Nick Cave, Mann Music Center, 9:01 pm Friday by DAN LONG DAN DELUCA: Way back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Australian punk-goth songwriter Cave was in the early stages of what has become a legendary career, I was a Nick Cave skeptic. Sure, I was attuned to the sheer force of the music he made with The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds, with its combustive mixture of gospel, blues, and early rock and roll influences, and the way his sound was shot through with intermingling gangsta-outlaw and Biblical imagery. But it all seemed a too humorless and […]
BEING THERE: Ryan Adams @ XPoNential Fest
Ryan Adams, XPoNential Fest, 9:31 pm last night by PETE TROSHAK Tune in tomorrow for complete XPoNential Fest coverage.
Win Tix To See Nick Cave @ The Mann On Friday
BY JONATHAN VALANIA In the beginning, there was the Birthday Party. And it was good. Rock ‘n’ roll as sonic aneurysm: screeching, cataclysmic and cruel. The Birthday Party was scary. Not in the silly Count Chocula way of the Goths who would follow in its steps, but, like, Exorcist scary. Danger was the Birthday Party’s business, and in the early ‘80s, business was good. Nick Cave was the human cannonball at the microphone, the band would light the fuse and run for cover. When the audience demanded blood, Cave could open up and bleed with the best of them. […]
BEING THERE: Slasher Flicks @ Johnny Brenda’s
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ Arriving at the spooky little dimly-lit venue that is Johnny Brenda’s last night, I definitely felt like I was in the right place to hear Avey Tare’s Slasher Flick’s play a set. I got there around the time doors opened, which is basically when the major dweebs with too much free time arrive for these affairs. It was pretty empty except for a few other people, so I had time to check the place out. The mini-skeletons hanging along the bar provoked the kleptomaniac in me, while the broken photo booth in the back left […]
Win Tix To See Ryan Adams @ XPoNential Fest
Artwork by ENCORE Ryan Adams is one of those love him or hate him artists. I go back and forth. Sure, he’s an inveterate attention whore, a piss-poor editor of his own creativity and a drama queen man-child too in love with his own legend. But when the planets do align, and The Fates allow it, he is also a top-shelf singer-songwriter in the grand tradition of the great denim bards of Laurel Canyon. His last album, 2011’s Ashes & Fire is one of those occasions (a new LP, 1984 drops in September). It is not, as the growing consensus […]
BEING THERE: Veruca Salt @ The TLA
Photo by PETE TROSHAK In the mid-1990s, Veruca Salt released two well-received albums of post-Breeders girlie grunge-pop before a 1998 cat fight between co-lead singers/guitarists Nina Gordon and Louise Post [pictured, above] caused Gordon to abandon ship and the original lineup to dissolve. Post recruited new members and carried on under the Veruca Salt banner, releasing a few albums that failed to capture original lineup’s magic while Gordon embarked on a solo career that included one successful album and undoubtedly the greatest N.W.A. cover ever. Ten plus years later, Post and Gordon reconnected via email and buried their hatchets, paving […]
Win Tix To See Beck @ The XPoNential Fest
PAPER MAGAZINE: We were shooting Beck [for the cover of our 1996 music issue] and he had been very picky. He wanted Ellen Von Unwerth to shoot it and his team was just very high maintenance about the whole experience. And at that time in our history we were very much not into having a celebrity make requests like that. We resented it. If someone even suggested a photographer who they wanted to shoot them, we were outraged. Now we realize that, of course, that’s totally normal and happens a lot. So we had the photographer Dah-Len shoot him, […]
BEING THERE: Cheers Elephant @ Union Transfer
Photo by NOAH SILVESTRY I have seen Cheers Elephant do their thing on stage twice now, and I can say for sure that these Philly natives bring more fun and light to a roomful of people than any other band I’ve seen in my 17 years on Earth. Their relocation to L.A. was nothing short of a tragedy to their Philly fan base. It was with a heavy heart that I wrote the following about their “Farewell For Now, Philadelphia” show back in November of 2013: Between [frontman Derek] Kryzwicki bouncing around and doing the running-man and drummer Robert Kingsly, […]
BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY: Live From Wizard World
We duly deputized the gang from Panic Hour as our Geek Space Correspondents and sent them to Wizard World to ask the really hard questions nobody has the guts to ask anymore. No geeks were hurt in the making of this video. Special thanks to Scrapple TV/Woodshop Films, our partners in new media crime.
WHAT WE DO IS SECRET: Jason Fagone’s Excellent Profile Of ‘FOIA Terrorist’ Jason Leopold
Illustration by KRISTIAN HAMMERSTAD MEDIUM.COM: I first learned about Leopold’s work from Twitter. His profile picture showed him standing in front of the entrance to Guantánamo wearing a T-shirt from the punk band Black Flag. He called himself a “FOIA terrorist”—FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act. I started following him. The range of stuff that zips by on his feed is staggering and kind of thrilling: 140-character dispatches about guards and prisoners, spies and secrets, corporate intrigue, torture and war. Many of his tweets link to government documents he’s dug up. The documents regularly supply ammo to left and libertarian […]
Win Tix To See The English Beat @ The Prince
To paraphrase Lester Bangs, we will never agree on anything like we agree on The English Beat. At least that was the deal back in 1982. “Save It For Later” was the “Waterloo Sunset” of the 80s. Everyone we know loves “Waterloo Sunset” and we don’t wanna know anybody who don’t. Sorry to be a hard-ass about that, but that’s just the way it is. All of which is a long way of saying we just happen to have a pair of tickets to see The English Beat at The Prince on Sunday to giveaway to some lucky Phawker […]
INCOMING: David Bowie Live At The Tower 1974
September 23 sees the release of another very special limited David Bowie 7″ picture disc release, the 40th anniversary edition of KNOCK ON WOOD (LIVE) / ROCK ‘N’ ROLL WITH ME (LIVE). Originally released in autumn 1974 and taken from David Live, these two 2005 mixes by Tony Visconti are making their vinyl debut. The original David Live single mix of “Knock On Wood” was a UK top 10, however the US went with “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me,” also from David Live, in response to Donovan’s recent cover version there. DAVID BOWIE KNOCK ON WOOD (LIVE) / ROCK […]
MISSION CREEP: In Philadelphia, Everyone Is Now Guilty Until Proven Innocent, For Up To A Year
BY DUSTIN M. SLAUGHTER The Philadelphia Police Department is using Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR), which enable patrol car mounted and stationary pole cameras to collect images of over 1,800 license plates per minute over a 24/7 period. This information is then stored on servers located inside Philadelphia’s Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) and Philadelphia’s fusion center, the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center (DVIC). The department had 10 license plate readers in deployment as of 2011, according to police commissioner Charles Ramsey, although with new rounds of Homeland Security grant funding through the Urban Area Security Initiative, the number of units […]