Pete Townshendt Pete Townshend Live (Platinum Entertainment) Nothing against the aging rocker who turns it down and tones it down as he gets older, especially when that aging rocker is a half-deaf Pete Townshend. Better to stop the rock than keep forcing it; better to go acoustic when the electric…
Little Jack Melody and His Young Turks Noise and Smoke (Kilroy Records) Maybe Little Jack really does like to keep his Turks young: By his count, the artist known to his family as Steve Carter has burned through 19 full-timers plus “a dizzying assortment of occasional subs.” Sounds like Menudo…
Monte Montgomery There are not too many things in this world that impress me outside of sex acts and Johnny Cash’s pulse. But the first time I planted myself and watched singer-songwriter-guitarist Monte Montgomery perform, I was astonished. This man’s a true guitar genius, standing at the brink of six-string…
Charlie Daniels Band Believe it or not, there was once a time when Charlie Daniels actually seemed kind of hip. After all, he played on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline album, and produced the sublime record Elephant Mountain by the Youngbloods. Then, in 1973, he scored a hit song with “Uneasy…
Solex It’s that old question about toy and mannequins and falling trees: Do they talk when no one is looking? Add record stores to that list; Elisabeth Esselink can make them sing well after closing time. The inventory is her instrument, and while as much has been said about any…
Hamell on Trial When a band leaves a major label, its first independent release is usually just the band trying poorly, very poorly, to imitate that major label production. Sure, it’s the same band, only now it doesn’t have any money, and no label rep is there to hold their…
Maybe it was inevitable that after years of playing sidekick to Kim Thayil’s Led Zeppelin 3-Sabbath Bloody Sabbath riffs, Chris Cornell would decide to turn it down his first time out as Solo Artist. Turn it way down too: Euphoria Morning gets so quiet that at times it sounds like…
Used to be Kim Lenz and her Jaguars, though I suppose when your music is as static as this all-novelty-all-the-time act, you gotta shake things up somewhere, so why not the name? The surging audience for this local act has more to do with citywide retro-love than true musicality, although…
Hibbing, Minnesota — Maybe this is what he meant by bringing it all back home. On Wednesday, Bob Dylan returned to the town where he spent his childhood, to the place where it all began for a young Robert Allen Zimmerman, to announce his retirement from popular music. “Oh, all…
It’s never too late for a comeback in rock and roll: Every has-been is one fluke hit away from being a still-is. Yet even with that in mind, They Might Be Giants is perhaps an unlikely candidate for a resurgence, although it might be too soon to term the group’s…
One of my favorite popular musical tales concerns the writing of “Okie From Muskogee,” a song that enmeshed its author, Merle Haggard, within a cultural and political misunderstanding that seems to have lifted only in the last decade or so. As the story goes, Hag and his band were traveling…
When Brett Tohlen and Matt Beaton say that their band Lewis has been luckier than most, they don’t mean to imply that the group hasn’t had to struggle. Far from it actually, since the first four years of Lewis’ existence were nothing but an uphill climb. After all, three-fourths of…
Jim Heath, better known as Reverend Horton Heat (or Frankie Ramada, if you’re nasty) is now officially in the record bidness. Heath debuted his new label, Fun-Guy Records, with a single featuring two new Horton Heat tunes, and apparently, it’s only the beginning. The disc — “King” on the A-side,…
Any band that borrowed its name from a bit of dialogue found in The Karate Kid’s climactic fight scene should be, by all rights, easy to define. It’s the kind of ironic moniker that would fit right in with the SoCal punk-pop crowd, one of those start-stop descendants of the…
It takes a while to get past the packaging of Andrew Bird’s second disc, Oh! The Grandeur, and by the time you do, well, the music can wait a little longer (it has already — for, like, 60 years). Not to slight the fine violin-and-vocals craftsmanship of one Mr. A…
Never quite understood why Calways frontman Todd Deatherage idolized Tom Petty so much. Why would someone with Deatherage’s voice and songwriting ability deify a man who has always sounded as though he’s singing out of Dylan’s nose while recycling the same Keith Richards-by-way-of-Roger McGuinn riff? Sure, it’s fine to marvel…
Hillsboro-based author Ace Collins isn’t the first writer to tackle the Dixie Chicks’ story: Scott Gray and Cathy Repetti’s Chicks Rule: The Story of the Dixie Chicks was in stores just a few weeks before Collins’ tome, All About the Dixie Chicks, will be on September 18. And he surely…
Floor 13 has broken up, partly because of — and this is a new one — the U.S. government. It seems that singer-guitarist Winston Giles’ work permit expired some time ago, so he has been asked by Immigration and Naturalization Services to head back to his native Australia for now…
Face the facts: Iggy Pop hasn’t been the same since he recorded for Arista in the early 1980s, when he began confusing punk rock with hard rock and found neither wanted him anymore. Turns out he was the idiot after all, too dumb to give it up when he discovered…
This is where it all gets brilliant, where the joke reveals itself as Swiftian satire so lowbrow, only the highbrow among us will ever get it. For so long, Pimpadelic seemed to be nothing more than a one-note joke — white boys smeared in black face, grabbing their balls and…
Well, here we are, all the way to back-to-school time and what do we have to show for it? An embarrassment of riches, that’s what. A summer of radio fluff that moved with you and kept you going till supper. Whether you got to the beach or were stuck in…
It’s not surprising that the band named after the larger-than-life icon representing the overstimulated pop culture of the ’80s would aim to mimic the cocaine-fueled power-pop of that era. But what may surprise new listeners and seasoned fans alike is the Mr. T Experience’s (relatively) mature songwriting and unconventional recording…
