Surely the most surreal musical moment of the year occurred last February at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, when Ralph Stanley, the bluegrass patriarch, scared the bejesus out of the Armani-clad music-industry folks at the Staples Center with his chilling a cappella version of “O Death.” In the song,…
Nat Yarbrough never loses his cool. A slender, long-legged man with a calming, regal aspect, he moves as beautifully as a panther and rarely betrays the slightest hint of physical exertion — not even in the mounting heat of a solo, when both feet are thumping the pedals, his sculpted…
Last year, when Clear Channel vice president Chuck Morris first announced his company’s plans to open the CityLights Pavilion at the Pepsi Center in partnership with Kroenke Sports, newly reinstated House of Blues head Barry Fey vowed to send a private plane over the crowd, streaming a banner that read:…
When it was launched in 1995, the Warped Tour was one of many multi-band bashes — from H.O.R.D.E. to the Lilith Fair — that emerged in the wake of the influential, highly successful Lollapalooza festival. So why, seven years later, are virtually all of these allegedly annual events, including Lollapalooza,…
Singer, songwriter and guitarist John Davis was born and raised in south Georgia, a few miles from the Okeefenokee swamp, among what he calls “unredeemed Baptists, bootleggers and riff-raff.” Davis, who moved to Colorado in 1997 and quickly became a favorite at Swallow Hill Music Hall, revisits his roots on…
Early on a Sunday morning back in 1985, I was working at Tower Records on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip when the air became heavy with the scent of pheromones and ego. David Lee Roth had arrived. At that instant, Diamond Dave was at the zenith of his celebrity. By then,…
Jello Biafra’s scathing brand of political commentary won’t pass for comfort food in troubled times: Gooey, patriotic pabulum is best left to star-spangled yokels like Lee Greenwood or Alan Jackson. But the guy takes his anti-punditry as seriously as any free-speech proponent out there. He also has a knack for…
Bluegrass music is full of hotshot musicians, but only a handful qualify as true innovators. Jerry Douglas, the extraordinary dobro player, belongs to that exclusive club. He took an ungainly instrument with a relatively limited musical vocabulary and found a way to coax a variety of sounds from it: sweet…
When you’re a little kid, cursive handwriting seems like such an arcane, esoteric thing: Its strange and indecipherable loops and swirls reduce words to fluid mystery, some secret code shared by grown-ups. By the time you actually reach adulthood, cursive looks juvenile, even quaint — the hormone-inked scrawl of impetuous…
One of the least-used compliments in the average critic’s vocabulary is the word “consistent”; few scribes come out of a great concert exclaiming, “That was one of the most consistent shows ever!” But consistency is an important artistic attribute, particularly for a performer who hungers for career longevity, and Duke…
In opening remarks that christened Music Lowdown 2002 last Saturday, Colorado Music Association director Jeff Campbell rested his hands on a lectern, surveyed the crowd and shook his head, a sly smile forming on his lips. “Man, who would’ve imagined this?” he asked. “Musicians up at 9 a.m. — on…
Back home in Austin, Bob Schneider is King of the World. Sandra Bullock’s hunky, erstwhile paramour has escorted many a University of Texas freshman through the process of growing older, wiser and more worldly. Sometimes wisdom has had very little do with it: Schneider’s past projects include the funky, frat-boy-friendly…
As members of Boulder’s exploratory outfit United Dope Front, saxophonist Ben Senterfit, guitarist Javier Gonzales, organist Jarad Astin and drummer Damieon Lee Hines mold a groovy, hypnotic and thoroughly modern form of acid jazz. But every now and then even the most future-minded players look to the past for inspiration…
The only downside to discovering a band that’s so cool you simply have to tell the world about it is that eventually, the world does find out, and then things are never quite the same. The White Stripes’ regular fan base in Los Angeles knew that a new element had…
Over the past several years, Americans have grown accustomed to hearing rising stars on the British music scene make pompous pronouncements about everything from their talent level to their odds of success in the colonies. The standard setters in this regard are the men from Oasis, whose Liam Gallagher told…
There are certain words that commonly creep into descriptions of Mark Eitzel: “brilliant,” “tortured,” “honest” and “poetic” are among the often-used adjectives. These may all be fitting descriptions, but isn’t everyone a little brilliant, a tiny bit tortured and even honest sometimes? It’s more accurate to describe Eitzel by explaining…
Working musicians might be the only subsection of Denver society that’s actually quite pleased that the Detroit Red Wings scored seven goals against the Colorado Avalanche in game seven last Friday — effectively quelling hometown dreams of hosting that large, silver spitoon-looking Cup thing two years in a row. As…
If you’re going to do an Internet search for the Queers (who appear June 11 at the Bluebird Theater, with the Briefs and the Independents), don’t do it at work: Locating the band online involves scrolling through pages of hits, including Queers for Christ and a Web site named thequeers.com…
As its name would imply, local indie-rock combo O’er the Ramparts is well-versed in the fine art of the anthem. The band, which appears Friday, June 7, at the 15th Street Tavern, stirs up an epic mess of skittering melodies and saccharine-baited hooks that harks back to the vintage American…
Writing about band names is one of the great cliches in rock journalism. Every group with an off-kilter appellation has an allegedly amusing or revealing (and often lengthy) story about how its stage alias was invented, but the majority of these tales are about as fascinating as a day spent…
Andrew W.K. is working hard to have a good time as often as possible. Whether he’s talking about amusement parks or music, it doesn’t take much to raise the long-locked rocker’s excitement level. The Detroit native is the first rock artist to do partying justice since the Beastie Boys fought…
Dr. Bug and I, we were basically playing in dumpsters and garbage cans in alleys around the Denver area,” says Log frontman Harry Lug Nutz, the essence of haute couture in a Mexican-wrestler mask and a pink polyester muumuu. “We would occasionally go down to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for aromatherapy conventions,…
