It’s not easy to make creative holiday music. Writing a seasonal classic is all but impossible; besides, it takes years to know if you’ve succeeded. And while it’s a snap to cover old favorites, the extraordinary familiarity of the material prevents all but the most innovative performers from doing anything…
That Son Volt’s first album, Trace, makes excellent driving music has everything to do with the habits of the act’s lead singer and guitarist, onetime Uncle Tupelo member Jay Farrar. “I did spend a lot of time driving from my home in New Orleans to Minneapolis,” says Farrar, who made…
“We’re kind of like a comic book come to life,” says Mark D., drummer for Denver’s Fox Force 5. “Seriously, our persona is a cross between a comic book and, like, a bad, circa 1973, One Day at a Time sitcom joined together as one.” The stage names favored by…
Acting like you’re famous while you’re still a relative unknown often can lead to actual fame. That’s a lesson many performers never learn, but Courtney Taylor already knows it by heart. The trippy, self-titled CD by his Portland-based band, the Dandy Warhols, has been heard by only a handful of…
Meat Puppets No Joke! (London) For the Meat Puppets, the key has always been striking the right balance. When the Kirkwood brothers, Curt and Cris, and drummer Derrick Bostrom allow their music and words to drift on a patient narcotic breeze, their tunes are positively addictive–but when they rev up…
Trends always have risen and/or vanished quickly in the pop-music universe, but seldom as viciously as right now. Metal is a case in point. Since exploding in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the style has been as impossible to destroy as cockroaches. Disco, new wave, punk and countless other…
Baldo Rex, with Boss 302, Friday, December 8, at the Lion’s Lair, hasn’t yet taken the nation by storm because of a single, fatal flaw: originality. Sure, the band (featuring Phil Wronski, Tom Sprenkle, John Call and Ted Thacker) makes music that might be described as modern rock, but it…
George Clinton, Thursday and Friday, December 7 and 8, at the Fox Theatre, and Friday, December 9, at the Ogden, may not create at the furious pace he managed during the Seventies, but he continues to give good show. In combination with the P-Funk All-Stars (essentially, those members of the…
“We do a different kind of blues,” says Ben Stevens, guitarist and vocalist for Boulder’s Bleecker St. “We want to keep the Delta-blues tradition alive but mix a new, original sound with the old. We like to call it the new Delta house-rockin’ blues.” That’s as good a definition as…
Kat Bjelland, the leader of the post-punk threesome Babes in Toyland, is paying for her good times. The previous weekend, at the end of a two-week tour of Australia, Bjelland, Babes bassist Maureen Herman and the Toyland crew had thrown a surprise birthday party in honor of drummer Lori Barbero…
Henry Rollins, Saturday, December 2, at the Ogden Theatre, takes pride in selling out, so long as he does it his way. Whereas most old-school punks eschew any public activity that might cast aspersions on their credibility, Rollins endorses computers, poses for fashion layouts and acts in films (he’s just…
Ellyn Rucker, with Laura Newman, Thursday, November 30, at the Mall Exchange, deserves her reputation as the area’s premier female jazz pianist. She’s at ease and in superb form in virtually any musical setting, as the Colorado International Women’s Forum just acknowledged by accepting Rucker into its organization. Rucker is…
Boss Hog leader Cristina Martinez has no intention of exploiting her sexuality to make a living. After all, she’s already done enough of that. “I used to do phone sex back in the Eighties,” she volunteers. “I didn’t start out doing it–I was the receptionist taking credit-card numbers at this…
Drummer Colby Mancasola and his mates in the band Knapsack discovered a surefire way to pick a record company. “Basically,” he says, “we just looked at our record collections and said, `Okay, we own these four or five albums on Alias.’ And then we looked at label B and went,…
There’s no shortage of sweet-voiced, guitar-wielding women in Boulder these days. Toss a quarter on Pearl Street and it’ll more than likely land in a female singer-songwriter’s guitar case. Audiences, however, are harder to come by, and renown more difficult to achieve than that. So it’s fortunate that Wendy Woo…
Windowpane, with Benjamina Ficus Exotica, Saturday, November 25, at the Lion’s Lair, has a new drummer: Kenny Ortiz, the man with the sticks in both D-Town Brown and Tribhanga. This addition is certain to enhance what is already one of the more innovative bands in town–a collection of awesome instrumentalists…
Avoiding any mention of alcohol during a chat with Shane MacGowan would be as stupid as neglecting to ask Elizabeth Taylor about marriage, perfume, Michael Jackson or cholesterol. MacGowan–onetime leader of the Pogues, current frontman for Shane MacGowan & the Popes–has a reputation as one of popular music’s most aggressive…
Reggae original Eek-A-Mouse began wearing costumes long before anyone knew his nom de plume. “I started doing that stuff back in Jamaica,” he says of his often outlandish attire. “I’d just walk around town in that kind of stuff and people would think I was crazy, you know? Then I…
With a new album, a new label and a national tour, Los Angeles punk-rock legends the Lazy Cowgirls seem to be making a major comeback. But there’s something wrong with this picture–because the band never really left. “We keep reading about how we broke up,” says Cowgirls vocalist/ frontman Pat…
Take heart, garage-rock fans: In this age of platinum-selling punks, Denver’s Sissy Fuzz is keeping the do-it-yourself ethos alive. “When we started, we’d just been saying, `Wouldn’t it be fun if we were in a band?'” recounts drummer Cincy Woods. “And Andy was the only one who knew how to…
Once Blue, with Lisa Loeb, Friday, November 24, at the Bluebird Theater, is a New York-based duo making its first Colorado appearance. But the approach taken by vocalist Rebecca Martin and guitarist Jesse Harris on their recent EMI debut recording isn’t particularly new: It suggests a preppy updating of the…
Green Day Insomniac (Reprise) In the press biography sent to reviewers with this CD, flack Ben Weasel (a nom de plume, perhaps?) claims that Insomniac “ISN’T a progression, and that’s exactly WHY it’s so fucking good. I mean, Christ, if the Ramones coulda just put out a couple more Leave…
