David Thomas of Pere Ubu died last week at 71. He was listening to MC5 on the radio. The band wrote that “he will ultimately be returned to his home…where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn.’” Happy trails, cowboy. Broad and heavyset, Thomas looked like Edward G. Robinson but he sang […]
St. Vincent seems programmed to appeal to me. She’s fond of snaky guitar lines and bouts of atonality. She played in a noise rock band called the Skull Fuckers. And she took her nom de plume from a Nick Cave lyric and named her debut after an Arrested Development joke. That debut was called Marry […]
Roxy Music was too small for both Brian Eno and Bryan Ferry. Fifty years on that seems like the most obvious statement in the world, but I bet the separation felt traumatic for their fans at the time, who (wrongly) thought the flamboyantly dressed, knob-twiddling synthesizer player, Eno, was the brains of the band, while […]
When asked why he never cheated on his wife Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman famously said, “I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger?” It sounds very romantic, but it also seems like he dodged the question by asking a rhetorical one of his own, a question whose answer isn’t as […]
We’re coming up on 30 years of the mainstreaming of the internet and I think there’s an argument to be made that it has, overall, been a net negative for politics, culture, and humanity. Most probably agree that its good/evil splits are around 51/49, flopping one way or the other depending on what’s happening in […]
Culture doesn’t evolve all at once. Nirvana released Nevermind in September of 1991, but Guns ‘N Roses’ Use Your Illusion II came out the very next month and knocked it down the charts. The arrival of grunge supposedly signified that leather was out and flannel was in, but leather wasn’t going anywhere. Nevermind popped up […]
Lots of kids pick up a musical instrument because they heard John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, or Stevie Ray Vaughn and thought, “That’s cool. I want to do that.” Those kids must’ve also seen the “Be Like Mike” Gatorade commercials and figured they could be like Michael Jordan. I knew the only thing I had […]
Wagner requested I write about Pink Floyd this week. If you want me to write about a band or an album, let me know, and we’ll see if I have anything interesting to say. Mount Everest’s Nepal base camp sits at 17,598 feet above sea level. That’s over 3,000 feet higher than any peak […]
Sometimes I get jealous of bands like FACS. They know what they do, they do it well, and they don’t fuck around too much. And when they do fuck around, it’s within a framework that ensures they’ll never not sound like themselves. All their songs are powered by the bass guitar, amble at about 120 […]
There’s a scene in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: a Film About Wilco, the 2002 documentary about the making of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that lives rent free in my head. Wilco’s singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy and multi-instrumentalist/detail wizard Jay Bennett are sitting behind a studio console working on the mix for an album […]