Jason Pierce doesn’t know how to read. Music, that is. Incredible, then, that he’s been able to build a musical career that’s spanned more than a decade, first as singer/guitarist for ’80s-era psychedelic-rock icons Spacemen 3 and later as a founding member and the mastermind behind Spiritualized, the darlings of…
Like many musicians, Chris Watkins has a tough time putting a label on his sound. “I’m one of those hyphenated people,” says Watkins, who plays under the name Preacher Boy. “You know, folk-blues-roots-jazz-soul-blah-blah-blah. The influences I pull off of are rooted in the folkie, storytelling kind of songwriting thing.” Watkins…
A few weeks ago, Backwash received a press release from Wind-up Records in New York, a label whose most high-profile client is the ubiquitous radio-rock band Creed. “Creed and Wind-up Records will launch the ultimate fan connectivity tool,” began this exciting news flash, “with a free download of a ‘virtual…
One of the downsides of the post-September 11 expansion in American philanthropy — so far, nearly $1 billion has been raised to provide relief to survivors of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks — is the shrinking of donations to traditional charities. An all-star slate of literary superstars hope…
Though Justin Roth is a native of Minnesota, he sounds very much at home in his adopted hometown of Denver. Roth’s simply instrumented but authentically rendered acoustic music recalls the folky tradition that’s so much a part of our state’s musical history. The singer-songwriter, who tours non-stop to support himself…
Warren Zevon once said, in response to an interviewer asking whether he was being ironic or sincere in a particular song: “With all due respect to Alanis Morissette, if you define that you’re being ironic, then you’re automatically not being ironic.” “Irony” is a word you can’t get away from…
If they were to judge him by his back yard, Randy Meyers’s neighbors might think he was a librarian, or maybe a gardener. Packed with small deciduous trees, potted flowers and an unshakable sense of calm, the small, private patch invites visitors into a state of almost meditative repose. But…
One of the enduring myths about the Grateful Dead is that they were better live than in the studio. According to their legion of fans, the cultish Deadheads, the best way to experience the band was in concert, where, depending on the vibe — and the acid — anything might…
Daniel Johnston is feeling better these days. Austin’s most infamous and prodigious bipolar songwriter has got a real band, a larger-than-ever following and — thanks to the wonders of modern psychiatric medicine — a handle on his own mental demons. He’s also got a new album, one that finds him…
Oslin has been around country music long enough to know that the C&W establishment doesn’t often look kindly upon performers who try something different. But she didn’t let that stop her from making Live Close By, Visit Often, a disc that busts through boundaries by refusing to acknowledge that they…
According to this CD’s liner notes, the 55-year-old Iris is “still electrifying audiences today.” If that’s the case, one wonders why this collection was deemed necessary at all. With teenagers’ belly rings and gangbangers’ banter dominating the music market, it’s not like the singer’s legacy screams for a revisiting, much…
The rise of alt-country music in the early ’90s was inextricably linked to the legendary band Uncle Tupelo, which before its demise gave birth to a lineage complicated enough to warrant a Ken Burns documentary. One of the better bands Tupelo inspired was Whiskeytown, whose lead singer Ryan Adams struck…
When Quixote’s True Blue officially unveiled its new location on Friday night, it appeared as if the management had made some sort of sacrifice to the Gods of Determination. The evidence? At 2 p.m. Friday, the place was a dusty mess, with an untapped bar and walls that were mostly…
Perry Farrell is a weird genius-prophet from another dimension — or maybe from the future. His creations are cunning experiments, forays outside of the rigid bounds of normal thought. Like a trickster of myth playing possum, he pretends to be part of just another band or rock show, beguiling us…
Among the Front Range’s mamba-mad masses, Cabaret Diosa has become as much a part of the Halloween tradition as checking youngsters’ Milky Ways for wayward razor blades. The Boulder-based neo-Latin ensemble always folds a hearty dose of theater into its live shows, which are designed to incite audiences to sing,…
A few years ago, Rolling Stone did a feature on fathers and sons in music. The two-page spread featuring Loudon Wainwright III and his son, Rufus, portrayed the two men in a back-yard landscape, Loudon sitting in a lawn chair, wearing old-guy shorts, a fishing hat and a crotchety puss…
Paul Galaxy and the Galactix are slicked-back proof that rockabilly is far from dead. Their success is also evidence that a bar band can make a living — and a name around the country — while based in Denver. The Galactix have overcome the alleged out-of-favor status of their chosen…
While Bazooka Joe was being shipped off to die in ‘Nam, a sweetly sick kind of music called bubblegum oozed out of stateside AM radios like pink, candy-coated napalm. From 1967-1969, independent producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz supervised a revolving, New York-based crew of session players and professional jingle…
Like his good friend Johnny Cash, whose last three albums were among his best, Bob Dylan is on a late-career roll. Four years ago, he graced us with Time Out of Mind, a somber meditation on love and life. Dylan was 56 at the time; his voice was shot, and…
In The Outsiders, a 1967 novel published when its author, S.E. Hinton, was just sixteen, Cherry Valance is a “soc” — a teen who hangs out with sweater-wearing, affluent peers from the right side of the tracks. But whereas most of the soc guys and dolls are snooty, arrogant and…
Santa Monica-based Moonshine Records (Moonshine Creative Media LLC, in new-millennium speak) has engaged consumers of electronic music with varying degrees of success during its decade-long history. Like veteran imprints Eightball, Strictly Rhythm and Cleopatra — indie outlets servicing dance/ alternative-music formats — Moonshine seemed to lose its focus on quality…
Like its moody contemporaries Nick Cave or His Name Is Alive, upstate New York’s Mercury Rev has taken a bizarre, winding path to its current vision of twisted American music. While Cave has settled post-punk ire into outsider-bluesy balladeering and His Name swings moody hybrids of folk, gospel and ’60s…
