After enduring every embarrassment from the electric slide and Dollywood to Toby Keith’s persistent Arab-baiting nonsense, country music feels likes it’s in a dang ol’ coma. But before the plug is pulled on the patient and farewells are said, it only seems appropriate to celebrate the art form’s golden age…
A loose cannon known to brawl with bouncers, bandmates and even the occasional audience member, Anton Alfred Newcombe has been 86’d from his share of music venues over the years. He’s blown off sound checks to get drunk and stormed off stages after playing only two songs. He’s provoked hostile…
The Hackensaw Boys, a primitive-sounding string band with modern-day flair, are a plucky eight-man acoustic unit of colorfully named mountain-bred Virginians, including Jigsaw, Skeeter, Spacey, Tater and Pee Paw. Playing everything from fiddles, dobros and spoons to a curious percussion device called the charismo (hand-built by Salvage Hackensaw himself), the…
Had George Orwell lived long enough to see 1984, he might have thought bands like Spandau Ballet were a more terrifying prospect than Big Brother. Then again, Orwell hailed from the same merry olde land that introduced the world to T. Rex, Gary Glitter, Slade and Bowie’s shrill alter ego,…
I don’t know where the Slayer comparisons first started,” says Eric Madris, quick-fingered banjo picker for bluegrass quartet Split Lip Rayfield. “Obviously, other than just the speed, there isn’t much of a sonic comparison. The tempos are there, but it’s not like we’re trying to get bucked off a goat…
From a New Orleans tradition as old as the bordellos of Storyville, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band continues to reinvent Dixieland jazz with ace musicianship, dynamic interplay and horns aplenty: two trumpets, two saxophones, one trombone and a sousaphone that fattens the bottom end like a wedge of mud pie…
Seated around a cluttered coffee table in a Congress Park home, the four members of Denver’s New Ancient Astronauts are engaged in a lively but tangent-prone bull session. Among the evening’s many unexpected digressions: Were rocks the planet’s first musical instruments? Was Journey the first emo band? Is Michael Jackson…
When they’re not busy logging miles as Nomeansno, an exceptional Victoria, Canada-based prog-punk outfit, founding members Rob and John Wright pound out simple, Ramones-style hockey anthems as their dim-witted alter ego, the Hanson Brothers. Inspired by the knuckle-dragging trio from 1977’s Slap Shot (a classic sports satire in which a…
The High Street Speakeasy sits on the southeast corner of 39th Avenue and High Street, wedged between Five Points and I-70. From the outside, it looks like less than nothing — exactly as a good speakeasy should. Inside, the guzzlery recalls the days when a shrill and righteous few decried…
Having more in common with Buzz Ozbourne than Buzz Aldrin, the New Ancient Astronauts boldly go where free jazz bares its fangs. Working from the bedrock of brooding hardcore, these adventurous space sailors — sax skronker Aaron Schilling, guitarist Kasey Elkington, bassist Don White and drummer Anthony Bell — don’t…
The next time the sky cracks open and hails bloody murder, conjure up heavenly angels spitting over the rail. That’s something Ed Hamell is good at doing. A brutally frank songwriter from Syracuse, New York, the narrative-based guitar slinger works exclusively from a jet-black palette — imagining, for example, the…
During its longest period between albums, Ween has endured one emotional jolt after another: Touring drummer extraordinaire Claude Coleman survived a near-fatal car accident, uninsured; the band got more attention for a commissioned but never aired Pizza Hut jingle called “Where’d the Cheese Go?” than for releasing any backlogged collectibles;…
While deciding whether to call its unique, infectious, wildly irreverent music “whiskey grass” or “whiskey folk,” the Single Malt Band trotted out a few other ideas — including “fiendishly adolescent, fried chicken, monster music” and “flies on the folk cuisine.” Good luck, pickers ‘n’ grinners. Ever since progressive bluegrass earned…
Simon Morley, the Aussie creator of the internationally notorious comedy Puppetry of the Penis, summed up his unlikely theatrical juggernaught with a smile and a shrug in one interview. “It’s art. It’s a piece of skin. It’s there to be laughed at. Get over it,” he said. Considering that Morley’s…
Unsung champions of the Delta blues have often boasted colorful nicknames. And while a memorable moniker never hurts a shot at notoriety — Jaybird, Bo Weavil, Scrapper and Peg Leg, for instance — few bluesmen go on to become household names, let alone footnotes to Robert Johnson. For Willie Houston,…
Sounding as excited as someone stuck in traffic, Lisa Marie Presley settles in for yet another goddamn media probe. Immortalized by enough tabloid clippings to sink a garbage barge, the Princess of Graceland knows the drill of being drilled all too well. After all, she’s lived in a publicity bubble…
FRI, 8/29 “The main code of the tango is that you dance as you are feeling today,” says Nina Pesochinsky, artistic director/instructor/performer of the Denver-based Tango Mujer Dance Company. “The same two people can dance the same song a thousand times, and they will have a thousand different dances. It’s…
FRI, 8/29 Speed freaks don’t have a very good reputation these days. But the backers and fans of the Centrix Financial Grand Prix of Denver may be exceptions to that rule. After all, Mayor John “Vespa” Hickenlooper has signed on as grand marshal for the second annual spin on 1.65…
Long before the Butthole Surfers discovered the aural-application possibilities of orange sunshine or windowpane, a San Francisco-based blotter veteran and guitar phenom named Helios Creed co-founded Chrome in 1977, with the late Damon Edge. After launching underground-style, Stooges-inspired music that was referred to at the time (and much maligned) as…
Details magazine proclaimed I’ll Take It “the best album by a New York band since Remain in Light” — such hyperbolic gushing has been commonplace for Brooklyn’s Mink Lungs. Unlikely candidates for anti-scenester royalty — Talking Heads be hanged — the band is infinitely more adventurous than the one-note gutter…
The Rasta always try to live a life within the system, at the same time living around the system,” declares Winston Rodney, the international reggae superstar better known as Burning Spear. “So he’s preventin’ himself from feedin’ the system and preventin’ the system from taking all of him. So regardless…
With a safety record to rival Amtrak’s, Derailed conducts runaway locomotives of the headbanging variety. Fast and heavy, the trio — guitarist/frontman Russ Fahnestock, bassist Matt Flanagan and drummer Scott Lewis — cranks the decibels up past hardcore’s pain threshold for a pleasingly melodic, punk-informed brand of gritty, proletarian metal…
