A typical gig by Denver’s Whores, Pigs and Ponies is apt to feature fire spitting, cross-dressing, codpieces and simulated sex acts: For example, bassist/vocalist Rel has been known to mime fellatio on a latex penis worn by guitarist/vocalist Jud Van Vliet, then use a cigarette to light the tip of…
The financially disastrous concert season that was 1996 precipitated a rash of think pieces in which pundits attempted to explain why music fans stayed away in droves from all but a handful of last year’s major concerts. Many factors were cited in these articles, but the one mentioned most frequently…
Anyone who doubts that our society is too obsessed with celebrities would have had his mind changed by the January 22 press conference at the Temple Buell in support of VH1. One attendee who shall remain nameless for his own protection called it “bloated” and “overblown,” but I disagree. In…
Anti-Flag Die for the Government (New Red Archives) Punk nostalgia right down to the fake Limey accents. I take it about as seriously as I take Sha Na Na. Musicianship: D-minus. Originality: F. Listening pleasure: F. –Dana Collins Plexi Cheer Up (Sub Pop) This is one of those rare CDs…
Most times when Les Cooper is on stage, he’s singing with the band he fronts, Denver’s Dalhart Imperials. But on this evening, he and his wife, Joan, are teaching dance steps to an attentive crowd whose members seem to have stepped straight from The Wild One. Men with greased hair…
New York-based pianist Fred Hersch is a superior soloist as well as an excellent producer, composer, arranger, group leader and sideman. But in most of the articles about him, these attributes are given short shrift in favor of chatter about his personal life: In 1982 he announced that he was…
The main floor of Mountain Coin, located in an industrial cube of a building on a lonely stretch of 62nd Avenue just west of Interstate 25, is packed with the latest in electronic games and diversions. There’s “Wrestlemania,” in which a beefy champion under your control tries to smear the…
Because of various negative comments I made in print about the state of Denver radio late last year, I spent the month of December being excoriated by jocks at four radio stations–a personal record for me. These enjoyably vituperative attacks were offset somewhat by a couple of nods I received…
If you talk to Wally Collins about Boulder’s New Wizard Oil Combination, the musical aggregation he formed more than a quarter-century ago, make sure you get your lingo straight. “It’s not a band,” he says a bit testily. “We’re a group or a choir, but we’re not a band. ‘Band’…
One of the reasons bass legend Paul Warburton knows so much about the fabric of his music is that he’s actually made music with it. Fabric, that is. “Before I started playing bass, when I was fourteen, I’d lay on my bed, which was covered with one of those old…
If you’ve been to an avant-garde jazz show in Denver during the past decade, you’ve probably seen Alex Lemski, the president and driving force behind Denver’s Creative Music Works, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Tall, gangly and intense, with a scraggly beard and a pate partially covered by…
Ivo Perelman + “Cama de Terra” (Homestead) Oranj Symphonette Plays Mancini (Gramavision) The phrase “forward into the past” is such an obvious (and amusing) contradiction that the comedy troupe Firesign Theatre used it as the title of a Seventies-era compilation album. Yet the notion, jokey though it may seem, is…
Most Nineties celebrities understand that baring their souls comes with the territory. Your average personality mag is brimming with profiles of famous people who disclose their deepest, darkest secrets as casually as they cash their royalty checks–and the few who don’t are viewed with suspicion. For example, Eddie Vedder’s reticence…
Various Artists Deep in the Heart of Tuva: Cowboy Music From the Wild East (Ellipsis Arts) Various Artists Tibet: The Heart of Dharma (Ellipsis Arts) Hukwe Zawose Chibite (Real World/Caroline) “World music” is one of the most chauvinistic terms imaginable, if for no other reason than its implication that anything…
For Robert Woolfolk II–aka Dap, one of the pair of performers behind the impressive Denver-based rap group nGomA–musical eclecticism runs in the family. His father, the Reverend Robert Woolfolk Sr., is the spiritual leader of Five Points’ Agape Christian Church and an acknowledged leader of Denver’s religious community. (The Reverend…
The topic of the June 13, 1996, edition of this column was a change in the membership of 16 Horsepower, a terrific Denver band whose major-label debut–the A&M release Sackcloth ‘n’ Ashes–had hit stores just a few months earlier. Keven Soll, who’d been playing bass with cohorts David Eugene Edwards…
Denver musician Eric Bard’s goals are humble. “Basically, what I’m after,” he says candidly, “is a cheap laugh.” The means by which Bard achieves his ends are certainly novel: He uses drums and a saxophone, often played at the same time, to complement his wry brand of beat poetry. This…
And now it’s time for a startling revelation: It’s not easy to find innocence in rock and roll. I know–I recently thought I’d located this rarest of commodities right here in the Queen City of the West, only to discover that just beneath its surface lurked emotions, passions and conflicts…
Maranda Gaylord, the grande dame of the Commerce City Rollers, has never wanted for moxie. Barely one year after she first strapped on a bass, she tried out for Denver’s ’57 Lesbian in the hopes of filling the slot vacated by Spell’s Chanin Floyd. Her audition, she admits frankly, was…
Curtis Mayfield New World Order (Warner Bros.) Mayfield, who was paralyzed from the neck down in an onstage accident, discovered a year or so ago that he could sing as long as his body was in a reclining position. But doing so remains an exhausting struggle for him–and the sheer…
Last week, I compiled my list of favorite national releases from the past year (“The Prize Patrol,” December 26). This week, peruse my alphabetical roster of 1996’s best Colorado releases: ten fine recordings by a variety of local artists whose work rivals (and, in many cases, surpasses) the efforts of…
What follows is a list of the best albums of 1996. Sort of. Each December this decade, I’ve sat down to compile a roster of the finest recordings that came my way during the preceding eleven months. But because of the sheer volume of material I’ve heard–and because I try…
