Los Lobos 1992 masterpiece Kiko was/is the Pet Sounds/Smile of Latin music. To mark the album’s 20th anniversary, Los Lobos’ will play it from beginning to end tonight at the Keswick. We can hardly wait. RELATED: Just as Brian Eno became an aural architect for Talking Heads’ new sound, Los Lobos began a collaborative partnership with producer Mitchell Froom and engineer Tchad Blake that crafted sounds for Kiko that simmer and undulate. As the band and recording team have related, when it came to instrumentation and recording techniques, nothing was off the table, be it running guitars through cheap, pawnshop […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See The Afghan Whigs Tonite!
WIKIPEDIA: The Afghan Whigs are an American rock band from Cincinnati, Ohio, originally active from 1986 to 2001. They have since reformed. At their peak, the group – with core members Greg Dulli (vocals, rhythm guitar), Rick McCollum (lead guitar), and John Curley (bass), as well as various drummers (including Steve Earle and Michael Horrigan) – evolved into one of the leading groups of ‘90s alternative rock, rising up around the grunge movement but ultimately transcending it. Evolving from a garage punk band in the vein of the Replacements, Dinosaur Jr., and Mudhoney to a literate, soul-inflected post-punk quartet, […]
EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE: Cameron Crowe’s 1975 Neil Young Interview For Rolling Stone
BY CAMERON CROWE Nearing 30, Neil Young is the most enigmatic of all the superstars to emerge from Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. His often cryptic studies of lonely desperation and shaky-voiced antiheroics have led many to brand him a loner and a recluse. Harvest was the last time that he struck the delicate balance between critical and commercial acceptance, and his subsequent albums have grown increasingly inaccessible to a mass audience. Young’s first comprehensive interview comes at a seeming turning point in his life and career. After an amicable breakup with actress Carrie Snodgrass, he’s […]
PRODUCT PLACEMENT: Sh*t And Grin
Artwork via SMEAR CAMPAIGN All politics is loco, to bastardize Tip O’Neil famous nostrum, and packed to the gills foie gras-style with the fecal matter of its own corrupt bullshit. Which is slightly more elegant way of rendering the inelegant cliche that all politicians — left, right and everyone in between — are full of shit. Like all inelegant cliches, it’s entirely true. Even worse, we keep stepping in it over and and over again. Finally, somebody has done something about it. Boldly standing up and declaring that these would-be emperors have no clothes, Philly-based RS Kmiec Design, in partnership […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Wild Nothing @ UT
Photo by SHAWN BRACKBILL What’s that you say? Never heard of Wild Nothing? Oh, buddy. Via Captured Tracks: Ask Jack Tatum what ‘Wild Nothing’ means and he’ll answer: ‘a contradiction’. In 2010, 21 year old Tatum released one of the finest cult pop records of the summer whilst ensconced in his senior year of college in Blacksburg, VA, a small mid-atlantic town better known for producing football fans and engineers than musicians. Tatum lives in contradictions. You’ll often hear Wild Nothing referred to as a ‘one man pop band’. Jack creates in the studio, alone. On the road, he’s with […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Wye Oak @ Union Transfer
The good news about the new Cat Power album being such a distinct break from the old Cat Power is that Wye Oak is now free to be the Old Cat Power — witchy, supernatural Appalachian indie-rock narrated by a post-modern Ophelia backstroking across the river of madness — but with more incendiary guitar firepower. I mean that as a compliment. We have a pair of tickets to see them at Union Transfer on Saturday giveaway to the seventh lucky Phawker reader to sign up for our email list (SEE RIGHT, bottom of the mashtead). Good luck and godspeed.
