Music

My landlord knew a drug dealer in high school. The dealer had a bunch of acid — two sheets’ worth of quarter tab — stashed in his sock. It was a hot day. His feet got sweaty, and he absorbed most of the blotter. After a week in the emergency…

Record companies specializing in musical subgenres regularly market certain releases to tourists, literal and otherwise. For instance, blues labels tend to balance albums aimed at consumers who know the form well with lowest-common-denominator platters intended for people who think it would be cool to purchase a blues CD once every…

On Blue Country Heart, Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen goes country, singing heartfelt versions of songs by Garth Brooks, Toby Keith and Tim McGraw. Guest vocalists include Martina McBride and Faith Hill, who help Kaukonen shed his blues-steeped image. Just kidding. Sure, Blue Country Heart was recorded in Nashville, but…

For host Sid Pink and his helpers, Portia Needlewax and Professor Snarly, the Westword Music Showcase Awards Ceremony, held Thursday, June 20, at the Bluebird Theater, was fraught with peril: At one point, an unknown artist, frustrated that he wasn’t among the sixty acts nominated on the Westword Music Showcase…

Denver’s Czars, who appear Tuesday, July 2, at the Gothic Theatre with Lift to Experience and the Devics, have been compared to Radiohead, probably because of the atmospheric, swirling, textural quality of some of their songs. But the band also recorded “Song to Siren” for a Tim Buckley tribute album…

It’s hard to believe that seven years have passed since Qualm first inflicted a stage with its breakneck teenage punk rock. Now wiser, tighter and (kinda) all grown up, the band will be celebrating the release of its new album, A Long Story Short, on Saturday, June 29, at Tulagi…

As a band, I’d say that Pleasure Forever is a celebration of the ecstatic annihilation of orgasmic energy.” So asserts Dave Clifford, drummer for the vicious cabaret that is San Francisco’s Pleasure Forever. Clifford, guitarist Josh Hughes and keyboardist/vocalist Andrew Rothbard form an unholy trinity of rhythm, noise and verse…

Mayor Wellington E. Webb’s Music Festival at Red Rocks features a couple of big names in the jazz field — veteran vocalist Al Jarreau and fast-fingered guitarist Stanley Jordan — as well as soul/gospel singer Yolanda Adams. But those who’ve closely followed Denver’s jazz scene over the years may be…

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…