At the end of last year, many businesses and music fans declared victory when the Denver City Council approved an ordinance allowing patrons over the age of sixteen to play with the big kids at approved establishments that provide both booze and entertainment. The city had changed its all-ages enforcement…
In Jack Kerouac’s book Tristessa, the eponymous junkie heroine reflects the Buddhist tenet “Life is suffering.” San Diego’s Tristeza (Saturday, February 16, at the 15th Street Tavern, with Pinkku and VU) doesn’t take the suffering trip, but, like Kerouac, the combo does meditate upon the meaning of life with its…
Drummer Kenny James has done time in so many local outfits, from Sympathy F and the Samples to United Dope Front and Judge Roughneck, that one might think he has some sort of chameleon type of musical sensibility. The famously active local skinsman — who last appeared on local stages…
There’s a scene in the Coen Brothers’ movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? in which a promoter by the name of Mr. French drops in at a rural Mississippi radio station to see if he can track down the Soggy Bottom Boys, whose song, “I Am a Man of Constant…
Those of you without daughters or sisters born after 1990 may be in the dark about Aaron Carter. So here are the key facts. He’s the younger brother of Backstreet Boys hunkaroo Nick Carter. (Nick’s the blond one who was arrested last month in a Tampa, Florida, nightclub, either because…
It is a Monday night in LoDo, and a famous sky is melting. Over and over on a multimedia screen, the blue swirls and golden orbs of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” dissolve and re-form, accompanied by a fittingly kaleidoscopic live soundtrack. Shadowed before the dripping images, Denver jazz saxophonist Pete…
These days, Bill Doss, a key member of the Elephant 6 collective and a co-founder of Olivia Tremor Control, likes to refer to himself in print as “thebilldoss,” or, when he’s in a hurry, “tbd” — both good examples of how he’s able to freshen up familiar ingredients by giving…
Is our little Cornelius all growed up now? Keigo Oyamada’s newest album, Point, manages to preserve the wide-eyed sense of wonder that made his previous release so precious, but this time, he’s clearly on his best behavior. Cornelius’s last album, Fantasma, released in 1998, was one of those universally acclaimed…
Originally, Groundwork was a concert series built to raise money for a variety of sustainable, ongoing food projects around the world, including establishing orchards in Eritrea, producing natural honey in Armenia and building community-wide backyard livestock development in Sierra Leone. The group stayed true to its name by getting down…
How long does it take for a new art form to be embraced as legitimate by the music-listening public, a group that, as any modern radio programmer can tell you, is generally wary of change? Judging by the recent surge in the popularity of turntablism, about 25 years. Ever since…
W.C. Clark is one of those blues artists who is totally happy playing to faithful patrons in small clubs. In Austin, his hometown, he can regularly be found at modest East Side venues such as the Victory Grill and Charlie Playhouse. After roughly fifty years on the Austin blues circuit,…
Belly up to the Marshall stack when the local heroes of Abdomen inflict structural damage to pop architecture on Friday, February 8, at the 15th Street Tavern. Guitarist Mike Jourgensen nails hummable hardcore to the wall with the effects-laden skill of a master carpenter. Measuring psychedelic speed-metal to fit the…
Tan, rested and cocky, Tommy Womack returned to Nashville from a Carnival cruise late last summer with a bounce in his step. “The world was wonderful,” he says. “I got a copy of the new Dylan album in advance that nobody else had. I just met Bill Wyman at a…
Twenty years ago, Jim Salestrom was lured to Breckenridge by a folk-friendly bar culture and the Rocky Mountain mentality that John Denver made famous in his music. Like that songwriter, Salestrom built a career around writing high-altitude odes to life in the mountains: In his adopted hometown, locals still refer…
On his most recent album, The Rock: Stone Cold Country 2001, George Jones teams with Garth Brooks to sing a good old-fashioned drinking song called “Beer Run.” It’s about getting off work, jumping in the pickup truck and making a beeline for the liquor store — pretty tame stuff, especially…
It makes perfect sense that Graham’s best-known band was dubbed the True Believers. After all, he’s a songwriter and performer whose affection for genuinely American music — you know, the craggy, rough-hewn stuff that’s heard too seldom these days — is simple and pure. But he also sports an obstinate…
So far, 2002 has been a bummer year for clubs. In just one month, Denver has seen the abrupt — though not totally unexpected — combustion of three venues that regularly featured live music: The House of Rock and Alice Coopers’town have both closed, while the Flying Dog Pub has…
Felix Stallings Jr. has used many names during his ascension through the world of homeland electronica: Since the age of fifteen, when a chance encounter with Chicago’s DJ Pierre expedited his auspicious entry into the house realm, Stallings has worked under the tags Thee Maddkatt Courtship, Elektrikboy, Aphrohead and Sharkimaxx…
Orbit Service releases Space & Valium, its first full-length album, this week with a pair of shows: Friday, February 1, at Boulder’s Penny Lane, with This Film, and Saturday, January 2, at the Crowbar with Fort Collins’s DJ F and This Film. The swirling, ambient aspects of this Denver four-piece…
“I don’t really like storytelling or straight narratives,” Jay Farrar says halfway into a conversation about his new solo album, Sebastopol. The co-founder of legendary alt-country band Uncle Tupelo and its celebrated offspring, Son Volt, Farrar is speaking about the process of writing music. But he pauses for a moment,…
The story was surely blown before it began. Over the telephone, Geoff Vaughan, contact person for the groove collective Vinyl, is asked if he can set up an interview with someone in the band for early the following week. There’s a long pause. Then this: “Well, I’m the bass player,…
For a child navigating the uneasy interval of pre-adolescence, few things can guarantee nerd status like the decision to join the school band. All that lugging of equipment and shameless practicing is enough to crush the coolness out of any child who’s unlucky enough to pursue musical knowledge. Darren Kramer…
