The Last Waltz, the legendary farewell concert by rock group The Band, was held on Thanksgiving in 1976. The Last Waltz Philly will celebrate the music of The Band’s farewell show and bring the spirit of the legendary concert to the Trocadero for this very special benefit. Akin to The Last Waltz, the Thanksgiving weekend tribute concert will feature a core band with more than a dozen special guests. Proceeds will benefit four Philadelphia organizations that focus on education: Parents United for Public Education ; Passyunk Square Civic Association Education Committee ; Friends of Horatio B. Hackett School ; […]
MILESTONE: 45 Years Of Astral Weeks
My current fave Sunday-morning-coming-down album, Van’s transcendental 1968 masterwork still holds its secrets all these years later. The converted need no further preaching about Astral Weeks, so it’s the uninitiated I’m reaching out to here. First you need to dispense with the image of Van as the largely irrelevant pot-bellied sourpuss we know today. Flash back to Belfast in the mid-’60s: Van is winding down his tenure as blues shouter for Them — a roughneck collective of bruising whiteboy R&B and flame-throwing garage-punk snarl — ready to make the leap from drunk-up wailer to cosmic poet-seeker. Legend has it […]
KEY & PEELE: Substitute Teacher
Do NOT watch this if you don’t care much for laughing. You have been warned.
WORTH REPEATING: Set The Twilight Reeling
LAURIE ANDERSON: Lou was sick for the last couple of years, first from treatments of interferon, a vile but sometimes effective series of injections that treats hepatitis C and comes with lots of nasty side effects. Then he developed liver cancer, topped off with advancing diabetes. We got good at hospitals. He learned everything about the diseases, and treatments. He kept doing tai chi every day for two hours, plus photography, books, recordings, his radio show with Hal Willner and many other projects. He loved his friends, and called, texted, e-mailed when he couldn’t be with them. We tried […]
ASK A WIZARD: Backstage w/ Wayne Coyne
In conjunction Scrapple TV, our partner in New Media crime, Phawker sat down with Flaming Lips mainman Wayne Coyne on his tour bus a few hours before their performance at the Festival Pier last month and rolled film. DISCUSSED: Sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, why the new Lips album is so goddamned dark, why he has Nick Cave’s blood, the story behind the Wayne Coyne Hand Grenade Incident, how he got Erykah Badu naked and covered in cum and glitter, and if he wasn’t the lead singer of the Flaming Lips what would have he done with his life. The […]
EXTRA!: This Is The Kind Of Journalism That Will Die With Newspapers, And Then We’re All F*cked
DAILY NEWS: IN THE ANNALS of Philadelphia crime, the name Nafis Pinkney rings no bells amid the high-profile murderers, mobsters, corrupt cops and politicians. But in 2009, with a high-school diploma, a steady job as a baggage handler at Philadelphia International Airport and no criminal convictions, Pinkney, then 20, found himself beneath the bright light of a criminal interrogation. In a 24-hour span, he went from neighborhood witness to prime suspect, accused of murdering his friend since day-care days, Jonathan Pitts, 21, and Pitts’ girlfriend, Nakeisha Finks, 20. Steadfastly maintaining his innocence, Pinkney spent the next four years in […]
AMERICA NEEDS TO ASK ITSELF: At What Point Does The Extraordinary Measures Taken To Protect A Free Country Render It No Longer Free?
THE ATLANTIC: consider these ways in which our current “national-security complex” is more dangerous to democratic survival, and more difficult for President Obama to roll back, than in times past: 1. The national-security complex was charged after 9-11 with this credo: “Never Again.” This is a mission so absolute that it permits no cost-benefit analysis of any kind. 2. Throughout the Cold War we understood that the enemy was roughly as afraid of being wiped out by nuclear weapons as we were—hence the “mutually assured destruction” doctrine … Deterrence does not work well against terrorists. 3. The War on […]
TONIGHT: Keep On Truckin’
The Drive-By Truckers write songs about the dirty South, where life is hard and folks die soft and squishy and often emphysemic, dirty deeds get done dirt cheap, and everyone goes to church but nobody really goes to heaven. Their songs are like the weeds in the cracks of the trailer park, or the pile of broken beer bottles in the woods, or the lipstick traces on the stubbed-out Kools overflowing the ashtray. Oh, the things they have seen. The Truckers have two main singer-songwriter-guitarists these days: Patterson Hood, burly and bearded, whose voice sounds alternately like an angry […]
Win Tix To See The New Black Lips Middle East Tour Film @ The Ritz Tomorrow Night & Tix To See The Black Lips @ First Unitarian On Thur.
In 2009, The Black Lips started investigating the possibility of a bridge building tour of the Middle East with stops throughout the region. After two years of planning, several uprisings, a civil war, the tour finally came to fruition in the fall of 2012. It wasn’t easy either. Promoters in Jordan and Alexandria, Egypt backed out at the last minute because the band had played shows in Israel and a show in Erbil, Iraq had to be changed when an explicit video of the band was viewed by a government official. Suprisingly, It all worked out in the end though […]
IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING: Talking JFK Blues With Noted Historian Robert Dallek
BY JONATHAN VALANIA As historian/authors go, there are basically two species. Guys like Robert Caro who spend decades-long hermitages writing and researching exhaustive, Bible-thick multi-volume Hi-Def portraits of his subjects. And then there’s guys (and gals) like Robert Dallek, prolific generalists who keep circling back to the corpus delecti like eagle-eyed birds of prey to peck at some new fascinating and/or instructive morsel of the remains of the Kennedy/ FDR/Johnson/Reagan legacies. Dallek’s latest book, Camelot’s Court, his 19th book in 45 years, is his third examination of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. In it he argues that JFK’s dream team […]
ALBUM REVIEW: David Bowie The Next Day Extra
BY STEVE VOLK RESIDENT BOWIE SCHOLAR After nearly a decade of near total silence, the legacy of heart trouble that ended his 2004 world tour, the single arrived with no greater fanfare than someone, somewhere, clicking “publish” on a new posting to David Bowie’s web site.. Bowie sang. “Where are we now?” The song bled from millions of computers, languid and beautiful, as Bowie reappeared, suddenly, in a melancholy video supporting a mesmerizing single, on his 66th birthday. And fans, critics and entertainment wags wondered at the return of the Greta Garbo of rock n’ roll. After such a […]
WORTH REPEATING: Magic And Loss
PATTI SMITH: I met Lou at Max’s Kansas City in 1970. The Velvet Underground played two sets a night for several weeks that summer. The critic and scholar Donald Lyons was shocked that I had never seen them, and he escorted me upstairs for the second set of their first night. I loved to dance, and you could dance for hours to the music of the Velvet Underground. A dissonant surf doo-wop drone allowing you to move very fast or very slow. It was my late and revelatory introduction to “Sister Ray.” Within a few years, in that same […]
NEW MEDIA: You Had Us At ‘The State Of Local Media Has Gone From Dire To Absurd’
But we’ve been burned before: William Penn Foundation, we are looking at you. Not sure what to make of this or where it’s gonna go or how it ends, but we definitely like how it begins. MORE PREVIOUSLY: Inquirer Ownership Feud Crosses The Line Between Tragedy And Screwball Comedy PREVIOUSLY: Tierney Fired From $25K/month ‘Consulting’ Gig @ Inky After It Was Revealed That The Man Who Bankrupted The Paper Was Being Paid $25K/month For His Newspapering Wisdom