syd Barrett, an art student. Keith Richards was studying art…
The rock world often forgets that much music achieves its evocation and influence without words. Whole forms — notably jazz and classical — downplay the need for verbal lyricism, and within others there are plenty of instances in which the instruments do all the talking. Cutting between these parameters was…
Yes, still more local efforts cross our ears and end up with ink all over them. Thanks for your feedback. Thanks for the music. Thanks for a great year. See ya in ’93. XSF Doodles (independent cassette) BY TODD ANTHONY One of the biggest cliches in the rock criticism biz…
It felt like one of those magical nights, full of promise. As I headed along Dixie Highway toward the Beach, I popped in the Christmas cassette Rat had given me, the one with the big, hand-painted, red-and-green block letters: TOILING MIDGETS/AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB. Mark Eitzel’s edgy, elegiac voice bled out…
Death Metal. Crucifixes, sacrificial altars, stained and shattered glass. Calls for murder, massacre, all-around mayhem, and, in shallower interpretations, suicide, either alone or with your friends. Blood (always blood), sex (ritual evildoings), and fears (of nothing and everything). Oh, and let’s not forget the Devil, ol’ Beelzebub himself, basking in…
