We call my Grandpa Big Frank. Big Frank loves k.d. lang. In fact, he loves music in general — most of it. He digs Sinatra but thinks he was too much of a womanizer. Dean Martin was a drunk. Elvis had a nice voice, but Grandpa considers him part of the ongoing longhaired-pinko menace and […]
Frank De Blase
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From Nancy, with love
As rock ‘n’ roll’s swagger staggers under the weight of its disproportionate masculinity (you know, too many dudes), women with the appropriate stance and guts are keeping it somehow viable, visceral, and real. It’s still a man’s world, but women like The Breeder’s Kim Deal, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, Deborah Harry, or yes, even Madonna […]
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Zekes, Dekes, freaks, and geeks
I love The Grinders. I mean I love me some mailman Todd. But I’m not sure I dig ’em in a big venue like Water Street Music Hall, where they warmed the boards for The Chesterfield Kings two weeks ago. They still sounded great, and sure, they’ve earned the right to rock a huge crowd […]
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Sophie B. Hawkins
If it weren’t for the warm, husky seduction in Sophie B. Hawkins voice, you’d swear you were talking to a child. Hawkins eagerly leaps at questions and insightfully discusses her life and music. In the background, Spearhead leaks in from the tape deck. We chat via cell phone as she and her band wind their […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
From start to twang
Each day in a dusty workshop on the second floor of a warehouse on Elton Street, art is born — functional art. Art that lives and breathes each time it is brought on stage, or set in a lap, or held closely and simply strummed. It’s a marriage of woods. The notes it renders speak […]
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Cowboys and cowgirls
Ol’ gravel throat himself, Bryan Adams, sounds a lot better live than he ever did on the radio. His show at the Auditorium Theatre on March 9 brought out more stonewashed jeans and mullets than there were in the summer of ’69 (sorry, I couldn’t resist — cuts like a knife, doesn’t it?) Adams looked […]
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Now is the time
I don’t know. Maybe the blues just ain’t fair. It’s not like anyone with a harmonica or a guitar and a dream was ever promised a fair shake. But it just seems sometimes the cream doesn’t rise to the top. Cream like British blues legend John Mayall. Mayall has been playing the blues for […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Rock ’n’ roll soul
Tom Wales strolls into Mark’s Texas Hots with the enthusiastic gait of a big kid. He carries a Gibson SG in a beat-up case in one hand, and an even more beat-up Bible in the other. The two seem to balance him out. Sporting wraparound shades and dressed in black, standard-issue rocker gear accented […]
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Beautifully bombastic
The Suicide Girls have brought bump ‘n’ grind one step closer to rock ‘n’ roll. Pushing the standards of traditional burlesque and augmenting it with punk rock, this troupe of punk pop tarts stripped and teased and copped heaps of attitude to a capacity crowd at Buffalo’s Soundlab two weeks ago. Black electrical tape pasties, […]
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T-Model Ford is a bad man
You can romanticize all you want, but the blues has been gentrified. It’s been homogenized and castrated. Hell, it’s for everybody now. It’s practically Disney in some parts. That is unless you travel deep, deep into the Delta. There’re cats down there that never got out — at least until the revivalists at Fat […]
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Your Mom’s Big Muff
I don’t know what it is with all these old black blues guys and their stereo chorus and flanger effects. Cats that came off rough-and-tumble raw in the rock ‘n’ roll dawn now sound like Andy Summers on a Thunderbird jag. Example numero uno: Fat Possum legend T-Model Ford — a truly murderous and […]
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The best and only
Of all the guitar slingers in the world, living, dead, or otherwise, Sonny Landreth stands alone. Landreth’s playing style is as unique as it is stunningly hypnotic. With merely the 10 fingers God gave him, Landreth blends deft finger-style picking with slippery slide in a sea of reverb and bluesy redemption. Landreth was born […]