RIP: Steve Sabol, Poet Laureate Of The NFL, Dead At 69
Photo courtesy of NFL FILMS INQUIRER: Steve Sabol, an art history major and football star in college who combined those two passions to help transform the family business, NFL Films, into a modern mythmaking marvel, died Tuesday at 69. Mr. Sabol had been battling brain cancer since 2011. An inoperable tumor had been discovered just days after his father, Ed, the NFL Films founder, was elected to Pro Football’s Hall of Fame. A lifelong Philadelphia-area resident who never lost his accent or his boyish idealism, Mr. Sabol forever changed the way Americans view their sports. The theatrical instincts that grew […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Bon Iver @ The Mann
Bon Iver mainman Justin Vernon is in full possession of the most heartbreakingly beautiful falsetto to emanate from a hairy guy in blue jeans and flannel since Neil Young woke up in a burned-out basement with a full moon in his eyes. At the risk of sounding like the 21st century equivalent of the guy who booed Dylan at Newport for going electric, I should disclose up front that I am not a fan of the super-dense seven-layer cake of sound of Bon Iver’s self-titled second album, though not for lack of trying. For me, the beatific, naked-bulb bedroom folk […]
INTERVIEW WITH A FRINGE DWELLER: Q&A With Nick Stuccio, Producing Director Of The Live Arts Festival And Philly Fringe
Illustration by GRAHAM SMITH BY BRANDON LAFVING ARTS CORRESPONDENT Nick Stuccio has been the producing director of the Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe Festival from the very beginning. This year marks the 16th time that performance artists from Philadelphia and across the globe will showcase their work, communicate new and sometimes radical ideas, collaborate, brainstorm, party and, in some cases, get naked — not necessarily in that order. Before Mr. Stuccio became a presenter of the performing arts, he danced for the Pennsylvania Ballet and started the AIDS fundraising program Shut Up and Dance in the mid-1990s. Now, he […]
KILLADELPHIA: 18,043 People Shot Since 2001 In The 215
PHILLY MAG: Between January 1, 2001, and May 29th of this year, 18,043 people were shot in Philadelphia. That equates to about one shooting every six hours. In that same time period, there were 3,852 murders—a new body yielded up for disposal nearly every day. The entire length of the conflict in Afghanistan hasn’t produced as many dead Americans as we’ve picked up off our city’s streets. Unfortunately, political debate over urban violence reduces to opposites: On the left, politicians blame economic factors, bad schools and ineffective, even racist law enforcement; to the right, conservatives preach personal responsibility, citing […]
KILLADELPHIA: ‘Stop Snitching’ Killed Officer Moses Walker Jr.
INQUIRER: The night of Feb. 12, six months before he allegedly gunned down Police Officer Moses Walker Jr., Rafael Jones was arrested and charged with sticking a handgun into the chest of a man walking to a Germantown bus stop and stealing his designer jacket, Nike sneakers, and $65. The victim, identified in court papers as E.J., 26, ran barefoot two blocks to his girlfriend’s apartment to call police, who quickly arrested Jones, still on probation for a previous gun offense. In the months that followed, E.J. made a fateful decision. He failed to testify. Despite extensive efforts by prosecutors […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See Brian Jonestown Massacre @ UT
Artwork by NICK KULP If you’ve not seen Dig, stop reading and go watch it. We’ll wait. [two hour pause while the reader watches Dig and learns everything he/she needs to know about The Brian Jonestown Massacre and probably more than he/she needs to know about The Dandy Warhols] I know, right? Told ya. Anyway, Brian Jonestown Massacre are coming to Union Transfer tonight support of Aufheben, their 12th LP. We have a pair of tickets to give away to the 10th lucky reader to sign up for our mailing list [below, right, at the bottom of the masthead]. Good […]
TONITE: Win Tix To See My Morning Jacket
Tenth lucky reader to sign up for our email mailing list (at the bottom of the black box to the right that says FOLLOW US at the top) wins a pair of tickets to see My Morning Jacket and Band Of Horses at the Mann tonight (Friday, 8/18). Good luck and godspeed. PREVIOUSLY: Which is not to say that those seats weren’t completely filled with stubbly, red-eyed young men, and the women who go to concerts with them, by the time My Morning Jacket took the stage and kick-started a sweaty, fist-pumping, three hour hoedown of southern-fried beard-rock, soul […]