Photo by ANDREW CAITLIN via the Melody Maker This is very exciting news. We’ve been granted permission to excerpt a 3,000 word passage on the Butthole Surfers — easily the greatest live performers (not just in rock, but in any artform) in the 1980s — from the forthcoming book NO SLAMDANCING, NO STAGEDIVING, NO SPIKES, an exhaustive oral history of City Gardens, the legendary 80s shithole/tri-state alt-rock mecca situated somewhere on the dark side of Trenton, in a a post-apocalyptic/post-industrial deadzone that could easily have served as location shots for David Lynch’s Eraserhead. And did we mention that Jon Stewart […]
BEING THERE: All That You Can’t Leave Behind
U2, Roof of 30 Rockefeller, Tonight Show, by JONATHAN COHEN BILLBOARD: Fallon welcomes to the couch his new regime’s first musical guest (“who you saw earlier”), U2. “Have you ever performed higher?” he jokes … of the band having just played 70 stories up. Fallon asserts that activist Bono could give a speech about anything. “Can you do a speech about … this coffee mug?” he challenges. “It’s not a cup,” Bono begins, easily rising to the task. “It’s a container that demands to be filled … by love.” The Roots join in with appropriately emotional backing music. Fallon congratulates […]
FROM THE VAULT: Wayne’s World
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally appeared in MAGNET MAGAZINE BY JONATHAN VALANIA We’d been traversing the spine of Tornado Alley for the last two hours when the stewardess announced that we would be landing in Oklahoma City in a few minutes, and that we should fasten our seatbelts and return our minds to the upright position, when the drugs took hold. We are, as the saying goes, off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Odd—or, if you prefer, the Wizard of OK, a.k.a. Wayne Coyne, frizzy-brained mainman of the Flaming Lips, the P.T. Barnum Of The Stoned, a.k.a. […]
EXCERPT: About A Girl
BY JONATHAN VALANIA In 2012, Tom Gabel, the 33-year-old year old frontman of Florida-based million-dollar major label punk band Against Me!, announced to the world that he was transgender and had begun the process of transitioning into a woman. Tom Gabel was dead, long live Laura Jane Grace. Grace told MAGNET she knew, deep down, since the age of five that she been had miscast in the role of heterosexual boy in the play of life. After years of drug-and-alcohol-abetted denial cross-dressing behind a cruel veil of secrecy and shame, Grace realized she could no longer deny her true […]
BEING THERE: Dr. Dog @ The Electric Factory
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ Last night Philly natives Dr. Dog threw down an epic, no-holds-barred, all-stops-pulled tour de force sold-out show that served as a fitting finale to the band’s two-night homecoming stand at the Electric Factory. Decked out in their trademark Skittles-colored beanies and cheap sunglasses, the Dog played a seemingly endless 18-song set, followed by a six-song encore, that took long pulls from their newish album B-Room, with smaller sips from their older vintages stretching all the way back to their 2002 debut, Toothbrush. The beard-y six-piece seemed to be having the proverbial time of their lives […]
IN MEMORIAM: ‘Pete Seeger Made Me Understand How Far Behind Enemy Lines I Was Living’
Illustration by ALEX FINE DAVE MARSH: If nothing else, Pete Seeger made me understand how far behind enemy lines I was living—he showed me the road that had to be traveled, if I really wanted to live. He did this the same way that James Baldwin and Elvis Presley and John Coltrane did it: by example, and with the same generosity and the same sense that the world was packed with a load of insurmountable cruelty and that, nevertheless, the truth was that something better had managed to survive within it. Which meant, for each of us, a choice and […]
BREAKING: Pollard Throws No-Hitter — In 1978!
MAGNET: For reasons unknown, except that it’s the internet, news of Guided By Voices‘ Robert Pollard tossing a no-hitter as a college hurler on May 11, 1978, has gone semi-viral. We noted it in MAGNET’s Top 25 Of 2012 and thought it was relatively common knowledge among diehard GBV fans at the very least. Still, it’s a treat to see Pollard’s mug in the Wright State student newspaper account of his masterpiece. At the time, the no-no was the first in school history. Given the unlikely resurgence of interest in his mound milestone, we asked Pollard to share any […]
BEING THERE: Neutral Milk Hotel @ The Tower
In 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel released an album of hallucinatory folk-rock called In The Aeroplane Over The Sea that is, it can be said without fear of exaggeration, nothing short of a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. Like My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, it is lightning caught in a bottle, one of those rare perfect albums that come along maybe once a decade. Or once a lifetime. In 1999, Jeff Mangum — Neutral Milk’s singer, songwriter and primary guitarist — disappeared from public life without explanation, declining all entreaties to perform or discuss the album or record a follow-up. Over […]
RIP: Pete Seeger, Inexhaustible Avatar Of American Folk And Fearless Populist Troubadour, Dead At 94
EDITOR’S NOTE: This review of Bruce Springsteen’s The Seeger Sessions originally ran in PW back in 2006. I think it ably serves double duty as a Pete Seeger obituary, which was in the back of my mind when I wrote it given that he was 87 at the time. Goodnight Mr. Seeger wherever you are. It’s no accident that you don’t really know what Pete Seeger did. That he’s truly larger than life, an American original, the kind that walk out of storybooks, like Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed, but more real. That he more or less singlehandedly carried […]
BEING THERE: The Pixies @ The Electric Factory
Photo by NOAH SILVESTRY The Pixies weren’t just first to the indie rock party: they hosted it. They’re royals in the kingdom of rock, prophets in the religion of screamed lyrics, champions in the game of noise. Their subjects/followers/fanatics (or whatever else you may call them) flooded the Electric Factory floor to see the Pixies do what they do best, what nobody else can do — though Lord knows for 25 years they have tried and tried. This tour diverges quite a bit from others since the Pixies’ reunion in 2004: Paz Lenchantin plays bass, replacement of the replacement of […]
BEING THERE: No Other Tribute @ Union Transfer
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ The only thing I expected to be bitter about last night was the cold. Making trip from the suburbs to Union Transfer by SEPTA in below freezing temperatures seemed awful, but I soon found out that would be the warmest and most appealing part of my night. By the time I got to the line at UT, my fingers were frozen to the point of immobility, but I didn’t care. Seeing some of the most acclaimed indie bands of my generation — Beach House, The Walkmen, Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear — performing Byrds frontman […]
BEING THERE: Diane Coffee @ Kung Fu Necktie
Photo by MARY LYNN DOMINGUEZ After the release of Foxygen’s blissed-out We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic and the chain of awful events that led to them canceling an entire tour, I was pleasantly surprised by my first listen to Foxygen drummer Shaun Fleming’s solo project, Diane Coffee. But it seemed a little too good to be true, and I decided that seeing the 60’s-70’s-gospel&Mowtown-inspired indie-pop creation live at Kung Fu Necktie Saturday night would enable me to render a final verdict. Upon entering KFN, the first thing I noticed was how outnumbered I was by […]
Q&A: Dissecting Doolittle With Black Francis
“Saint Francis” by WALT LINDEVELD BY JONATHAN VALANIA A word of warning: This is gonna be one of those pieces where I go on and on about my little monkey shines with famous alt-rock personalities. Millions of people love it when I do that, but others seem to get very, very angry about it, stomp their feet and write mean letters that hurt my feelings. If that sounds like you, stop reading right now. I’m serious. I don’t want to even see you in the second paragraph. Set the Wayback Machine to 1988. I’m a college DJ stranded in the […]