The music industry virtually shut down this past week while every flack, hack, and sad-sack musician in the land converged on Austin, Texas, for the huge showcase convention SXSW (short for South by Southwest). There are panel discussions and such, but the big draw is the bounty of showcases. There’s…
The real-life follies, clinging to the sanctity of good clean fun, faith tested time and again. Till death, or worse yet, unemployment, entrapped within the bell jar of gossip, the cutting wire that dices, dissects, and taints every circumstance. But then, the razor’s edge of columning cuts both ways, the…
Lamenting the demise of the vinyl configuration for recorded music is at this point as tiresome and pointless as the Simpson trial. The “wax” many of us grew up spinning now makes up a minuscule portion A perhaps three percent A of the market. Live with it. And celebrate the…
Vacation time, a brief reprieve from these deranged metropolitan diaries A in truth, we don’t even know what the hell they’re all about A inspiring a curious strain of holiday anomie, the workaday world suddenly robbed of meaning, authenticity, and dramatic interest. Without the small deaths of deadlines, the daily…
This space is devoted to musical reportage and commentary. It is not supposed to be an obituary column. Sadly, fate isn’t cooperating. I remember nights a lifetime ago watching Johnny “Stix” Galway illustrate what great rock drumming is all about. Often those nights consisted of shows featuring the legendary Bobs…
The Replacements were considered by many to be the best rock band in the world about ten years ago. Let It Be (1984) and Tim (1985) captured the foursome at its apex by blending the hard stuff A “Gary’s Got a Boner” and an inspired cover of KISS’s “Black Diamond,”…
Another week, another frolic with mirthmakers of every imaginable breed. A Noah’s ark of dark pleasures, touched by a higher force. On the rounds Saturday night, trudging up and down Washington Avenue, a penitent dragging the cross of gossip through Sodom, witness to the eternal passion play of nightlife. The…
When was the last time you spent a day by the bay at Virginia Key? When did you last take a casual stroll through Bicentennial Park? Or sit down for a quiet picnic on Watson Island? Shaking your head? Okay, let’s try this: When was the last time you visited…
It’s a great life, these postcards filed from the apocalypse, these rhapsodies to a permanent — albeit spectacularly unsuccessful — vacation in Hell. One of our bleaker colleagues encouraging an addiction to darkness, noting that the next angst report may well serve as a handy obituary, rich fodder suitable for…
Sometimes the best way to measure the health of your pond is to find out who’s dipping their toes into the water. On that basis, Miami’s rock scene is robust. Billboard recently visited these shores with a piece that noted that Mary Karlzen, Nil Lara, and several others have signed…
The future must look bright for local polka-punkers I Don’t Know, who use accordion prominently in their songs, and occasionally toss in other instrumentation not normally associated with high-energy rock. First, this week the Rhino label will issue a collection of music by accordion greats (Flaco Jimenez, Clifton Chenier) and…
Unfortunately, a free and vigorous press requires a touch of scandalmongering on the side, something of an unseemly decline from the noble ideals of Thomas Jefferson, a rich, famous, and powerful statesman (think Dallas set on a plantation) whose randy appetite for interracial dating might have made him the perfect…
God help us, but we love this filthy business, despite the inevitable toll of the dungheap: metamorphosing into an unhealthy alien existing on earthly junk food, nothing but a blob of numb ectoplasm with an engorged brainpan, continually force-fed a diet of the unwholesome. Home at last for a quiet…
Isn’t this starting to read like an obituary column? If it isn’t a club closing, it’s a band breaking up — we have some bad news and some bad news. What’s ironic is that 1994 was a boon year for the (inter)national music business. Nearly 200 concerts grossed a million…
A city under siege, immersed in the commercial pageantry of Super Bowl, the ultimate arena of power, money, and sex. High-roller time, the juiceless groveling and the connected — from the swinish Rush Limbaugh to Stevie Wonder — tooling down the hookup highway, taking a turboglide run into the heart…
Noise bands have no credibility. It’s just…um, uh…noise. A passing fad, a selfish indulgence, a sham. Except. Except that among all the South Florida acts currently trying to make their way into the national limelight, only a few have any chance of reaching as high a level so quickly as…
The Talkhouse is closing. No it’s not. The Talkhouse is closing. No it’s not. After months of rumors and rumor-quashing, the owners of the Stephen Talkhouse have announced that the beloved Beach venue will go the way of Washington Square, Cactus Cantina, and countless other clubs. The Talkhouse, which opened…
Life’s a banquet, most poor suckers are starving, and the world’s out of whack, past proportion and reason. And now, dear God, even money — pretty much the only thing we care about lately — coming under fire. Socialites rioting in Mexico, all in a tizzy over the failing luxury…
A world spinning out of control, the merry-go-round of moral decay lurching along heedlessly, civilization collapsing in a compost heap beyond the reckoning of Nostradamus. Qubilah Shabazz, one of Malcolm X’s lovely daughters, charged with plotting to kill Louis Farrakhan, proving once again that people of taste prefer their revenge…
Dateline: January 19, 1997. The ViaWarSon corporation — formed last year with the mergers of Viacom, Warner Bros., and Sony — announced today that their Blockbuster Entertainment Division has completed negotiations to purchase Yardbird Records, the last remaining independent record store in Florida. All recorded music — from the inception…
One year ago WSHE radio was considered an enemy of local rock. Ernesto Gladden replaced Bill Pugh as program director, the station dropped Glenn Richards’s local-music show, and, people on the Miami rock scene claimed, SHE was doing everything it could to avoid — avoid — playing any music made…
A cruel business, this gossip game. With every attention paid to the rich and celebrated, every moment of slack-jawed stupefaction before their banal utterances, their pointless travels and grotesque indulgences, we are, one and all, diminished, crippled by the very act of being a witness, reduced to nothingness. The puerile…
